Does your setting have Magic Shops

[Arkhandus]

Depends on which campaign I'm running.

Rokugan/OA: No magic shops, but there are a few adepts and other spellcasters around who sell minor magic items or who accept commissions for magic item creation. Magical treasure is generally acquired from defeated enemies or as rewards from the character's lord (generally chosen by the lord, rather than allowing the PCs to choose whatever they like).

The 13 Kingdoms: Magic shops relatively rare but not too hard to find in big cities of any significantly-civilized region. Mage guilds more common, and likely to craft magic items for commission. Magic items found as treasure as often as normal.

Rhunaria homebrew: Only magic shops are in gnomish lands and dark elven lands, where they're fairly uncommon, otherwise magic items are received as treasure or commissioned from local spellcasters, mage guilds, and certain temples.

Aurelia homebrew: Magic shops are as common as other exotic goods/curio shops, and some temples raise money by offering magic items of their priests' creation to anyone pious and worthy who makes large donations. Magic items also found as treasure. Psionic item shops also around but less common due to the nature of psionic pursuits being generally less materialistic and more ascetic. Psionic items also found as treasure.

Azeria homebrew: Same situation as in Aurelia. Psionic items slightly less common than in Aurelia, but more likely to be available for commission from individual psionicists.

 

[paradox42]

I voted "both," but in fact I do it the way frank does it- PCs in my game depend heavily on social skills (Gather Information and Diplomacy in particular) to find and acquire any desired items. There are never shops, per se, for anything except minor items such as potions and scrolls, though sometimes such a shop will have a random small selection of other items for sale. There are also occasional "theme" shops which sell more, but those are in and of themselves quite rare.

As an example of the latter, there's a shop PCs found in Union (and have since been to several times) called "Stokel's Stones" that sells crystal items, both psionic and not. Very rarely do they have magic items, and when they do they're only things like Gems of Seeing or Staves of Earth and Stone, but most of the stock is mundane crystal art objects and psionic powerstones. They also carry dorjes sometimes and other crystalline psionic items more frequently than any kind of magic, but it's always random on any given visit. And stones for powers that would be popular- often, but not always, matching the powers my players want to get stones for in the first place- tend to sell out fast and are therefore not often present, or priced much higher than market value (and frequently both). Examples of the latter type include high-level information-gathering powers like Hypercognition (a perrennial favorite) and Metafaculty, or travel powers like Gate.

Generally, my players know that to find any specific item in any city, no matter how large, they'll have to do some legwork Gathering Information to find one for sale- and as with the stones I mentioned above, popular items or ones considered especially valuable will often be marked up from market value for the start of negotiations if they're for sale at all. "+5 books" , for instance, are especially hard to come by, though not impossible most of the time. Custom items, or weapons/armor with a specific set of special abilities, are almost never for sale in any case, and typically must be custom-crafted by a PC or somebody known to them. This comes back to bite them less often now at Epic levels than it did earlier, because by now they've had time to acquire most of the abilities they'd want anyway, but even so the party's item crafter character (who has specialized his character in it even from the lowest levels- deliberately aiming himself at a homebrew prestige class I made for it) has a full plate of stuff he wants or needs to make, and never seems to find the time to actually do it.

All in all, it seems to work.

 

[Victim]

Eberron. Most adventuring wonderous items are going to be commisioned; usually only low level potions, scrolls, and wands would be stocked since those aren't going to be big targets for heists and they're more ubiquitous - cure potions and wands are probably the main sellers. Magic item sellers are licensed by DM houses (usually Cannith) so buyers can be confident that they aren't getting scammed. And the sellers get some coverage from the big houses.

Now that one of the PCs is a artificer, I'm more concerned about selling magic, rather than buying it.

 

[Azalnubizar]

very interesting topic - I have had several discussions with my players regarding this...

...I believe no spellcaster would actually spend XP on items for the sole reason of making profit.
Therefore you wouldn't probably find spellcasters working for commission. There might be spellcasters that would do it - but then for other payment than gold, I believe...

on the other hand - I do play FR, mainly, and if you look into the character descriptions there are simply too many magic items around so this would definitly justify a "magic shop".
Any sort of item worth it (and magic items certainly are) would find some kind of market. And as long as it is not prohibited by law (which in case of FR isn't the case) there would be dealers and probably shops in every major city.
About the risks of a magic shop... well, I believe that, since the amount of money which can probably be made by dealing in magic items, is quite high, the cost proper security can be well paid and therefore this is no reason for not dealing in it. If the risk would still be too high, the dealers would simply raise the security and therefore raise the prices...

...last, but not least, there r a few questions that need to be answered before trying to solve the issue:

1) If there r no shops selling and/or buying magic items in a campaign with as much magic as FR... where do all the magic items go, once the holder doesn't "need" them any more?
2) Since every creation of a magic item costs you XP - how do magic users working for commission get along? Do you study your whole live just to spend all your magical might on a few magic items that you sell and become rich? And then start it all over again?

in my campaigns I usually have some kind of "magic shops"... magical weapons/armor can be purchased and resold in smithies in major cities (if those have enough cash). Other magical material is either sold and bought at some "curiosities"-shops or at mages-guilds, which naturally often fit this role quite easily...

I would love to have some kind of system for my campaign to work with and not allways have to come up with something on my own, never knowing if this is too hard on my players or if I'm being too good and therefore unbalancing the game... but I haven't found any kind of proper resource for this, yet. The only mentioning of this for FR I found in Magic of Faerun which was a little disappointing, but enough to at least give a hint / a direction...

about the power of items sold - normally I rule, that the max value of these items for sale are around 10,000 gp. Everything above is for one thing too rare, too risky & to dangerous to be sold openly. Items above those limits can easily threaten security of an area or tip the power balance of a region and therefore local rulers normally intervene to make sure items of this power are going to be placed into the right hands if there every would be something like this for sale (which rarely is, since most find these items very usefull themselves).

just my 2 cents

 

[happyelf]

Only very minor items are ever 'for sale' in say, a market. Anything more than that is a jealously guarded commodity, although I tend to have magic items in my campaign in two categories- minor trinkets, and quite powerful, distinctive items.

 

[Kormydigar]

Just like the title says. Can your PC's walk into an appropriate sized town and go shopping?

It depends on the campaign. For the most part only potions, scrolls, and some wands are "in stock" in a magic shop. It seems contrary to the basic rules of the game that a caster would want to sell powerful items. A caster that creates items is also an adventurer that must earn XP. Why would an adventurer sell items that cost XP? It would be more profitable to go out and get loot while EARNING XP than sitting around spending it.

I am in the process of designing an artificer class that actually earns XP for creating items. This class will not be able to multiclass or gain xp from any activity other than crafting items. I am working on revamping the item creation rules for my campaign, making most of them unavailable to adventurers and turning them into class features for the artificer. Magic shops will then make a little more sense to me as they will be run by those that actually gain skill and knowledge as well as gold for practicing thier trade just as adventurers do.

 

[Blue]

Alchemists can be found in any good sized city, and often temples also sell potions and scrolls. Some places have wizards willing to take a commission, but your average city will have 1-2 types of items, plus wizard scribe scrolls (since all get it), and you may well often need to hire spell caster type X to work with item crafter T who doesn't have the right spells (or spell type ) to make an item.

The closest they got to "buy what you want" was spending several weeks in the dwarven capital (at ~12th level) with the blessing of one of te dwarven chursches and several characters with good gather information, and even there it was a 6000gp limit before additional rolls to find someone selling it could be found.

Oh yes, in one city there was an auction of magic items - fairly rare even, and only certain items were for sale, but the values could be very high. The PCs auctioned a couple of items off, and purchased others.

Cheers,
=Blue

 

[Henry]

When I'm playing in Eberron, yes, there are both commissioners, and magic shops, especially in the city of Sharn. Also all of the Capital cities, some with larger GP value limits than others, some state-controlled by law to limit access.

When in FR, Waterdeep, Suzail, and a number of other large cities have such shops.

If I'm playing in a campaign with lower magical availability, the only thing available are some potions and scrolls.

 

[Psion]

There are no magic "general stores" (much less Amazons or Ebays) where you can find anything in the book.

You want something specific, you have to find someone who can make it (magic items have prereqs, y'know) and offer them a price that will convince them to make it. Then you have to pony up the dough and wait for it. At high levels, some objects take a long time.

There are brokers, collectors, and alchemists, but availability is a crap shoot. It's more like buying handcrafted items than anything assembly line manufactured. When my players look for magic items, I randomly roll what's available with TreasureGen.

When trying to visualize availability, it's a bit more like a yard sale than a WalMart.

 

[MonkeyDragon]

I have magic shops, and they're large and just about anything can be bought there. Players can walk in and buy anything from the DMG without usually even roleplaying it out. Items not in the DMG are subject to approval and usually cost +10%.

I think that everyone's qualms about having shops make perfect sense. However, I really don't want to spend the effort creating alternative means to get the items when I could be making more adventures, and my players would rather be adventuring than spending a whole session roleplaying to get every bit of equipment thy want.

That's not to say I might not choose sometime to have an adventure revolve around getting a particular magic item, or a mystery surrounding the magic shops, but in general, shopping is an errand, not an adventure for my players.