The players in my OD&D open table periodically ask me, “Are there any magic items for sale?” Not certain of how I want to handle that, up to now I’ve been fairly content to simply say, “Not yet.”
It’s a question I’ve also struggled with in my Ptolus campaign: On the one hand, positing a setting where wandering mercenaries go delving into dungeons in order to pull out vast hordes of wealth which frequently include magical treasures, allowing the PCs to sell those treasures, and then concluding that there’s no way to buy magic items seems unreasonable. (Although running a campaign where the PCs really are the sole sellers of magic items in the whole world seems like it could be potentially fascinating, albeit completely different from a typical D&D campaign.) On the other hand, I think it can be quite evocative to see what the “competition” has been bringing in.
As far as Ptolus goes, I’ve largely been handling it in an ad hoc fashion. And I feel like it’s been a mild success in evoking the wider sense of a setting in which delvers are plumbing the depths of the vast catacombs beneath the city. But I’ve also longed for a better/systematic way of handling it, and now my OD&D campaign has raised the demand to a figuratively fever pitch.
The method described below hasn’t been heavily tested yet, and it does require a fair bit of prep for larger communities. (Although there are some methods for breaking that prep up into manageable chunks if you find yourself needing to generate it on the fly.)
THE LOCAL MARKET
The local market can vary quite a bit. While it could be a generic “magic mart” there are lots of other options: In small communities, it might be nothing more than Bob who has a couple of magical items stuffed in a trunk that once belonged to his adventuring grandfather. Local churches might have a supply of divine items. It might be an eclectic collection of antiquities dealers, pawnshops, down-on-their-luck magicians, and the like. It might be a secretive cult of black-robed alley-dwellers. The local mage’s academy might buy up all the items that come into town and then re-sell them (along with new creations) at a mark-up. There might be specialty fences trying to evade the local prohibitions on the dissemination of dangerous magical weaponry.
THE LOCAL SUPPLY: You can determine the initial supply of items in a community by randomly determining magical treasure once per 1,000 inhabitants. (So in a community of 40,000, you would make forty checks.) If appropriate, you can vary this according to the treasure type of the predominant population. Or you can just go with a flat 50% chance.
In OD&D, for example, a typical human settlement of 30,000 people would use Treasure Type A (40% chance of any 3 magic items) and you’d made the check 30 times.
For AD&D1, you might want to use Table II.B on pg. 120 of the DMG in combination with the random check.
For D&D3, you’ll need to figure out what level to roll using the tables on pg. 52-53 of the 3.5 DMG. (You might try randomizing that by rolling 1d20.)
(Note: You’re not generating a list of every single magic item in town. You’re just generating the stuff that’s currently available for sale.)
THE MARKET LIST: When you’re done, you’ll have a list of items currently available for sale in town. Where the PCs will need to go (or what they’ll need to do) in order to procure a particular item on the list is up to your discretion.
MODIFYING THE MARKET LIST: Obviously, anything the PCs buy should be removed from the market list and anything they sell should be added to the list.
Adding Items: At set intervals (either once per session or once per some set amount of time in the game world), roll on your treasure tables again once per 10,000 inhabitants. (So if you rolled 40 checks originally, the market fluctuates using 4 checks on a periodic basis.) Items generated in this fashion are added to the local market — either due to new finds from local adventuring parties or new creations from local wizards.
Removing Items: Count the number of items you just added to the market. Modify that number by (1d10 – 1d10) and then randomly remove that number of items from the market.
(For example, if you generate 8 new magic items and then roll (9 – 3 =) 6, you would remove (8 + 6 =) 14 items from the market. If you had rolled (2 – 6 =) -4, then you would have removed (8 – 4 =) 4 items from the market.)
NOTES
In practice, generating the initial list of items may be a bit time-consuming for larger communities. But keeping the list updated after that point shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.
If you find yourself needing to use this system on the fly, you can de-centralize the local market for magic items and reduce the load by generating only the supply available at each potential “outlet”. If the PCs don’t find what they want from Aldric One-Eye, of course, they might go check with the local fences from the Thieves’ Guild… but that should give you time to generate the short list of what the Thieves’ Guild has on hand. (Simply jot down which items can be found where on your market list for future reference as necessary.)
Of course, the entire process can also be considerably sped up by using one of the numerous automatic generators that can be found scattered around online.
Pathfinder has a similar set of rules located at http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items#TOC-Purchasing-Magic-Items . It’s a good idea; I’m surprised it’s taken so long for somebody to codify it.
It might be a little easier to reverse the process by reversing the question.
The systematic approach seems to be the rather open question of “what is for sale?” Then a list is generated and the PCs get to pick and choose what they want to buy. This is the common store-based approach.
But for magic items, it might be more appropriate to work in a more auction-based approach. Instead of generating a random list of items for sale, simply check whether a given item is for sale. Let the PCs do some legwork – or failing that – have them be approached by mysterious vendors trying to hawk them stuff they want to sell.
In general, you can preserve the mystery of magical items in this way, because PCs shouldn’t neccessarily know what items they are looking for – rather they might want something that can do a certain job. For example, if they need to tunnel through a landslide on the quick, rather than get the three hundred labourers and take the thirty days required, they will want something that can shift or get rid of the earth. Having them ask around might lead them to a wizard who can sell them a wand of move earth, a ring of earth elemental control, or something similar. Likewise, if the warriors want better weapons, with a sharper edge, they are likely to get all sorts of offers.
If the PCs don’t know what they are after, it doesn’t matter – a down-on-their-luck magician might still offer them some magic items to make some cash, pretty much as they might be sold a treasure map. The PCs will have to take their own chances with whether it is fake or not, and whether it does what it advertised… Who hasn’t been stung after buying an invisible ring that turns invisible when worn, or boots of shadows which cast darkness on the wearer so they they cannot see?
Bear in mind that adventuring parties are more likely to sell permanent items than consumable items, and such second hand items items are likely to have seen significant use or be inferior to what the person selling them already has available. Ironically, consumable items are more sought after than permanent items, so unless there are people actively making and supplying the demand for such items, these can actually increase in value on the open market, making them much harder to buy, while a glut of permanent items will cause their price to crash, making them much harder to sell.
Bear in mind that when magic items come onto the market, they pretty much stop being magical items – they are more like another variant from of technology. Of course, many rules systems already assume this for gameplay reasons, so you should adjust things accordingly. D&D is coming increasingly mage-punk the more readily magic items are available for sale.
I like the Pathfinder guidelines. I’ve been using the “75% chance that the item is available when you look for it” method primarily in my Ptolus campaign, but the refinement of setting a cap for that method based on community size is nicely done.
The problem with this method is when the PCs aren’t looking for a specific item, but just want to know what’s available on the local market. (IME, this can be both generic window-shopping or more specific searches like, “I want a better sword.”)
Going forward I’ll be using this method of generating the “local market”. If the PCs want something that isn’t on the market, I’ll be using some kind of percentile determination to figure out if such an item can be found locally in any capacity and then using a Gather Information check to see if they can track it down. The question would then become how you can procure that item: Can you convince the owner to sell? Can you steal it? Is it “available” only in the sense that One-Eyed Bill once spotted something that looked like it in a dungeon beneath the city and is willing to guide you to it if you pay for regenerating his lost eye? Or that the local bandit leader is known to be using it to terrorize the outlying steadings?
It could be simpler to do three tests; one for the market, one for individual sellers, and one for rumors of nearby lost treasure. Depending on the area, you could select the treasure type to test. Next to a delve, a greater chance, and in rural pastoral settings, a lesser chance.
Having 3 sources and 3 rolls can help narrow the focus. In a more robust system than ODD you could require they use contacts, Gather Information tests, and so on.
Testing once for each of the 3 between adventures is also handy because it simulates a moving market; people have been wheeling and dealing, coming and going, buying and selling. If you don’t get it now you might not get it.
Rather than finding out who bought it locally, you could connect that to a lending library sort of guilder system for merchants and markets, and shadowy purchasing agents for great and distant powers, and the inevitable loss and murder (though that could shift it from market or seller to rumor availability!)
Another great thing about this method is that’s what the word on the street is, or what purchasing agents could find out. Is it true? Is it accurate? Is it a scam? Is it something else altogether?
This is another great use for henchmen. Characters can hire someone between adventures to locate an item for them–that could modify the roll, because they could be connecting to more distant markets with their own purchasing agents!
My variant: For prices below the settlement cap roll 1d4.
1: The item is readily available for anyone looking for it.
2: It can be found by asking around (Gather Information DC 15-25).
3: You can find the item (with Gather Information), but it is not for sale. A higher price might persuade the owner or you could try to steal it. Alternatively, someone knows the location of the item in a nearby dungeon or whatever.
4: The item is unavailable at this time.
For up to twice the cap you may want to roll 1d4+1, treating 5 as 4.
The “this is what’s available” approach seems somewhat lazy on the point on the behalf of the PCs, and this is the biggest issue I have with the “magic mart” style of handling such items.
This seems to go hand-in-hand with the increasing sense of entitlement that PCs have to such items, often because they are enforced and expected to have them within a standard campaign – otherwise all sorts of encounters simply become unbalanced if you don’t have certain abilities and certain items by certain levels.
Equipment is already one of the most under-rated features of most systems, in favour of magic items that can offer bigger and better things, and to offer such in a standardised “magic mart” format seems to be pushing even magic items further in this direction of streamlining away from any point.
The thing is, if people want to buy something, and people want to sell something, they will. But chances are, without “magic marts” it will take a lot of work. This gives the GM a lot more control, because they will probably have the PCs have to deal with such buyers and sellers individually, rather than through a broker, and this will mean they are more than likely to get involved within whatever plot hooks the GM devises.
In most cases, companies making magic items don’t exist – because of the vast expenditure of time and resources to make such items. This is even more the case when there’s is significant personal sacrifice – for example, those games where XP is used to make magical items. Where do NPCs get the XP to create items? There certainly isn’t enough to sustain such an economy.
Of course, certain systems, like Pathfinder, swapped XP costs for GP costs, but all this has done is increased all the issues of magical item proliferation, so that now it IS possible to create a “magic mart” – in which case, you are probably better off just treating magical items as a variant form of technology and expanding the equipment lists, and having done with it.
Having a cargo manifest of magic items for sale isn’t really useful, unless you’d also have a cargo manifest of normal items for sale as well. If the only difference between a normal item and a magical item is that it’s magical, then there is no difference. After all – they are both items, and they both work like items.
That’s like arguing that a magical rock should be treated differently from a normal rock. Why? Just because it’s magic? Unless being magic means something – which it clearly does not if they can be bought and sold the same way. It might twinkle a bit if you use detect magic on it, since it is magic, and it can affect things affected by magic, because it is magic. But other than that, it’s still a rock. It’s like a holy rock, a lawful rock, or a yellow rock. Unless being holy, lawful, or yellow means something, it is basically still a rock, and should be treated as such.
I personally favour that magical items should only be treated differently from normal items if the campaign sets them up as such. In most cases they do – so magical items should be rare objects that shouldn’t be easily bought and sold in a “magic mart” style approach. If you want to make sure that characters have an ample supply of minor manic items, particularly healing items, then maybe minor magic items should be declassified or healing items shouldn’t be limited to purely magical abilities – or maybe you shouldn’t focus on so much combat ALL THE TIME…
You know, if magic was radioactive, I’m pretty sure every hero would suffer from fatal radiation poisoning before reaching mid-level… There’s miracles, and then there’s taking things for damn granted!
In the game setting my family has been working on (getting close to release), we wrote up a pearl scrip that would automatically generate a town’s market based on the random treasure generation tables. The end result is that every time we get to a new city, we can set a few parameters (how wealthy the town is in broad strokes – poor, common, affluent, etc – how large the town is – hamlet, village, city, metropolis, etc) and get a page or two of gear to look through. For more continuous settings, it has an update function that does things like rotate out the oldest stock and see if anything new was brought in.
We’ve been pleased with the result. Not only is getting back to town like getting bonus loot (but without the balance complications), but the adventurers began to look more like what you would expect from people scavenging among the ruins of ancient empires – a bunch of scraggly survivors with a mishmash of gear scrabbling around in the dirt for fabulous wealth, then blowing it all in a weekend on hookers and a sharper sword.