The shards of a pot on the floor. Bits of an ancient item scattered as plot coupons all over the world. The greatest crafter in the world carefully trying to restore the function of something that hasn’t worked in centuries. Or just that window the kid sent a baseball through. Broken things are everywhere in stories—and why wouldn’t they be? They can do as much for a plot, be it novel or game, as any intact item.

The GM’s first narrative use of broken things is, of course, as a limiter. If the Lost Amulet of Mahri Su, said to be capable of giving its wearer near invincibility, downright magnetic charisma, the ability to survive her own demise, and sparkly teeth, is intact when the PCs acquire it, then whichever one actually uses the thing is going to throw the game balance off to no end. But what if it’s broken? They might be slowly fixing it, or slowly recovering its powers by acquiring lost pieces and fitting them together… or unable to fix it and only carrying it around for its symbolic value. Either way, by being literally broken, it avoids being quite as mechanically broken.

For both GM and writer, its brokenness becomes valuable as a plot point—if the plot-important item’s broke, you gotta fix it. In some cases (I’d list video games alone, but we’d be here all day), it’s just the pieces that are scattered all over Fantasyland or Planet X and half of Georgia, and they have a peculiar tendency to either knit themselves back together when connected or to be very easy for some important person to put back together. In others, the problem isn’t so much the major structure of the item as the actual fix itself: finding someone who would be capable, doing whatever it would take to convince that person to fix it, managing to locate ritual components or vital materials or whatever unnervingly rare oddities the repair requires.

What happens if someone actually tries to use a broken item? For mundane, non-technological items, this may not be too interesting—at best, it’s just a test of cunning. But technological and magical items are likelier to misfire instead of just not working, resulting in anything from just short of what they were supposed to do through technically related but nowhere near the desired result to the opposite of what they were supposed to do—and that’s not even taking into account the possibility of explosions. GMs take note: some gamers even enjoy making their own misfires. I had one player a while back who, when his character was attempting to upgrade a communication device, walked into what was functionally a wild magic zone with an incompletely upgraded communicator. He spent the whole time using a peculiar Wikipedia-based algorithm involving free association to come up with random words to occasionally insert in his normal attempts at communicating.

Then there’s the responsibility aspect. If the main characters themselves broke it, they’re likely to have to contend with someone else upset about its breakage; actions have consequences, after all. Someone else breaking it might inspire them to go inflict responsibility on the culprit. If it was just broken, perhaps it might be a certain person’s job to fix it.

Last, there’s a certain emotional impact to the breaking of important things. A breaking is a loss of function, a destruction of beauty; even if it can be reversed, it might not leave whatever was broken the same as it started out. The older and harder to repair the thing was, the more important it was to its owner, the more symbolism it had, the more craftsmanship with which it was wrought, the closer to the gut breaking it is likely to hit the kind of audience who cares about such things. Don’t underestimate that.

A broken item doesn’t have to break your flow; it can even be a fix in and of itself.