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?

 

[Stormonu]

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

I don't know about the bold, but I think the above statement was meant to be the indicator that it was sarcasm.

I do think the examples you gave are excellent for showing exactly each point was viable for those who might sweep aside or not grock how it could be implemented/reasoned.

 

[FrozenNorth]

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.

So explain how modern countries purchasing large quantities of weapons is in any way similar to the average fantasy adventure campaign. The comparison doesn’t make sense.

If you have noble houses, each house has a house guard that it is required to equip. No single house (or feudal baron) is likely to have enough money to purchase all magical weapons and items with a military application. And if they try, the creator is going to jack their prices higher. And use the profits to create more magical weapons.

As for selling to both sides, of course they will. It happens now, it happened then, because it’s human nature.

The point stands. You are looking for reasons why it wouldn’t work, when there are just as many why it would.

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.

No it doesn’t. A high level mage (or even several high level mages) having access to it doesn’t mean society as a whole has access to it. Again, you are making a bunch of ungrounded assumptions for why it doesn’t work.

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.

A high level mage able to do this would definitely be powerful, but you are wrong that they would be the most powerful faction in the world. For one thing, other high level mages exist. So do clever mundanes with a large number of resources.

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.

Counterpoint. Bane, Asmodeus, Gorum (in Pathfinder), Tempus, Gruumsh.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I don't know about the bold, but I think the above statement was meant to be the indicator that it was sarcasm.

I do think the examples you gave are excellent for showing exactly each point was viable for those who might sweep aside or not grock how it could be implemented/reasoned.

The bold was because I cut and pasted the Romeo and Juliet quote, and the rest of the post was stuck in bold.

I don’t think a magic store offering a wide range of magical weapons and items works in all cases, but I do take issue with a post that argues they are impossible because the local baron would buy up the entire stock.

 

[Celebrim]

So explain how modern countries purchasing large quantities of weapons is in any way similar to the average fantasy adventure campaign. The comparison doesn’t make sense.

Sure it does. The market for magic items doesn't mimic the real-world market for "weapons". It resembles in some ways the real-world market for jet fighters or tanks. You don't expect open markets in jet fighters. Those are specialized highly restrictive markets with a limited number of buyers and sellers.

There are no ungrounded assumptions in assuming magic items in D&D are relatively rare, relatively expensive, relatively difficult to produce. That isn't an assumption. That's the default state of magic items. The relative scarcity of magic items is a function I think of how relatively rare PC type individuals are and how stingy their production of such items would be if they were making their own.

If you want to move to a magic mart concept and have it make sense you have to break the assumption that magic items are rare, expensive and difficult to produce. Eberron for example attempts to break this paradigm by adding to the typical D&D setting some magic crafting options and factions, but then the way that it changes society isn't just superficial D&D but also with magic marts.

No it doesn’t. A high level mage (or even several high level mages) having access to it doesn’t mean society as a whole has access to it.

Capability to produce and access are very different things. A place of business provides access. You might not be able to make the business yourself, but you gain access. Society is going to see this and realize, "This is a thing. Magic Mart has thousands of employees sharing a central store with entrance and egress around the world." And then the whole world is going to be like, "If magic items can be sold this way, why not other stuff? The economic and military implications are profound!" And then if there are any other high level mages in the world or if the mage of magic mart inc is ambitious, the world changes. What was first offered to simplify trade in magic items gets offered as access to allow armies to move between border forts so that if you attack one, you've attached them all. It lets you have a gate in each city that is a gate to each other major city in your trade network so that trade between cities takes minutes or hours instead of days or weeks.

A high level mage able to do this would definitely be powerful, but you are wrong that they would be the most powerful faction in the world. For one thing, other high level mages exist. So do clever mundanes with a large number of resources.

See the problem with your argument is that it isn't consistent. Up above you say access would be limited based on the unavailability of high-level mages. But now you say that they don't dominate the world because of the economic and military advantage that they provide because they are numerous. My argument is based on a consistent paradigm, that magic items are rare, expensive, valuable and (above the level of low level potions or scrolls) not commodities because magic tends to have restrictions on its production that mere technology does not.

Counterpoint. Bane, Asmodeus, Gorum (in Pathfinder), Tempus, Gruumsh.

I don't understand the counterpoint here. The deities you list don't engage in the behavior you describe and aren't congruent to the "god of arms dealers" you postulate. And that's not even getting into the valid complaints that Green Ronin's "The Book of the Righteous" makes against the typical D&D pantheon, of which Forgotten Realms might really be the worst offender.

But whether or not such deity could exist misses the main point, which is whether or not the presence of such deity in and of itself makes magic items so inexpensive and trivial that it makes economic sense to have warehouses of them sitting around awaiting purchase. The post-industrial revolution commoditization of all products is a feature of the post-industrial revolution society and technology. If it doesn't apply to magic items, then the secondary features of that like magic marts shouldn't apply either. But if it did, then you'd expect something closer to Eberron with pervasive magic as technology, and not magic as rare numinous esoteric objects of the sort you find in dungeons in D&D.

 

[Alzrius]

And that's not even getting into the valid complaints that Green Ronin's "The Book of the Righteous" makes against the typical D&D pantheon, of which Forgotten Realms might really be the worst offender.

It's been a very long time since I've read the Book of the Righteous; what complaints does it make?

 

[Staffan]

It's been a very long time since I've read the Book of the Righteous; what complaints does it make?

Been a while, but as I recall: the lack of coherent mythology. If you look at real-world mythology, particularly the Greek and Norse mythos we in the West are most familiar with, they tend to be familial and, when not, at least share other bonds. But the FR pantheon (and many other D&D pantheons) feel a lot like someone decided they needed a god of X, a god of Y, and a god of Z, and then told different people to write them up. With the Realms, at least you have the explanation that it has, to a large degree, been populated via migrations from other worlds and those folks brought their own gods and the FR pantheon is the resulting mish-mash.

I think there are some other complaints as well, but they mostly follow from that.

 

[James Gasik]

There's also a lot of syncretism in the Realms, where this god might actually be known as some other god by a different culture (Sune Firehair is also Hanali Celanil, don't tell Hanali worshipers on other worlds!) or start hopping pantheons (Bast, in becoming Sharess by way of absorbing Zandilar the Dancer) or even one god just offing another god and pretending to be them for awhile in order to claim their worshipers (Cyric being a repeat offender).

Also completely new gods can appear, like how Ra was "killed", pushing him out of the plane, but Horus claimed his mantle, becoming Horus-Re (another fusion dance, but this sort of thing happens all the time in Egyptian mythology).

And then there's the endless rabbit hole of Angharradh, a triple goddess made up of three distinct elven goddesses (two of whom may or may not be elven deities at all!).

 

[Celebrim]

It's been a very long time since I've read the Book of the Righteous; what complaints does it make?

The one I found most pertinent was its complaints that so many typical D&D pantheons have gods and cults of baby and puppy killing that seem to meet no real needs a community would have and serve solely as sources of villains for the PC's to fight.

My big complaint against most D&D inspired pantheons are when they have "gods of the class" like "the god of rangers", the "god of paladins", the "god of fighters", the "god of magic-users", the "god of thieves", the "god of assassins", and often the "god of clerics" (a generic good god of healing and undead slaying) followed by a long laundry lists of "the gods of bad guys".

 

[Celebrim]

There's also a lot of syncretism in the Realms...

And by a lot you mean the entire pantheon is combed from the 1e AD&D Deities & Demigods with the labels scratched off and new names provided. Almost the only originality in it is its list of villain deities to provide for stock villain cultists.

 

[James Gasik]

And by a lot you mean the entire pantheon is combed from the 1e AD&D Deities & Demigods with the labels scratched off and new names provided. Almost the only originality in it is its list of villain deities to provide for stock villain cultists.

Well yeah, with Finnish deities rubbing shoulders with a reskinned Issek of the Jug. I was approaching how it's a mess in universe as opposed to out of universe.