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| The power of a good list |
It’s an OSR truism (which has since made its way to 5th edition) that shops cheapen the magic of magic items, and therefore no item should ever be sullied with filthy commerce. I think this is exactly backwards: magic shops are exciting! A magic shop is one of the more evocative images available to fantasy RPGs. A cluttered room full of strange and forgotten curios. A mysterious merchant offering power at a price. Second-hand potions (unlabeled). Jumbled crystals, stuffed crocodiles, stacks of books, starry curtains, sorcerous burglar alarms, golem security guards, talking shop cats, and so on. It’s a button that you can hand players that they can hit for either the wonder of discovery (“what have they got in stock?”) or the pleasant anticipation of a long-term goal (“ok, I need to save up for the Sword of Blue Fire, let’s hit the lair of the lizardmen next”). Mechanically, a shop is also a way of smoothing out player problems at a cost: they don’t have a healer, but they can buy potions. They haven’t found a magic battle-axe but they can buy one… for the cost it would take to hit level 2. They can’t think of anything cool to do with that randomly generated item they found in the ogre’s cave, but they can sell it at a steep discount to that hooded old man.
I think the anti-magic-shop attitude is part of the long hangover from 3rd edition, because (I’m told) it was easy to play that game as a bonus treadmill, where you get the +2 Gauntlets of Strength in order to help you grind enough to afford the +3 Gauntlets of Strength. But you can also just… not do that. In fact, you could even not do it in 3rd edition, where I mostly used the exhaustively detailed item creation rules to make weird things like “+1 arrow with the powers of a Quaal’s Feather Token (Tree), so a giant oak sprouts wherever the arrow lands” or go “the rules allow for putting single-use powers like scrolls or potions onto permanent items like +1 swords, neato”.
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| "I'll buy it at a high price!" |
This is actually the sweet spot for me in terms of magic item availability: the very best things are found down in the dungeon, but you can still buy some cool stuff if you go to the right market. In fact “they have a magic item market there” is a great reason to break out your overland travel rules and go somewhere! Or at least for your players to look at a map and dream about going there before deciding “well we really ought to finish clearing out level 2 here first,” which in many ways is just as good.
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| consider the phrase "goblin market" |
Gold-for-XP games are constantly running into the problem of what players are supposed to do with all of this money. Equipment is comparatively cheap. The official stronghold-building rules are level-gated and hilariously expensive. Taxes and fees will only get you so far, and carousing rules are more fun when they represent an active choice (blow the money for xp or spend it on something useful). 5th edition appears to have arrived at this same problem from a different angle, in that treasure is almost vestigial. You don’t get experience for it and there’s very little to spend it on. In both cases the humble magic shop offers a useful gold sink.
Some other common attacks by the scurrilous anti-magic-shop rogues include:
“It keeps the emphasis where it belongs: the dungeon”. Planning and preparation are also interesting, as is engaging with the setting outside of the dungeon! Buying a magic item is a very dungeon-oriented way of doing both of those things.
“The PCs will quickly become too powerful”. No they won’t.
“Magic shops allow for character builds, which are Bad”. Setting aside the question of whether or not character builds really are bad, yeah if you just hand the players the rulebook then sure. Give the shop a limited inventory or an interesting “yes, but…” “I’m terribly sorry sir, I had an item just like that but I recently sold it to Malcator the Spiteful. There he goes now in fact,” or “The mage-smith Green Vessille knew how to craft such a thing. His tower is located beyond the Bog of Sorrows and is guarded by deadly Glass Wasps”.
“I want magic in my games to be wondrous and scary”. Then make it so. There’s a series of children’s fantasy books by Bruce Coville called, appropriately enough, the Magic Shop series. Each book involves a kid wandering into the titular shop and buying a powerful magical object. These items (a dragon’s egg, a ring that turns you into a monster, the Skull of Truth, etc.) always turn out to be more trouble than expected, get the children into adventures, and help them to learn and mature. If you want magic to be cool and dangerous, that has more to do with item design than whether or not the cursed necklace of power can be found in a shop.
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| two wizards competing for bargains on Black Friday |
With all that said, there are more and less fun ways to implement a magic item shop. I think it helps to have a limited inventory (so the players don’t spend all day shopping), and to have some kind of turnover (so there’s some tension to the decision of whether to buy something or not). Shop themes and limited information are useful techniques as well. Say one town is known for its book and scroll market, while another has magic swords. Perhaps a generalist item shop sells a wide selection of things, but they’re all unidentified. That amulet might be magical, or it might just be a piece of jewelry. Would you care to pay the additional fee for our in-house sage to reveal its powers? A table of minor curses or drawbacks can be useful for battered or second-hand magical items as well – “Yes, it is an enchanted sword, but the constant humming is very annoying. No, I’m not sure why it does that, you’d have to ask the wizard who enchanted it.” The Dolmenwood fairy blades chart is a good one, and the 3rd and 5th edition Dungeon Master’s Guides have several categories:
Unreliable: %chance not to function on any given use.
Dependent: only functions under a certain condition. The table is a little weak, but can still create gems like a sword that can’t be drawn during the day.
Uncontrolled: activates at random times. Not a great choice for most situations.
Requirement: needs some oath, sacrifice, or continually applied ritual to function. My favorite example is an item that only functions for people with a specific name, suggesting that you have to ritually and earnestly adopt that name as your own. Even the humble command word can be fun if applied in an unusual way.
Drawback: carries some small curse or annoyance. The table provided is pretty swingy, from turning your hair blue or the air around the item feeling colder to afflicting the user with a random disease or a negative level. My favorites are “Item continually emits a disturbing sound” and “Item looks ridiculous”
Sidebar on Item Creation Rules
I think the prices and rules for 3rd edition’s magic items are pretty good (after level 1 potions and scrolls, which genuinely are too cheap). They’re exhaustive, tedious, and of little interest to the majority of readers, but honestly I think that maximalist instinct is kind of nice. While of course you can just make things up, I question the utility of a rulebook that just says “The DM can make it up”. I already know that! Ideally the rulebook would provide some kind of guidance as to how, and magic items involve so many incomparables that something like OSE’s vague:
“The referee must judge the requirements for creating items that do not recreate the effects of a spell. More powerful items should require more time, money, and special materials or quests. Some examples: 20 arrows +1 (10,000gp, 1 month), plate mail +1 (10,000gp, 6 months), crystal ball (30,000gp, 6 months), ring of x-ray vision (100,000gp, 1 year).”
is not particularly helpful. How does a ring of protection compare to a crystal ball? What about a flying carpet?
Incidentally, these costs run into the problem I mentioned in the first paragraph: they are too expensive and too time consuming for the levels and time-frames that most people play at. If you can afford to spend 10,000 gp and 1 month on a quiver of +1 arrows, you no longer need those arrows. It smacks of a common DM improv trick where a player asks for something you’re not prepared for and you don’t want to say “no,” so you say “yes, but…” with a cost that’s so high that you might as well have said no.
In my solo OSE game I’ve been using the costs from Holmes Basic for making scrolls (100 gp and 1 week per spell level) and healing potions, and I have not been overrun with magic items. I’d love for my characters to be able to purchase more, in fact, but their operating costs and other goals keep getting in the way. If I, using the 3rd edition prices, said that Eveningstar had +1 swords for sale for 2,000 gp, none of my characters would be able to buy one. Would Trigg Sunbold ever sell Scalebane? On the one hand, he’s sentimentally attached to that sword, and if he were to retire he’s more likely to make a gift of it than to sell it. On the other hand, 2–3k gp would buy a lot of farm upgrades…
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