6 Responses to “Advanced Gamemastery: Magic Item Markets”

1. PuzzleSecretary says:

   Magic-Mart is one of those tropes I personally love, but it’s not the right choice for every campaign. In Eberron it’s so integral that you’d deal severe damage to the setting’s assumptions and feel if you took it out; there’s even an entire Dragonmarked House dedicated to magic item creation! Meanwhile, in Dark Sun magic is so scarce and either dangerous or secretive depending on the type that Magic-Mart would be out of place, and while psionics are much more commonplace, the difficulty of finding materials durable enough to enchant means that even psionic items would be scarce — at most a few power stones or a tattoo parlor.

   July 8th, 2024 - 6:57 pm
2. Rallenkov says:

   Thanks for the Outtake, now I have to get rid of my laughing Tears

   July 9th, 2024 - 8:38 am
3. The Byzantine says:

   Came up with my own magic shop a while back, which I will shamelessly drop in here.

   THE SMILING SPHINX
   A little while ago, a restaurant opened in your city, some foreign haute-cuisine to tantalize the nobility. But no grand marquee graces the old manor house it was built out of, no sign, just a pamphlet on the door: ‘The Smiling Sphinx – Table by Reservation Only.’

   Nobody you know has ever eaten there. The Smiling Sphinx is classy. Elite. You have to be in the know, high class, rich, famous, politically important, just to get a reservation. At least, that’s what all the rumormongers say. None of them have ever been either.

   This can remain a question mark on the players’ map until they start getting up in levels, say 5+. Then, out of the blue during downtime, they get a letter inviting them to dine at the Smiling Sphinx, with the full complements of the house. A handsome hansom cab picks them up punctually, and takes them in. It’s lovely, but there are only 1d3-1 other parties there, all clearly wealthy.

   As they reach their private room, they get a single menu, for the whole table. It does not contain food.

   The Blue Menu contains lists of minor magic items, with illustrations, descriptions, professional accounts of their acquisition and powers, and *prices.* Potions, simple magic weapons, charms and the like.

   The Red Menu contains more powerful fare: magic armors, staves, potent scrolls.

   The Gold Menu contains greater magic, fantastically expensive and often unique, as well as magical creatures and their offspring: pegasus foals, dragon eggs.

   The party won’t be granted access to the Red and Gold menus their first time, but they will learn of their existence. They need to prove themselves to the Smiling Sphinx as wealthy, loyal, and discreet customers first.

   After they’ve ‘ordered’, lunch arrives . The party can have seconds, order entertainment, anything they want. After all, they’ve just spent far, far more on magic items. Before they know it, the evening is over, the requisite sums have already been withdrawn from their monetary institution of choice, and they leave the Smiling Sphinx with their orders in a magelocked trunk and a hunger to come back with more money.

   July 9th, 2024 - 10:36 am
4. Alexander_Anotherskip_Davis says:

   In my campaign if you want magic items you need to order them from a Dragon through their dragon cult (who also can buy with Cash on Hand or trade what they have on Hand for better items) (look at MEN in the 1EAD&D MM, each group is matched to a different dragon as their cult).

   Allow 4-6 weeks for delivery. (This is a group of Merchants physically delivering the items, no shortcuts here!)

   If you die between now and then better have the item covered in your will.

   July 10th, 2024 - 9:36 pm
5. Screwtape says:

   Hard no.
   Seemed awesome when I was 14.
   Now that I’m an adult, it turns out to be a remarkably bad idea. Preposterously bad. Completely devalues magic.

   July 15th, 2024 - 9:29 pm
6. Highbrowbarian says:

   Sure, magic item shops are goofy and genre-distorting. Then again, so are the ubiquitous “blacksmith shops” which each carry a dozen suits of full plate armor (to fit a variety of body types, down to and including wearers the size of human children), a seemingly endless assortment of the kind of expensive murder tools that most real-life societies made illegal for commoners to own (but not so endless that they won’t buy twenty new ones, still covered in blood, on the good faith assumption that these must have been taken off enemy combatants and not the local constabulary), and probably like six horseshoes and a single box of nails in some dusty corner behind the on-spec barding they keep around on the off chance that a complete stranger wants to kit out their warhorse on short notice.

   I actually like the idea that 5E is getting at where buying and selling magic items is a matter of gathering information on who would even be involved in something like that, but I don’t really see why we would stop there. If we want a fantasy setting which feels like a premodern economy distorted by a few fantastical elements, lots of other things damage that immersion just as much.

   As for how far is too far… that’s a balance I haven’t really found yet. There’s always going to be some give and take between presenting a world which really feels different from our own and keeping things familiar enough that the players can reasonably grasp what’s going on and make informed decisions without the GM pausing every few minutes for yet another infodump. Is shopping important enough to you that you’ll spend some of that limited buy-in here rather than on replacing the cops with “city guard” nametags with reeves and ad hoc posses? Or putting some thought into how hereditary nobility might survive in a world where people with actual superpowers can go around doing the stuff they merely claimed to be capable of in our world? Or wrestling D&D’s contradictory mess of god stuff into some kind of plausible religion(s)?

   I can totally see your point if it is. And I definitely sympathize if it isn’t.

   July 17th, 2024 - 2:07 am

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