Ye Aulde Magicke Item Shoppe

The power of a good list

Characters should be able to buy magic items. PC magic-users should also be able to make them (at a level, price, and time investment that sees the ability actually get used), but the magic shops are more contentious so I’m going to talk about that.

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”.

Blatant Theft: Alternate Spell List for Rise Up Comus' Wilderlands

Since 2025 is apparently the year of the beta, I've decided to go ahead and post something from an unpublished google doc from ~2019. I was a few months into an administrative assistant job with a lot of seasonal variation in workload and had just gotten jazzed up about Tolkien and OSR writing from reading Rise Up Comus, The One Ring 1st edition and Adventures in Middle Earth, so I was able to get a lot of writing done on the clock.

Piggybacking off of Josh's Wilderlands posts, I hatched a grand scheme to write a boxed campaign with a megadungeon, a small hexcrawl, and a bespoke ruleset in a kind of "The Hobbit meets Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay," "what if you replaced Smaug with Chernobog" thing called "Orcmont". I wrote a bunch of stuff for it before realizing that A) I'd bitten off way more than I could chew, and B) I was adding very little original material to my sources. Bits and pieces are still pretty good (although you'd certainly hope so, since the google doc is over 100 pages long), and a lot of the work that I've done since has owed a creative debt to Orcmont.

Maybe I'll revive it in some form one day, who knows! While these rules are mostly me clambering onto the shoulders of giants, there are a few minor innovations and ideas that I like:

• The sigil rules are pretty fun. You can make a ward or magic item by casting a spell as a sigil, but you can only ever have one at a time. For example, Josh had the great idea of letting the caster choose who the victim of a Charm Person is charmed by, so it can be a love spell. Using the sigil rules, you can also make a love potion.

• Making Blessing work like Glinda the Good's kiss is pretty cute.

• I combined Josh's Animate Object and Command spells, which feels resonant to me. They are both in a sense Words of Command.

• The table of non-magical counterspells for lifting curses is neat.

• While unnecessarily clunky in implementation, this marks my first attempt to combine the Light spell with a Turn Undead effect. To be honest, I think they should be the same thing in any setting where the cleric isn't warding vampires off with a cross. Everybody's always trying to rework or drop the cleric because "adventuring priest" is a fairly specific archetype, and the best way to do that in my opinion is to just hand their tool set to the wizard. Gandalf holds a demon at bay and Ged banishes shadows with magelight: why not do the same in your game?

• Wizards should also be able to turn into animals.

• While my Speaking spell is lifted almost word-for-word from Josh's Give Voice, I do think that I wrote a nice line expanding on how to give the target of the spell a thematically appropriate personality.

In the meantime, if you like the Wilderlands magic system but wish it had a little rule for carving magical symbols on things and a slightly different set of spells, check this shit out:

HALO is OSR

search your feelings, you know this to be true

Think about it. Master Chief has limited inventory slots (two for guns, two for grenades) designed to force the player into making interesting choices and tradeoffs. If you pick up a powerful but overly specialized weapon like a sniper rifle, gravity hammer, or rocket launcher then you'll be less flexible in situations that those weapons don't excel in, but if you keep to your solid foursquare meat-and-potatoes loadout of battle rifle and shotgun/pistol you may find yourself outgunned or outranged in a key moment. Sometimes you'll just run out of ammo for the better weapons and need to scrape by on readily available trash-tier equipment like the needler until you can scrounge something better, a design philosophy meant to generate tense moments and force the player out of entrenched habits (or learn why the plasma pistol is actually good). 

Halo also uses a two-track HP system with a large pool of easily regenerating ablative HP and a smaller one representing real injuries, which requires a limited resource to restore. The Chief spends a lot of time exploring ancient ruins, interrupting destructive alien rituals, and fighting eldritch tomb-spawned horrors. 

Plus, you can honk the little horn on the mongoose ATV.