Yo.

You were probably expecting a follow up to that article I posted last week about module design and layout. Probably because I told you to expect it. Well, this ain’t it. That follow up needs another couple of days in the oven. I’m finalizing a few bits and pieces of the draft of The Fall of Silverpine Watch – the introductory adventure module I’m working on – and the follow up kind of requires me to be able to preview that module.

Remember kids who are tracking that project’s timeline that I’m saying this s$&% on October 14. This article has to be ready to go up on Patreon on Friday, October 16. YOU might be reading this on October 21 or later, at which point I’ll be well into doing the final revision of FoSW. One of the benefits of supporting my site is that, when I mention a date or timeline, you know exactly when I mean. And also you ensure that I keep, you know, posting content for you to read.

Today, I’m just going to open up the virtual mailbag and deal with a bunch of reader questions. Because interacting with all of you hasn’t caused me ANY trouble lately.

Remember, you can e-mail your questions to ask.angry@angry.games. Just remember to tell me very clearly and explicitly what to call you and to get to the f$&%ing point. Be brief. I don’t know why I bother saying this s$&%. None of you ever listen.

RedSlaadBlueSlaad asks…

How do you determine how many magical items to distribute in your adventures? And how powerful should they be? Does your approach differ between one-shot adventures and adventures that are part of a series or campaign?

Hey RSBS! Nice to hear from you again. Thanks for your help with that thing. You were a lifesaver. I can’t say what thing it was, though, because RSBS is withholding their real name. Also, thanks for being clear and concise and for telling me exactly what to call you.

Man does the magical item distribution thing give lots of GMs lots of headaches for some reason. Personally, I’ve always loved sprinkling magical treasures in my deathtrap dungeons, but these days it seems like GMs just want to piss and moan and b$&% and whine about how everything is too much work and too much bookkeeping. I mean, you decided you wanted to design your own adventures. What the f$&% did you expect? If you want to be a game designer, you have to actually design a game.

But, I digress. Point is that doling out magical treasure is part of writing adventures. And it can be a pretty fun part. But before I tell you how I do it, let’s go over how you’re supposed to do it. Because I actually kind of start there. Sort of.

Most people don’t think of them this way, but magic items are an important part of character advancement. As such, they have to show up at appropriate intervals, their acquisition has to be driven by player actions and player choices, and they have to follow a logical progression. This is why the D&D 5E Dungeon Master’s Guide suggests you dole them out at random. Nothing ensures regularity and a logical progression like a bunch of random tables.

Chapter 7 of the DMG – starting on DMG 133 – has two sets of random treasure tables, each broken down by CR. The first determines how much pocket change any given monster is carrying in its pockets or backpack or stomach. The second tells you how much coinage, how many gems, how many objects duh art, and how many magical items a large group of creatures has piled up. And that’s the textbook definition. A hoard is “the accumulated wealth of a large group of creatures” according to the DMG, but it also notes that individual monsters – like dragons – sometimes have hoards of their own and sometimes, treasure hoards are just sitting around in ancient ruins and s$&%.

I’m not making fun, by the way. This all makes perfect sense and it’s totally part of the fantasy Louvre.

The hoard tables are broken down by CR. There’s four. One for CRs below 5, one for CRs 5 to 10, one for CR 11 to 16, and one for CR 17 and above. Which follows the super-secret tier structure built into absolutely every level-based mechanic in the game. The cutoffs align with magic item rarities, with class bonus damage and bonus attack mechanics, with cantrip damage advancement, and – with some allowances for smearing and averaging – even proficiency bonus advancement.

It’s a shame D&D’s designers didn’t just explicitly say there were four tiers of play and tell us what that meant. But then, why would we stupid, peasant GMs ever need to know about that?

Anyway, the DMG helpfully suggests you use the hoard tables to fill your adventures with treasure. It says you can even double or triple the hoards if you want and hand out as many hoards as you want. And that you can break the hoards up and spread the treasure however you want. But it does suggest that it might be best to include seven hoards in the first tier, eighteen hoards in the second tier, twelve hoards at the third tier, and eight hoards at the highest tier.

You can follow those instructions exactly and it’ll totally work. In simple, adventure-of-the-week style campaigns, that’s what I do. Hell, I LIKE rolling up treasure on random tables. It’s fun. I miss using Pathfinder’s Ultimate Equipment. And I keep track of how many hoards I’ve given out in previous adventures so I can roughly follow the DMG’s guidelines. And I’m sure that’s just too much bookkeeping for some people. I mean, after all, it does take up almost half an index card and require me to make several pen strokes every couple of weeks.

But I know that not everyone’s big on random tables. People just don’t know what’s f%$&ing fun anymore. Fair enough. If you want an OFFICIAL way to dole out magical items that totally isn’t random, the designers finally parted the idiotic veil of secrecy and let us know what assumptions their random tables were actually based on in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. I don’t blame you for not owning that. It’s 80% random, useless crap and it’s a tonal mess. But the magic item section is actually really useful. If you know a friend that was dumb enough to waste money on XGE, borrow their copy and scan XGE 135 through XGE 145. Or just tear the pages out and keep them for yourself.

Basically, XGE revealed that the WotC designers assume a PARTY of adventurers will trip over about 100 magical items throughout their twenty-level careers. Further, it says 80 of those items will be minor items and the rest will be major. Further still, it says they’ll find 20 common items, 20 uncommon items, 20 rare items, 15 very rare items, and 5 legendary items. Rounded off anyway. For some reason, the WotC designers think their game balance is so delicate that they can’t say “about five legendary items.” The game will absolutely f$&%ing break if it’s not seven and exactly seven.

If you want to just give out whatever magic items you want and you hate fun and don’t want to roll any dice, but you still want the pile of magical crap to be a carefully balanced pile of magical crap, you can use some simple math to figure out that an average party of four should find about one minor magical item per level per character and one major magical item per player per tier. Give or take. And THAT is pretty easy to keep track of.

So, there’s the official, fair, balanced, precise, perfect approaches. Use random tables to place hoards at the prescribed rate or use those ratios to distribute magic items. Just keep track of how many hoards you place or how many items you give out.

But you didn’t ask what the book says you should do. You, GreenEggsAndSalad, asked me what I do. And what I do is ALMOST what the book says to do. Well, I basically do the hoard thing. I basically use random tables and keep track of how many hoards I hand out and I basically roll randomly and I…

Okay, you know what? F$&% this. While that IS kind of what I do, there’s more to it than just bowing to the capricious whims of the insane voices in the WotC designers’ heads that tell them what to do. I use those tables for a reason. And not because it’s fun. Well, not JUST because it’s fun. I use that s$&% for very good reasons. And, on top of that, my brain is also carefully watching what the tables churn out and it’s ready to swap and veto s$&%. But to really understand what I do, you have to understand that there’s more to handing out magical items than just “how many” and “how powerful.”

So, I’m switching gears here. Mailbag over. I’m turning this into a full-on article about how to decide for yourself how to hand out magical items.

Magical Items and Philosophy

Whether the designers of D&D will admit it or not and whether they carefully designed a progression for it or not, magical items ARE part of character advancement. They’re one of the two ways that characters grow through gameplay. Which means you HAVE TO give magical items out. And for it to feel right, you have to give them out pretty regularly and you have to give better and better items for as long as the game keeps going on.

Advancement is important. It’s one of those things that differentiate RPGs from other games. Advancement creates a sense of growth and progress over many sessions of play, but it also establishes a sense of permanence and continuity. And it keeps gameplay fresh.

In D&D, there’s two ways that characters advance. First, characters gain experience points. And when they hit certain XP thresholds, they gain new character levels. Those levels come with new abilities and features and bigger numbers and all that jazz. Second, characters acquire supplies and equipment. Supplies can be burnt up to give the characters temporary advantages or mitigate specific problems and equipment enhances the character’s abilities or grants new abilities.

With me so far? You have to be. As a GM, you can’t hand out magical items if you don’t get this s$&%. As the characters adventure – as a result of their actions – the characters grow. They advance. That’s why, by the way, milestone XP systems or level-by-fiat systems are such bad ideas. They turn advancement into a matter of survival. Cross a checkpoint, gain some XP. Cross another, gain a level. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you live through it.

Truthfully, though, that’s already how D&D handles advancement anyway. And that’s why doling out magical items is such a big, complicated issue. It’s a subtle point. See if you can follow it. In D&D, you gain XP – or the GM just hands you levels – for overcoming encounters and completing objectives. Which is, of course, what the game is about. If you don’t complete objectives, you’re not playing the game. And to complete objectives, you have to overcome encounters. Most D&D adventures are nothing more than a big-a$& pile of encounters with an objective on the other side.

As long as the players play the game and as long as they never, ever lose, their characters advance. And they advance at whatever rate the game dictates. And everything they get for advancing comes from a class advancement table. There are some choices involved, sometimes, but they’re pretty minor. Unless you’re a primary spellcaster. Once you’ve built your PC and picked your build – usually at 2nd or 3rd level – you’re done customizing your character. From then on, advancement is just a matter of checking boxes. Barring choosing the one useful feat you’ll take at 4th level whereafter you will never take another feat.

The players pretty much have no say in this whole advancement thing. As long as they beat all the encounters and win the adventure, they’ll get the level. And the level will give them exactly enough to handle the next adventure. The players can’t really miss out on XP – optional content is pretty rare these days – and they can’t gain extra XP. They can’t get bonuses for overcoming encounters really well. They can’t choose to grind for more XP. And they can’t even do anything with XP. They just watch the meter tick up until it hits the next benchmark.

If you can’t tell it from my tone, let me be clear that I do NOT support this philosophy. I think this is a BAD way to handle advancement.

XGE reveals that WotC had the same philosophy regarding magical item advancement. Dole out a precise number of items of precise power levels as the party overcomes encounters and completes objectives. Done and done. Overly mechanical. Basically automatic. If the characters don’t die, they get the items they get. Just like class features.

Except for one thing. The WotC designers did something – and man, I really hate to use the ‘r’ word to describe something they did – the WotC designers did something right. They buried all those precise numbers and measures and things and instead said, “you know what, let the dice dole this s$&% out. Let randomness add an acceptable amount of surprise and wobble to the whole affair. Otherwise, gaining magic items is just gaining levels all over again.”

Is Balance Important?

Is the number of magic items you hand out actually a big deal? Does it f$&%ing matter? Well, the obvious answer is that it does. Which is how you know that it doesn’t. Because if I was just going to repeat the obvious answer, I wouldn’t devote a whole heading to this s$&%.

Balance is kind of important. It’s just not as important as most people think. And balance doesn’t come from the number of magical items you hand out. Well, it mostly doesn’t. The WotC folks even knew that the number of magical items the party acquires isn’t a big deal. They made it not a big deal. Because they built all sorts of other limits into the game and then made the number of magical items subject to the whims of the dice.

You can only benefit from so many items. You can only wear one kind of armor. You can’t wear two pairs of gloves or seven cloaks. You can only take one action at a time, so you can’t use two wands or swing two magic swords at the same time. It’s hard to stack too many items thanks to those practical limits. And the stackable items – the ones that would break the game if stacked or shared – require attunement. They can only benefit one character at a time. And a given character can only have three such items at once.

Beyond that, while versatility and deep resource pockets are both advantages, they don’t really matter given the way D&D sets up its challenges. Attrition isn’t really meant to be a challenge. The players aren’t meant to face serious resource crunches. They always have the resources they need to pull a win out of their a$&es at the start of every encounter. The game is balanced that way. So, yeah, a wizard with seventeen wands can go through ten encounters without ever burning a spell slot, but, effectively, that doesn’t mean anything. The wizard can still only cast one spell a round. Doesn’t matter whether it comes out of a wand or out of his pineal gland.

Interestingly, even though consumables are viewed as less powerful items, they’re the ones that are most dangerous to overload the party with. Especially the ones that can be used before, after, or outside combat. A party that finds fifty suits of magical armor or fifty magical weapons is – all else being equal – less overpowered than a party that finds fifty potions of heroism or potions of invisibility. I’ll let you work through the math.

Point is that the absolute number of magical items the characters are carting around isn’t actually a big deal. The game won’t break if the party has 150 items instead of 100. Nor will it break if they only have 80. As long as the GM enforces the other restrictions and as long as the GM doesn’t let the party have items of rarities that are too high for their levels, everything will chug along just fine. That’s why the designers felt safe with random treasure tables. And why I’m fine with them too.

But that’s just a rehash of the “how many” and “how powerful” questions. What we really need to think about is “what items?”

Scratch-Off Lottery Tickets, Hand-Picked Gifts, and Gift Registries

It’s easy enough to decide how many magical items to hand your players and how powerful they should be. It’s easy to decide that, when the players fight The Awful Aboleths of Alliteration Atoll, they’ll find two common minor items, three uncommon minor items, one rare minor item, one uncommon… blah blah blah. But how do you decide which specific uncommon minor items they’ll find floating in the mucous covered tropical coves once they slaughter all the psycho-fishes?

Obviously, you can just use those random tables I keep harping on about. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But you can instead carefully hand-select each item. Which just raises the question of how you select the items. Some GMs pass that question onto their players. They ask their players what items they want to see. Or they take a page from the 4E core rulebooks and ask their players to prepare lists of desired items. Basically, gift registries. Other GMs use the gift registry approach without even knowing it. Either they hand-select only magical items they know will be optimal choices for the characters, or they let players freely buy or craft magical items with whatever treasure they find, which is essentially just giving the players gift cards and letting them pick their own presents.

At the core of the issue is one simple question – how important is it that every item the characters turn up be useful and desirable? The gift registry approach is based on the idea that no one should ever find a magical item they don’t want or won’t use. The random approach, on the other hand, is like giving the players scratch-off lottery tickets. They might hit the jackpot with a perfect item, they might get something useful, or they might get useless junk. The hand-picked approach might seem like the appropriate middle ground here, but it isn’t a middle ground per se. Depending on how the GM makes his choices, the GM might veer toward every item being a jackpot or he might sprinkle in a lot of losing tickets.

Of course, the average GM – and the average player – will tell you that the magical items the characters find should always be useful and desirable. What’s the value in a magical item the players don’t want or won’t use? Or can’t use? And that’s why you should never take advice from the average GM. They’re usually wrong and I’m usually right.

Above, I b%&$ed about the lack of ongoing customization in level advancement. And you might conclude, therefore, that I want the players to exercise as much choice as possible over their equipment advancement. Au contraire, mon casse couille. First, that’s a problem for level advancement. You can’t fix one problem by breaking some other system. Second, there’s actually a lot of customization in level advancement. It’s just all front-loaded. Characters are loaded with cool things to do. And whenever they level, they get more cool things to do. And those things are almost always useful and broadly applicable.

Building your character is gift registry advancement, pure and simple. When you pick your class, you’re picking a gift registry. At every level, you’ll receive something you definitely want. Something perfectly suited to you. There’s very little on those class advancement tables that aren’t perfectly suited to every member of that class. In short, D&D already has too many gift registries. It needs scratch-off tickets.

What equipment advancement can bring to the table is choices. Meaningful choices. Tough choices. Tradeoffs. Have you played Dead Cells? The rogue-lite action-platformer that is NOT NOW AND WILL NEVER BE a Metroidvania game. It’s pretty damned fun, despite NOT BEING A METROIDVANIA GAME. Check it out. It’s by the makers of… well… the makers of Dead Cells and a bunch of s$&% you’ve never heard of.

I didn’t smash my head and suddenly forget what I was talking about. I bring up Dead Cells because it illustrates the issue of choices and tradeoffs in item disbursement beautifully. Daryl Talks Games did a great video about some of what it does right in his Psych of Play series.

Rather than reiterate everything he said, though, I’ll illustrate the point with an example from one of my home games. The players were on their way to a ruined abbey they suspected was now the unliving space for a bevy of undead beasties. When they had the opportunity to acquire a mace of disruption, a couple of players seized on the chance. At a pretty high cost. They figured it’d be perfect for fighting the undead they’d encounter. Especially because I make liberal use of vulnerability and resistance mechanics. And because undead in the Angryverse are hard to finish off unless you finish them off the right way. But the mace could finish them off. Sometimes, it would kill them outright.

Except the party’s fighter wouldn’t use it. Seriously. The cleric and the warlock who bought it assumed the fighter would use it. But he didn’t want to. He was a polearm fighter. He had a neat feat to make him a better polearm fighter and he’d built his character around using polearms. So, he wouldn’t use the magical mace. Not even for one adventure. Not even some of the time. Because he always wanted to be using his polearm.

Ultimately, the cleric took the mace. And sometimes, she used it. Being a cleric though, she had spells that could circumvent the undeads’ various defenses. And she also spent her time casting support spells. So, she only used the mace when it was the best choice or when she got backed into melee combat. The party really didn’t get their money’s worth on that purchase. The fighter, meanwhile, was able to keep the undead on the ground prettily handily by overpowering them with damage. But he couldn’t finish them off reliably without help from the cleric.

This isn’t about whether the fighter made the best choice. Or the optimal choice. Or whatever. And it’s not about whether the fighter was being a team player or whether the party should have talked over their plans for the mace more before they bought it. My point is that the fact that the magical item was a mace completely changed their strategic game. If I had put a glaive of disruption in the game – or whatever – then the fighter would have had a wargasm and then used it to slay every undead in the abbey the same way he slew everything else in every prior fight. And the cleric would have just slung her spells and supported the party and the warlock would have cast eldritch blast and complained about the stupid-a$& spell slot mechanic for warlocks.

The mace changed the game. It wasn’t the perfect weapon for the fighter. So, the fighter had to decide whether the ability to finish off the undead and shut down their regeneration and stuff was worth not using a polearm. Whether it was worth not using the character options he’d invested in for a few sessions. Whether it was worth not being the polearm fighter. Whatever. And the cleric, meanwhile, had an extra option to consider whenever she was picking her strategy. But she was also stretched thin because she had to run around and finish off all the undead before they could get up again, which she could have done without the mace. No one else could reliably do it.

And that’s the power of not making sure absolutely every item is perfect for the party. Making sure some items are suboptimal. And some require some real thought and creativity to use effectively. It creates dilemmas. Conflicts. Choices. Another fighter player might have handled that choice completely differently. The choice wasn’t about math. It wasn’t about the character sheet. It was about what that specific player valued more.

I hate gift registry item distribution. It’s contrived as all hell and D&D players don’t need more ways to make their characters more improbably awesome bada$&es. I like watching the players struggle to choose between suboptimal options because that says something about their priorities. I like watching players find uses for weird, useless things. I like giving them weird magical hammers and watching them try to treat every problem like a nail that’s only vulnerable to magical attacks. To me, that’s what magical items SHOULD be about. That’s how finding items should feel.

That doesn’t mean every magical item should be randomly generated. It doesn’t mean completely useless items are totally fine and should be celebrated. I have to say this s$&% because lots of my readers seem to forget there’s a lot of middle ground between any two points and I rarely sit on any extreme. Case in point, useful is a broad spectrum. Any item a character CAN use CAN be useful. It doesn’t have to be optimal. A fighter might trade down to a lesser suit of armor to gain a cool feature or power. Or they might not. Everyone has a favorite weapon and some people invest a lot of advancement resources in their weapon of choice. But that doesn’t mean they won’t consider other weapons with useful abilities. And players will consider powerful, optimal weapons even if they carry weird curses and drawbacks. That doesn’t mean every item has to come with a tradeoff or invalidate a character feature. Sometimes it’s nice to find something that suits you perfectly just the way you are.

There’s also circumstantial utility to consider. That is, sometimes magical items are useful because they help the party overcome specific challenges in the adventure they’re currently adventuring in. In my module, there’s a specific semi-optional boss enemy that’s a tough challenge for a new group of players. But there’s a bunch of hidden items in the adventure – and hidden information – that make beating the boss easier. Finding those items is a sort of mini-goal the players can adopt.

What items you give out, that’s not a question that has just one answer. There’s no objective answer. And there’s no single, absolute rule. You can’t roll every item randomly. That’ll suck. But you can’t give every player exactly what they want every time. That’ll suck too. You need to strike a balance between the awesome, the useful, the useful-but-costly, and the weird thing that you really have to think to use. And the balance you strike speaks to your own priorities. How you think the game should be.

That’s what makes it a meaningful choice.

But let me add one more wrinkle.

The Magical Item Triad

To decide how to dole out magical items in D&D, you have to consider three questions. “How powerful” isn’t one of them, though. For balance purposes, as explained above, you want to keep the rarity of the items in line with the characters’ levels.

The three questions are “how many,” “how useful,” and “how difficult are they to get a hold of?” Compared to the average of 100 items over 20 levels, how many magical items do you want the players to find in your game? How tailor-made should those items be to the specific characters and their specific adventures? Do the players have to work hard to acquire the items in question? Do they have to hunt them down? Do they have to have to pay a lot for them? Gather lots of resources? Basically, how much s$&% do the players have to do ASIDE FROM overcoming the encounters they have to overcome to complete the objective.

If you make a game with lots of items that are absolutely always useful and where the items just pop out of every monster corpse, you’re going to break your game. If you make a game with very few magical items that are mostly junk that the players have to search every nook and cranny and waste a lot of extra time to find, you’re going to break your game.

Now, you can look at this as one of those “I can have two of the three” triads, but that ain’t the best way to look at. Instead, just think about how tightly constrained you want each answer to be. For example, suppose you want a lot of magical items and you don’t want to bother with a lot of optional content and side challenges. You just want the players to find a lot of items as they do their thing. That’s fine, but the usefulness of any given item they find should be a crapshoot. Sometimes, they should find the best item ever. Other times, they should find vendor trash.

Or suppose you want lots and lots of really useful items in your adventures. Well, you’d better hide that s$&% like an Easter bunny on meth and leave it up to the players – and random chance – to decide what they find and what they don’t.

See what I mean?

And now that you have the context, I can tell you how I do things.

How I Hide Magical Items in the Angryverse

First, understand that I want to contrast equipment advancement with level advancement. Level advancement is always useful, it’s reliable, it’s a sure thing. Equipment advancement is not. When you’re digging through the rubble of millennia-old civilizations searching for the castoff artifacts that have survived the ravages of time and those said artifacts are powered by the chaotic force that warps or even unmakes reality, you SHOULD feel like you’re playing a f$&%ing lottery.

Second, understand that I’ve built a bunch of standard templates I use to tell me how much stuff fits in any given adventure based on how many sessions I want to fill. All roughly based on the math in the core rules. So, when I sit down to write an adventure, I know roughly how many minor and major and climatic encounters I have to work with and how many minor and major objectives I can impose and I know how much XP the party is going to earn handling all that s$&%. And I also know how many magical items the party should find.

Except none of that s$&% is guaranteed. I build a lot of optional content in my adventures. Missable side-quests, missable paths, even mutually exclusive paths where doing one thing makes another thing impossible. And the more optional something is, the more unbalanced I’m willing to make it. I will hide an overpowered, hand-selected magical item behind a monster that’s too powerful for a party to just beat to death with pointy sticks. If they can find a way to deal with the monster, they can have an overpowered toy.

As far as I’m concerned, D&D is about exploring and making choices. Which means that’s how it’s got to be. Everything’s got to be optional. Well, almost everything. So the difficulty to acquire magical items is reasonably unconstrained. Some s$&%, I hide so well I know it’ll never get found. Sometimes, players surprise me by finding it. Often they don’t. Other s$&% just pops out of boss monsters. Or it’s just sitting unguarded in some decaying foyer somewhere.

I’m also firmly – and hopefully obviously – of the opinion that magical items should be an unreliable way to advance. So the utility of any given item is also a crapshoot. Given that both the difficulty of acquiring items and utility of those items are pretty unconstrained, I have to balance those factors out by giving the players lots of opportunities to acquire items.

What that means is I probably plant twice as many items in my world as the DMG wants me to. I have a big pool of items to scatter around my adventures. I still follow the rarity requirements – mostly – and respect the 80/20 minor/major split, but I don’t actually do the math. I just eyeball it. As to what items I place? Well, I generally start by reserving an item – maybe two, depending on the length of the adventure – for a specific character. Something I know will be useful to them. Not necessarily optimal, mind you, but definitely useful. Then, I’ll usually reserve an item or two – or sometimes more – that’ll help with some specific situation in the adventure to hide along optional side-paths.

Once I’ve reserved those few useful items, I generate the rest randomly. If the random tables spit out something that wouldn’t make any sense in the adventure I’m writing – like scrolls in a network of volcanic tunnels – I’ll either reroll or purposely swap the item out for something that looks fun on the same table. Likewise, if I generate something I know that the party absolutely won’t or can’t make any use of – like a rod of the pact keeper for a party with no warlock – I’ll again reroll or swap it out. And every so often, I’ll spot an item on a list before I roll and be like, “oh, yeah, the party definitely needs an immovable rod. Wonder what the hell they’ll do with it.”

Now, apart from all of that, I also let my players buy and sell magical items. This plays into some optional rules I wrote for between adventure activities, but the gist of it is that the party can find a buyer for any magical item in any town or city. The buyer will buy the item for its cost less a randomly generated discount. The party can also commission specific magical items in towns and cities, but they have to pay the item’s cost plus a randomly generated premium. Finally, the party can shop around and see if anyone in a town or city is currently trying to offload any magical items. There’s no magical item shops in the AngryVerse. Just people occasionally trying to buy or sell items. At any given moment, there’s a list of randomly generated items available for sale in any town or city at a reasonably fair price compared to the price of the item.

And if you’ve been paying attention, you can figure out how those rules lean right into everything else I think about magical items.

For homework, see if you can figure out why almost every magical item I place in a one-shot adventure is a useful item and why I almost never use random generation for one-shots. Hint: use that triad thingy.

Anyway, Red Salad, that’s how I do things. Thanks for your question.