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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ilbranteloth" data-source="post: 7187870" data-attributes="member: 6778044">Looking at the AD&D treasure tables themselves, every treasure type except the individual ones (J-R) had a chance for magic items, usually multiple. The chance was often as low as 10% per monster, but that meant over the course of an adventure you'd still find quite a bit. Even looking at orcs, a lair has C, O, and Q (x10) or a 10% chance of any 2 magic items, and a 40% chance of 2-8 potions.Troglodytes (no. appearing 10-100) have a treasure type A, or a 30% chance of any 3 items in their lair. We went through a lot of orcs, troglodytes, and other low level monsters, and had a lot of chances to roll magic items as a result.But then Gygax also commented in the MM that random determination of a treasure guarded by a monster in a dungeon should not be used. In other words, the DM should determine what's there, and the only real guideline there is to look at what Gary placed in his published adventures.If I recall, The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth had 80+ magic items as treasure, including one of each of the manuals. That's just one of the published adventures from the 1e era. I seem to recall the manuals showing up in another adventure, and each time it included one of each. Maybe it was an adventure in Dungeon magazine. Granted the magic items generally included a share of potions and scrolls, along with items that are of limited use or use by only certain classes. So much of the items might have been sold rather than retained by the PCs. But most of them were useful items that would be used by the PCs. It wasn't uncommon for a powerful item, Zagyg's Lanthorn, Black Razor, Whelm, etc. to be part of the adventure too in the earlier adventures. The tournament versions of many of them held considerably less, but this was also before the time of players using the same character across organized play.This was also a time where the magic items tended to sit in the listed treasure, rather than be used intelligently by the creatures guarding them. So I think that for OD&D/AD&D there was a wide variation between different campaigns as to the amount of magic items handed out.</blockquote>

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