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?

 

[GrimCo]

Depending on the setting and theme, i range between "no magic items at all" to "everything can be bought for the right price" to "Magic Walmart". Legendary items are only ones that can't be bought and are hard to sell in all scenarios. Those are piece unique.

I'm ok with characters creating their magic items. Allowed it even back in 3.5 with no xp cost since we dropped use of xp for leveling way back in early 2010s.

Both of my current dms are very cool with creating interesting magic items. My main character in our 10y long epic campaign ( fighter 2/wizard 10) has proto light saber and inteligent shield gauntlets.

 

[Starfox]

In my version of Greyhawk I created an organization called the Blue Brothers. This started as a religious organization serving Boccob, the god of magic, who very much works to profligate magic in the world. Over time, this network has become less religious, tough they still honor Boccob.

This is now a network of traders in magic items, that use imps and lantern archons - they work hard to remain neutral, but there are no chaotic alternatives. These outsiders can teleport items from any agent to any other agent of the network. They can also send orders throughout the network. As long as the item exists anywhere in the network and weighs no more than 25 lbs, any trader can sell it.

The network has never become important enough to map it out, but it makes sense that they would have members that specialize in acquisition, selling, or securely storing items.

Edit: My version of the World of Greyhawk is in the equivalent of the renascence and moving into the baroque period, so society is rather more advanced than in a medieval world.

 

[FrozenNorth]

This is why comparing magic item shops to jewelry stores or banks doesn't really work for me. A magic item shop, at least one of the sort that PCs would want to use, isn't just a collection of extremely expensive things, it's a collection of extremely expensive things used for fighting, and we generally call that a military base. If there are 50 magic swords lying around town, 45 of them have probably found their way into the hands of the local baron, who has given them to 45 of his best men. And a large part of how he stays the local baron is probably having 45 trained warriors with magic swords. Anyone you can buy significant magic items from (where "significant" varies depending on where you are) almost has to be one of the most powerful and dangerous figures around. Sure, you can try to steal from them. But if you slip up you'll have a target on your back for the rest of your life.

Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

*Yes, it is impossible in a fantasy adventure that there a multiple armed interests with differing agendas, and therefore, that there would be a market for magical weapons.

It is impossible that the setting’s backstory contains a fallen empire that relied on magical weapons whose ruins are being discovered now, leading to a glut of old magical weapons available.

It is impossible that the creators of magical weapons have access to other magic, that allows a single store to have storefronts in multiple locations, thus allowing them to profitably stock a large selection of magic items.

It is impossible that the creators of magical weaponry worship a god of battle and therefore the sale of magical weapons is an act of devotion, along with ensuring there is always demand for her wares.

I don’t have a problem with verisimilitude, but too often it is an excuse for a lack of imagination.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Depends on the group. Some people want to get it out of the way ASAP. Other people just love fantasy shopping and meeting the quirky NPC merchants. No answer is universally right, so it's up to the DM to feel out their players and decide what's right for their table.

I wouldn’t include merchants selling magical items in the same category as the merchant selling mundane adventuring gear. The magical item merchant is a veritable adventure hook generator: from requiring ingredients to craft, to hunting down thieves, to recovering a magical item from a ruin.

 

[Stormonu]

In my version of Greyhawk I created an organization called the Blue Brothers. This started as a religious organization serving Boccob, the god of magic, who very much works to profligate magic in the world. Over time, this network has become less religious, tough they still honor Boccob.

This is now a network of traders in magic items, that use imps and lantern archons - they work hard to remain neutral, but there are no chaotic alternatives. These outsiders can teleport items from any agent to any other agent of the network. They can also send orders throughout the network. As long as the item exists anywhere in the network and weighs no more than 25 lbs, any trader can sell it.

The network has never become important enough to map it out, but it makes sense that they would have members that specialize in acquisition, selling, or securely storing items.

Edit: My version of the World of Greyhawk is in the equivalent of the renascence and moving into the baroque period, so society is rather more advanced than in a medieval world.

You missed an "S" in the first name . After all, aren't they on a mission from God?

On a semi-serious note, any chance they have patronage from Tenser? He's strongly associated with the color blue, is a powerful wizard and for a while did suffer a fate of having been a lemure (after having been betrayed and slain by Rary) until he was rescued from that fate, so he might have some connections among the imps.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah, that's one of the problems with banning magic item stores, especially if you also insist on handing out randomly generated treasure: the party is inevitably going to accumulate a pile of magic items they've outgrown and/or have no use for -- which contributes to magic items feeling boring. There's no sensawunda in finding a +1 glaive-guisarme that you're never going to do anything with, other than maybe turn it into a hat rack. And that was happening long before 3E.

The other problem is one you often see in 5E: players accumulating massive wealth and having nothing to spend it on. Not everyone is going to want to buy a castle or hire an army.

I don't use magic stores myself, but I also do tailor magic item finds to what the players need, and I give them opportunities to level up their items as they play so there are no forgotten +1 swords hanging around uselessly at the bottom of their inventory. And I don't bother tracking monetary treasure.

Many versions of D&D have fixes for the Redundant Magic Item and How to Spend Gold problems. Older editions and similar OSR for one, 5e games like Level Up for another. These problems are solvable. WotC has simply chosen not to solve them in recent editions.

 

[Celebrim]

*Yes, it is impossible in a fantasy adventure that there a multiple armed interests with differing agendas, and therefore, that there would be a market for magical weapons.

But each of these interests would want to monopolize access to magical weapons as much as possible. In the real world, it's rare for a supplier to be selling weapons to both sides of the conflict, and generally when they are they have to hide this fact from the buyers. That's why for example most conflicts involve NATO weapons on one side and Warsaw pact weapons on the other. If you see both sides with the same weapons, it suggests the collapse of some former political structure and something like a civil war.

You see, it's not enough to create the conditions for a market in magical weapons. You have to create the conditions where their is an open market in magical weapons. If you want a big box store for magical items, this requires magical items to be seen as trivial and inexpensive - something available to the common man.

It is impossible that the setting’s backstory contains a fallen empire that relied on magical weapons whose ruins are being discovered now, leading to a glut of old magical weapons available.

I think this actually would do the reverse. If you influx a market with a bunch of items that are essentially irreplicable and cannot be commoditized because their own source is some lost technology of the past that is difficult or impossible to replicate today, then those items don't end up in big box stores. You end up with nations fighting wars over access to those things because they are functionally priceless and whomever can control them has enormous advantages over anyone else. In my campaign world, intelligent swords are this category of item - only one empire in the past knew how to make them and they are the ultimate prestige item. Now many if these things were so common farmers were all the time plowing them up in their fields, you might end up with a big box store sort of market but then you couldn't explain why these things were expensive. Magic mart's problem is that it implies the good is inexpensive, abundant, and trivial - attributes we don't normally ascribe to magic items much less magic items from a long-lost civilization.

It is impossible that the creators of magical weapons have access to other magic, that allows a single store to have storefronts in multiple locations, thus allowing them to profitably stock a large selection of magic items.

It's not impossible - see "Howl's Moving Castle" as an example. But, if you have a single store that defies spatial arrangement and connects multiple distance locations, then the fact that it lets you run a magic mart is one of the smaller impacts on the game world. If you basically have teleportation networks, then maybe you don't have caravans or ocean going vessels, and nations are terrified of having armies marching straight into their city through a store front or whatever. If you have magic of that profound of an impact used for mere trade, then the society you are describing becomes really hard to relate to and requires a ton of special knowledge to understand and additionally loses some archetypal aspects.

And if you try to avoid that by having this shop be the only thing that has that technology, then the magic shop keeper faction is the most powerful faction in the world.

It is impossible that the creators of magical weaponry worship a god of battle and therefore the sale of magical weapons is an act of devotion, along with ensuring there is always demand for her wares.

It's not impossible but it is weird. There are two things going on here. First, people in a polytheistic culture normally worship deities for the advantages that they believe the worship will give them. You don't normally want to worship someone that might help your enemies. The Spartan main patron god was Apollo, but they did have a temple to Ares. And if you went into that temple, you would have found the idol of Ares in chains and affixed to its pedestal to symbolically prevent Ares from leaving to help their enemies. That's a form of anti-reverence, and I suspect a deity that wanted to arm everyone alike would receive not support but the same sort of treatment. Secondly, unlike mortal rulers deities in D&D aren't hypocrites, but actually representatives of the ideology that they aspire to. You've got a deity here that is both a god of war and a god of trade, making these magic marts to assure everyone is well armed. What you functionally have here isn't the god of battle but the god of arms dealing, and it's a Lawful Neutral god of arms dealing that believes in fairness and detente more than it believes in war. This isn't a god like the wild half mindless Ares. This is a deity that believes "A well-armed society is a polite society" or "The best way to ensure peace is through strength." or something of that sort.

It is a cool deity concept, but it doesn't solve the problem. This deity still has to be able to flood the setting with enough magic items that they are trivial and inexpensive before selling them in big box stores makes sense. It's not enough to believe in a megamart for swords. You have to justify a megamart for magic swords.

 

[Stormonu]

@Celebrim, I think @FrozenNorth was being sarcastic.

 

[LordEntrails]

I too don't like or use magimarts. But I think your reasoning is significantly flawed and premised based only upon your table and not a broader thought for the genre. In particular:

(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.)

There are lots of tables that have no problem with other distribution systems. To me it seems to me to be dependent upon the maturity and nature of the players.

Excuses for magic-selling stores need to be even wilder than that!

And...? You provide very flawed reasoning to support this. Take a setting like Eberron, Magic Selling stores are not a big problem there. (see * below)

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!

Because you know, security? If you are able to collect millions of GP worth of magic items, surely your not just going to secure your store with a pair of CR1 guards are you? No, the defenses of such an establishment need to be proportionate to the wealth contained within. Besides, these places would have access to the best/most powerful of magics, and so should easily be protected by such.

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?

They don't need to be powerful, they just need to be able to be rich enough to hire others. Besides, even in today's world there are plenty of examples of wealthy or powerful people who hire others to do the mundane and/or dangerous on their behalf. Not everyone has the same desires in life, and adventurers and those willing to adventure are small part of the population.

* Finally, you fail to address the scale or worth of the magic items available for sale. The impacts to design, adventure and realism points are vastly different if a magimart sells common potions and scrolls of cantrips versus one that sells a collection with items like a staff of power, robes of the archmage, and armor of invulnerability.

 

[Celebrim]

@Celebrim, I think @FrozenNorth was being sarcastic.

Ah... I have no sarcasm detector. Is that why all the text was bolded? Sarcasm font?