Worlds of Design: The Problem with Magimarts

I dislike magic item stores. Here's why.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

Magic items are a part of every fantasy role-playing game, and wherever player characters meet, someone will want to buy or sell such items. What the players do among themselves is their business, in most cases; but when non-player characters (NPC) are involved the GM must know where magic items come from, how rare they are, and how hard it is to produce them. [Quoting myself from 40+ years ago]

Magimart: Still a Bad Idea​

I don't like the idea of "Magimarts" -- something like a bookstore or small department store, often with a public storefront, where adventurers can come and purchase (or sell) magic items. I said as much over 40 years ago in an article titled “Magimart: Buying and Selling Magic Items” in White Dwarf magazine. My point then still stands: at least for me and in my games, magic-selling stores don’t make sense.

They don’t make sense from a design point of view, as they may unbalance a campaign or cause power-creep. From an adventure point of view such stores partly eliminates the need to quest for specific powerful magic items. From a realistic point of view they would only provide targets for those who are happy to steal.

The Design Point of View​

From a game design point of view, how experience points, gold, and magic fit together makes a big difference. For example, if you get experience points for selling a magic item (even to NPCs), as well as for the gold you get, adventurers will sell magic items more often. If adventurers acquire scads of treasure and have nothing (such as taxes or “training”) to significantly reduce their fortunes, then big-time magic items are going to cost an awful lot of money, but some will be bought. If gold is in short supply (as you’d expect in anything approaching a real world) then anyone with a whole lot of gold might be able to buy big-time magic items.

Long campaigns need a way for magic items to change ownership, other than theft. As an RPG player I like to trade magic items to other characters in return for other magic items. But there are no “magic stores.” Usability is a big part of it: if my magic user has a magic sword that a fighter wants, he might trade me an item that I could use as a magic user. (Some campaigns allocate found magic items only to characters who can use them. We just dice for selecting the things (a sort of draft) and let trading sort it out, much simpler and less likely to lead to argument about who can use/who needs what.)

The Adventure Point of Views​

Will magic stores promote enjoyable adventuring? It depends on the style of play, but for players primarily interested in challenging adventures, they may not want to be able to go into a somehow-invulnerable magic store and buy or trade for what they want.

Magic-selling stores remind me of the question “why do dungeons exist”. A common excuse (not reason) is “some mad (and very powerful) wizard made it.” Yeah, sure. Excuses for magic-selling stores need to be even wilder than that!

I think of magic-item trading and selling amongst characters as a kind of secretive black market. Yes, it may happen, but each transaction is fraught with opportunities for deceit. Perhaps like a black market for stolen diamonds? This is not something you’re likely to do out in the open, nor on a regular mass basis.

The Realistic Point of View​

“Why do you rob banks?” the thief is asked. “’Cause that’s where the money is.”

Realistically, what do you think will happen if someone maintains a location containing magic items on a regular basis? Magimarts are a major flashpoint in the the dichotomy between believability (given initial assumptions of magic and spell-casting) and "Rule of Cool" ("if it's cool, it's OK").

In most campaigns, magic items will be quite rare. Or magic items that do commonplace things (such as a magic self-heating cast iron pan) may be common but the items that are useful in conflict will be rare. After all, if combat-useful magic items are commonplace, why would anyone take the risk of going into a “dungeon” full of dangers to find some? (Would dungeon-delving become purely a non-magical treasure-hunting activity if magic items are commonplace?)

And for the villains, magimarts seem like an easy score. If someone is kind enough to gather a lot of magic items in a convenient, known place, why not steal those rather than go to a lot of time and effort, risk and chance, to explore dungeons and ruins for items? There may be lots of money there as well!

When Magimarts Make Sense​

If your campaign is one where magic is very common, then magic shops may make sense - though only for common stuff, not for rare/powerful items. And magic-selling stores can provide reasons for adventures:

• Find the kidnapped proprietor who is the only one who can access all that magic.
• Be the guards for a magic store.
• Chase down the crooks who stole some or all of the magic from the store.

Maybe a clever proprietor has figured out a way to make the items accessible only to him or her. But some spells let a caster take over the mind of the victim, and can use the victim to access the items. And if someone is so powerful that he or she can protect a magic store against those who want to raid it, won't they likely have better/more interesting things to do with their time? (As an aside, my wife points out that a powerful character might gather a collection of magic items in the same way that a rich person might gather a collection of artworks. But these won’t be available to “the public” in most cases. Still just as some people rob art museums, some might rob magic collections.)

Of course, any kind of magic trading offers lots of opportunities for deception. You might find out that the sword you bought has a curse, or that the potion isn’t what it’s supposed to be. Many GMs ignore this kind of opportunity and let players buy and sell items at standard prices without possibility of being bilked. Fair enough, it’s not part of the core adventure/story purposes of RPGs. And magic stores are a cheap way for a GM to allow trade in magic items.

Your Turn: What part do magic-selling stores play in your games?

 

[Voadam]

Yes. That would be very true to how 1e was often played. Even in the 1e Monster Manual the treasure of many monsters were their eggs or young if you were capable of transporting them.



In an ideal world for me, all monster manuals would include the price of the carcass, hide, etc.

2e did this pretty heavily for uses as components in the ecology section of the Monstrous Compendium entries, though not often specific gp values, and Hackmaster built off of that in their Hacklopedias.

From the 2e MC I:

"Behir are useful to mages, priests, and alchemists for a number of concoctions. The horns of a behir can be used to brew the ink necessary to inscribe a lightning bolt scroll, and the sharp talons can likewise be used by a cleric to make the ink for a neutralize poison scroll. The heart of the behir is one of the more common ingredients for ink for a protection from poison scroll."

"The scales are valued for their hardness and color, and are worth up to 500 gp to an armorer who can use them to fashion a highly ornate set of scale mail armor."

 

[James Gasik]

Yes. That would be very true to how 1e was often played. Even in the 1e Monster Manual the treasure of many monsters were their eggs or young if you were capable of transporting them.



In an ideal world for me, all monster manuals would include the price of the carcass, hide, etc.

When I run, I'm always keeping an eye for providing alternative treasure for monsters. For example, there's a potential encounter I have planned with a legendary giant boar, whose hide is so tough it resists slashing and piercing damage.

"Further, if the hide is carefully skinned, requiring a DC 17 Dexterity (Leatherworker's Tools) check, it can be made into a suit of Leather or Hide armor that reduces Piercing and Slashing damage taken by 1 point (leather) or 2 points (hide). Up to 3 suits of armor can be harvested."

 

[Celebrim]

When I run, I'm always keeping an eye for providing alternative treasure for monsters.

In my most recent D&D campaign, one of the characters wears armor made from the hide of a sea dragon that he slew. On topic, in my setting you couldn't buy armor like this on the open market much less in a one stop shop magic mart of fungible magic, but you can probably find an individual who is both an armorer and a hedge mage (or two individuals that run a joint business) who could make the armor for you in one of the larger cities provided you could provide the hide. Wait a few weeks and you have your armor. No magic mart, but you do have some control over the equipment you have and the ability to fill in the gaps in your equipment that are filled in from loot.

The point is that the setting has an explanation for how magic items come into being that fits with the lore of the game, but it doesn't have big shops where people can buy and sell magic items because demand still vastly exceeds the ability of the society to supply owing to choke points in the supply process - limited availability of things like dragon hide, high costs of production, limited ability to produce wizards of sufficiently high level to craft items more complex than scrolls or potions, limited availability of the XP required to power the creation of the object (the spending of which suppresses the level of the spellcaster in a negative feedback loop).

Because of this disparity between supply and demand, it's relatively easy to sell a magic item but very hard to buy one. Magic items gravitate to the hordes of kings, nobles, major cults, and the rare adventuring class and stay there becoming family heirlooms or being gifted to trusted retainers and vassals and becoming their family heirlooms. There are no shops filled with undesired magic items waiting for a buyer. I mean, technically there are a few rare exceptions, but the vast majority of items in those sorts of magic curio shops are malfunctioning, cursed, esoteric items that no one can find an obvious use for and which the local authorities would probably destroy if they ever analyzed the collection because more than half of them are Evil nasty things that cause trouble. And the owner of the shop knows that this is true, so he's unlikely to pull out the real collection and show it to you for fear you'll do something stupid that will get him arrested and burned on a stake as a warlock. A magic shop of a sort might exist, but it's nothing like that scene in "The Highwaymen" where the Kevin Coster character goes into a gun store with a bunch of entries on a gun catalog circled and orders up his wish list of equipment.

But in my setting, you can totally go into a shop that specializes in selling spell components, spices, rare plants, and animal and magical beast parts because you need to refill your spell pouches or want to make your own scroll of bull's strength. Absolutely you could go into a hedge mage's shop and order a scale that chimed when something magical was weighed on it, a sail that wouldn't burn, a lock that opened only when a password was spoken, paper that was water resistant, a jar that kept its contents fresh for weeks, or a wand of light - but not a girdle of giant strength or a bag of holding. The local hedge mage makes things that ordinary people want and need or could afford, not legendary items for heroes. And the wizard that could potentially make a girdle of giant strength or a bag of holding, if one so powerful even exists in the kingdom, if he works for anyone at all works for the king and is too busy making stuff for the king to accept commissions from wandering mercenaries.

The problem with magic marts is that they are anachronisms that get in the way of setting depth. If you are going to go that far, you might as well have a crystal ball in every home and people gather around it to watch pastiche fantasy versions of "I Love Lucy" and "The Howdy Doody Show".

 

[Lanefan]

When I run, I'm always keeping an eye for providing alternative treasure for monsters. For example, there's a potential encounter I have planned with a legendary giant boar, whose hide is so tough it resists slashing and piercing damage.

"Further, if the hide is carefully skinned, requiring a DC 17 Dexterity (Leatherworker's Tools) check, it can be made into a suit of Leather or Hide armor that reduces Piercing and Slashing damage taken by 1 point (leather) or 2 points (hide). Up to 3 suits of armor can be harvested."

You might want to put a price on that right now, 'cause unless they're all light-armour-wearing characters it's safe to say they'll try to sell at least one of those three suits. And DR 1 leather armour (or DR 2 hide) ain't thick on the ground; there'd be demand for it.

 

[Starfox]

About using components to replace Xp costs for magic items.

I think that the price itself is a strong indicator that the ingredients are hard to find. These are implied to be rare metals, gemstones, arcane reagents, rare spices and incense, and so forth.



Maybe, but we did get an example recipe for a scroll of protection from petrification:

1 oz giant squid sepia (standard ingredient in all spell scrolls!)
1 basilisk eye (special ingredient)
3 cockatrice features (special ingredient)
1 scruple of venom from a medusa's snakes (special ingredient)
1 large peridot (commodity)
1 medium topaz (commodity)
2 drams of holy water (commodity)
6 pumpkin seeds (commodity)

This is something that DnD fails at. I'm playing Ars Magica now, and a long time earlier there was a tiny little RPG called Swordbearer, In both, the principal loot from monsters are magical components.

Seems I remembered the name of that game correctly, I recognize the art on Wikipedia. It was apparently published in 1982. Time flies!

Swordbearer (role-playing game) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Starfox]

And the wizard that could potentially make a girdle of giant strength or a bag of holding, if one so powerful even exists in the kingdom, if he works for anyone at all works for the king and is too busy making stuff for the king to accept commissions from wandering mercenaries.

This also gives PCs a reason to strive to become kings!

Back in 1E, fighters were expected to became landlords at about the same time magic-users learned to make permanent magic items.

 

[grimmgoose]

I hate magic marts. To me, the point of the game is to adventure. 5E already has a terrible economy - eventually players have so much gold that it's almost absurd.

Shopping is boring - adventuring is not.

IF I have any kind of Best Buy in a town, it's a shop with like three bespoke items that offer small utility (like the Cape of Billowing from Xanathar's) and not anything with actual power.

 

[James Gasik]

You might want to put a price on that right now, 'cause unless they're all light-armour-wearing characters it's safe to say they'll try to sell at least one of those three suits. And DR 1 leather armour (or DR 2 hide) ain't thick on the ground; there'd be demand for it.

Absolutely, which will be how I lure them in the direction of a major city for a future adventure!

 

[MerricB]

I allow players to buy magic items in my games.

Magic items are available, but in "hidden" trades, so the average citizen isn't aware they exist. As a downtime activity, my players can seek out the trades, making a Persuasion check (with a bonus if they spend money). The basis for this is the system in Xanathar's, but I make a couple of extra adjustments.

Firstly, the players can never request a specific item.

Second, only DMG items are available. More exotic items are only available through adventuring.

Based on the Persuasion check, I randomly determine what items are available. At some point, I'll formalise the costs of the items - I tend to use the AD&D tables as a starting point, but I can do better!

You can find what the results mean here...

Buying Magic Items – Revisiting Xanathar’s

I am quite fond of the downtime activities in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, and I have used them extensively in my Monday night campaign (the Weekend Adventurers game). However, there are a…

merricb.com

Cheers,
Merric

 

[M_Natas]

So, in my last campaign, I had the following magic shops:

- Nala Goodmothers Shop - a (totallt not a necromancer) mage, that was run out of her nation because of the experiments she did to try bring back her family - she set up shop at the Dwarfen Stronghold Bergstadt (English: Mountain City) which lacked arcane spellcasters. The looked away when she did her experiments in exchange for arcane services.
She also sold magic items to adventurers passing by, but no mundane +1 or +2 weapons or anything, but fun creepy stuff - like boots of elvenkind - but are they made off elven design or of elven skin? Are the night googles just magical glass or made out of the eyese of creaturess with night vision? We'll never know.

- In Bergstadt the Master Dwarfen Smiths could create mundane +1 masterwork weapons, but also if the adventurers bring magical stuff, they can turn that into armor and weapons. Like they had a dragon scale as a gift from a dragon that they could turn into armor or a whip.

- Katalinas Travelshop of Magical Curiosities - it is a magical wagon, that is the base of a group of thieves that use their shop as a cover to rob places. Basically only magical trinkets/common items. They robbed the vault of the Bergstadt while the adventure party was busy fighting the evil monster under the city.

- in another city there was a black market that sold also magical items. Usually cursed ones, but also stolen ones and items useful for darker purposes.

That was in my last campaign.

In my current spelljammercampaign, so far my players discovered one shop that sells magical items, but that are for Ships. Magical sails that make ships faster and so on. Which makes sense in a Spelljammer Setting. They are still in the small start town, so they haven't seen the magic shops in the bigger cities.