Magic Mart: Buying/selling magic items

I am not a fan of how later D&D editions (particularly 3.X) reduced magic items to a simple commodity. I get that some of the rules about crafting costs and times were a bit subjective before, but I fall into the camp that magic should be magical. 

That being said, players will want to find ways to spend their loot and one of the most useful things for an adventurer is better gear. Once the fighter has bought plate mail and silver arrows, his upgrade options in the standard price list are a bit thin on the ground. I sometimes do have the odd item or two for sale in towns. Usually it's things like potions or scrolls and other "limited" magics.

In the current campaign I am running, the PCs have managed to get through two adventures, both times clearing a fair amount of coin; enough that the PCs that have survived since session one are at or near level 3 (except the elf). The nature of the adventures limited the chance to find items, though. I am thinking of giving them a chance to acquire some magical shinies. The question is how to decide what's available in such situations without being utterly arbitrary.

The idea I am currently playing with is based roughly off of the Treasure Type Tables on X43. The larger the town or city, the better the chance of any magical items for sale. Likewise, certain types of items are more often found than others. A first pass at this for a typical BX fantasy setting (not particularly high or low magic) might look something like:

Small Town or Village: 15% Any 1
Medium-sized Town: 25% Any 2 + 1 potion + 1 scroll
Large Town or Small City: 1d4 scrolls, 30% Any 3 + 1 sword, armor, or weapon
Large Metropolis: 1d4 scrolls, 2d4 potions, 35% Any 4

It's up to the individual DM to decide where a given population in his setting falls on this list. As examples, I would say a town like Threshold in Karameikos would be a medium town, whereas Specularum might be a small city. You might also tweak how you roll based on things like how much trade or traffic a location sees or if adventurers are common there.

In my campaign, the party is currently in a town of 3,000-4,000 people; what I would consider medium-sized in my setting.  But, it is also a busy river port that sees a good deal of trade and adventurer types are not uncommon here (a name-level mage has a tower just outside the town walls). Therefore, I have chosen to roll as a large town/small city.

Roll results are as follows:

1d4 Scrolls = 1. The % dice came "00"! Which is a nice treasure map to 5d6 gems and 2 magic items. Buuuut, the party is already following one map and I am trying to generate magical items here. So I re-rolled that and got a Protection from Magic scroll.

% dice for other magic = 30 exactly (!) So 3 items plus 1 arm or armor. I rolled a d3 to see which and got a 3, which is a non-sword weapon.

The percentile rolls for the specific items came up as follows:

• A potion of Giant Control
• +1 Spear
• A Staff of Healing Staff of Striking (18 charges)
• A MU/Elf spell scroll of 3 spells. This came up as one 4th, one 1st, and one 2nd level spell. I rolled randomly (d12s) and got Charm Monster, Ventriloquism, and Detect Evil.

Now this is a pretty impressive haul, and frankly a lot more magic than I like to be just lying around. If I want to let these results stand, I need to make sure these items aren't too easy to get. Namely, they need to be expensive or require the PCs do something to get them.

The protection scroll has a lot of potential utility, but it's one use only, so I will peg that at 1000gp.

I decided to roll randomly for what type of giant the potion can control. There are six kinds of giants and I rolled a 4: Fire Giant. This is pretty neat but of limited usefulness. Commanding 1d4 fire giants even for only an hour could be pretty epic, though! Let's say 1000gp

The +1 spear is nice, but is just a bonus to hit and damage. 1000 gp should cover that.

The healing staff is another matter. I will invoke DM fiat and say this is too powerful to be simply bought in town, ready to go. This item essentially allows a cleric to cast a Cure Light Wounds once per day on each PC and uses no charges! This sort of thing would be snapped up by one of the temples in town and not readily available to wandering murder hobos. As with the map, I re-rolled and the result was a Staff of Striking with 18 charges. This is a nice item, but limited by who can use it (clerics) and of finite charges. I will judge it roughly equivalent to the spear and set its price at 1000 gp as well.

The spell scroll would be pretty expensive. I have previously established house rules about spell books and scrolls, so using those I can pin its price tag at 3,500gp (7 spell levels total at 500 gp per). Since they are all on one scroll, it's an all or nothing price.

Now, this is a pretty generous haul, but the rolls were with them. The odds favored 2-3 scrolls and that's it. I would also argue that it would be a while (a month or two at least) before this particular town might be "restocked." Over the course of a campaign, I would see this as balancing out. I'm not sure it's the perfect system. I still needed to intervene a little to maintain what I see as a correct balance, but isn't that what DMs are supposed to do?

Endgame, part 2: Fighters, aka The Lords of the Land.

Fighters are pretty straightforward. First off, the class information expressly states:

“High level fighters usually spend their time training and leading men-at-arms, clearing the wilderness of monsters, and expanding human settlements.” 

So the idea is that the whole “endgame” thing is a big part of what name level fighters do.

Tallyho!

Fighters reach ninth level at 240k xp, which is fairly middle of the road, advancement-wise. Using our earlier Tarnskeep example of a 175k gp price tag, it’s likely the new Lord would have enough scratch to at least start the construction process.

Unlike clerics, BX fighters don’t automatically attract followers to their castles. In fact, only clerics and thieves gain followers by default. Why is this? Well, it seems to me that a cleric’s followers aren’t really his. They are followers of his faith. We’ll talk more about thieves in a later post. A fighter must gather men with the force of his personality (CHA) and by the promise of rewards. If he hires mercenaries and leads them well, he might recruit more easily in the future, but in the end the soldiers will want their pay.

Another fun tidbit mentioned on X7 is that:

“When a fighter reaches 9th level (Lord/Lady), the character may become a Baron or Baroness  and the land cleared and controlled by that character will be called a Barony.”

So the assumption is that the fighter joins the ranks of his homeland’s nobility. (Note: While it’s not really a “BX product,” GAZ1 (Karameikos) does do a pretty nifty job of integrating these aspects of play into the societal/political structure.) DMs can harvest a lot of plot fuel from characters that are not only vested in the current power structure, but under an oath of fealty to serve it!

This also makes a Baron or baroness all the more interested in attracting settlers to their lands in order to collect taxes to help pay for their soldiers. When the crown calls in the banners, a lord that cannot respond might lose their fiefdom!

Endgame, part 1: Castles, Clearing Hexes, and Clerics

Turning on Retro-Scope, I dredged up a post on this topic from that iconic Old-School gaming blog of yesteryear, Grognardia called “on the Loss of D&D’s Endgame.”  Rather than regurgitate it all here in bits and pieces, I urge you to follow the link and give it a read. Mr. Maliszewski has been kind enough to leave the blog online even though it has long been mothballed. It reflects many of my thoughts on the subject. Not to mention James is a far more articulate writer than I.

Once a character reaches name -usually 9th- level (so called because that’s when the character’s experience “title” stops changing and they are referred to by such grandiose labels as Lord, Wizard, Master Thief and so forth), most classes are going to construct some sort of castle, keep, or tower. There are short, but functional rules in Cook for costs, times, and more. But before the PCs can build anything, Cook has a few things to say (from X52):

“When building a castle or stronghold, a character must first clear a hex or local area of monsters, entering the hex with a force of men and dealing with any lairs the DM has set up in the area. (The DM may also require the character get a land grant from the local ruler, if any.)”

So it looks like the PC is going to be busy before the first stone can even be laid. There are critters to clear out! A character might pay some men at arms, or lower level adventurers, to do the dirty work. The bit about the local ruler is not insignificant, either. That’s the sort of thing a DM needs to think about for his setting ahead of time if he plans on getting into this aspect of the game eventually.

As sort of a baseline cost for these posts, I took the description of Tarnskeep from Threshold in the Karameikos Gazetteer and priced out something roughly equivalent. Without getting into all the particulars, a character wishing to build Tarnskeep would be looking at approximately 175,000 gp, including hiring two engineers from the specialists section, and a little under a year in building times.

Not to mention Tarnskeep's owner is a high-level cleric!

I thought we’d look at the human classes first, as they are the most common. Going alphabetically, we’ll begin with the Cleric. The cleric is also the class that’s going to reach name level sooner than most in the XP charts, so it seems as good a beginning as any. (Thieves are a bit unusual, so I’m happy to save them for later).

The cleric PC hits 9th level (Patriarch/Matriarch) at 200,000 xp. Considering that most of a character’s experience is coming from treasure, this means he should have a fair bit of coin to work with. Of course a good bit of it may well have been spent along the way, but he should still be pretty flush.

When looking at the rules for clerics, Cook Expert has several things to say about 9th level. Rather than quote a great block of text, I want to take each point in turn.

“When clerics reach 9th level (Matriarch/Patriarch), they may choose to construct a castle (see p. X52) or stronghold.”

Seems straightforward enough. This next bit is interesting:

“...the cost of building the castle will be half the normal amount due to miraculous assistance from the deity.”

So if you were wondering how those ancient civilizations managed to build such elaborate temples before you dungeon-crawled their ruins, now you know!

Once a keep or temple or whatever is built, it needs to be manned. No worries for a cleric though:

“Furthermore, once the castle is completed, fanatically loyal troops (the "faithful", who never need to check morale) will come to defend the cleric. There will be from 50-300 soldiers (5d6 x 10), from 1-2nd level, armed with various weapons.”

Wow. No morale check for an average of over a hundred soldiers. That is not insignificant in a portion of the game where things like having troops to call on can have a real impact. Never mind wars, take a look at this bit from the castle construction section again:

“When the building is complete, the character may want to clear the surrounding area of monsters. The cleared area will remain free of monsters as long as it is patrolled.”

Finally, there is a section about settlers moving in if areas are cleared and improvements are added as enticements (mills, inns, etc.). This can yield 10gp annually per family of settlers. That will help pay for a lot of the day to day expenses once things are up and running.

So even after looking at a fairly simple clear & build model for just one class, we can already see some of the shifts that this sort of play would lead to in a campaign. I can understand some folks questioning whether this sort of thing would be fun, or just more book-keeping. But I also have to ask, if you’ve run a character all the way up from first to ninth level or higher (after all, you don’t need to start building right at ninth), don’t you think you might be ready to try something different? Of course you could always just start a new campaign or play a different system for a while, but it seems a shame to me to shelve a character that has paid such heavy dues when there is a whole new sphere of play awaiting them. The potential scope and depth of the plot-lines that could unfold. Whether it’s the responsibilities of leadership, political intrigue, or even militarily.

RMA: Gnomes

Unlike some of the other demi-human RMAs, Gnomes are not also PC race in BX. For those of us that have knocked about the old Grand Duchy a while, we've run into the little buggers from Highforge as NPCs, but I don't know if I've seen them used as a "monster" in actual play.

First off, the stats. They aren't terribly interesting, but let's get on with it:

Gnome (from Moldvay)

AC: 5
HD: 1
MV: 60' (20')
ATT: 1 (wpn)
DMG: 1d6 or wpn
# APP: 1d8 (5d8)
SAVE: D1
MORALE: 8*
TT: C
AL: L or N

*Morale improves to 10 if a leader or chieftain is present

As mentioned, nothing exceptional in the stats. One mechanic to consider is that the little buggers have better infravision than dwarfs or elves (90' vs. 60'). It's possible that could become relevant.

The gnomes' descriptive text holds some fun tidbits. "Gnomes are excellent metalsmiths and miners." Lots of plot hooks there.

Here's the bit I love:

"They love gold and gems and have been known to make bad decisions just to obtain them."

Hoo boy! Is there some meat on those bones! Maybe the gnomes enter into a dangerous bargain for some shinies. Maybe they delve too greedily and too deep. Who knows?

Over at the BX G+ Community, Mike Hill pointed out that, oddly, the gnomes' Treasure Type (C) does not include any chance of gold pieces. I suppose it I were to try and explain that as other than the designers simply picking a table entry that yields an appropriate amount of loot without carefully referencing the flavor text, I'd say that the treasure section allows the DM to place treasure and to move values around. Maybe there are no gold coins, but perhaps there are ingots or lumps or ore?

Jumping from the monster listing in Moldvay over to Cook, there is a fairly extensive writeup of gnomes in the Karameikos wilderness section (X60). In fact, they are the only race described under the "NON-HUMANS" header. It's long enough I won't break the whole thing down here, but it's definitely worth a read. The layout of the defenses is particularly fun (It even has a map!). There is a typo (?) where the text describes summoning guard animals (giant moles) but later mentions them as giant ferrets. I assume it's supposed to be ferrets, as there is no monster entry for moles (giant or otherwise). 

Closing In

I don't normally post about my campaign here. I usually just update the logs over at Obsidian Portal, but I realized that with Session #29 coming up tonight, we are closing in on the end of Night's Dark Terror. For those of you not familiar with B10, it's practically a campaign in itself. The story takes the characters all over most of eastern Karameikos. It's been a ton of fun, and I'm really pleased that we've managed to keep going through the whole thing. (knocks wood)

I will confess a certain level of GM fatigue, since I've been running this almost non-stop (with a few fun breaks) for the better part of a year, and trying to stick to a particular published module can be constraining at times. Perhaps when this is over someone else will run for a little bit. On the one hand that can be a relief, but on the other it's hard to step out from behind the screen and avoid backseat GM-ing. I can only say that if I end up playing instead of running, I will do my best to clam up.