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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 4588763" data-attributes="member: 32536">In my (perhaps relatively limited) experience of playing D&D, the most "wondrous" item I ever acquired was something I bought in a shop. A magical shop. It had an enigmatic gnome(?) owner who manipulated his inventory with his own magic, vanished after I left it, and was generally unusually mysterious for what was, essentially, a book store. Said "wondrous" item was a mundane book, which happened to be nothing more than a fairly detailed encyclopedia of demonology (I was playing a warlock, so this actually become one of my character's most valued possessions).There is nothing inherent to a set of stats in a game supplement that can possibly instill a "sense of wonder", create a mystery, or make something feel "magical". Either the DM does it, the players do it, or it doesn't happen. A magic shop can either be a boring "Magic Wal-Mart" or it can be the enigmatic shop in the corner of the market owned by a shriveled and cloaked figure who tries to con the players into buying a cursed monkey's paw, and it is entirely up to the DM. Either way, the raw existence of a magic shop doesn't change the "magic" of the magic items at all, for good or ill.Honestly, I have seen one player place a great deal of importance upon the single gold coin he happened to have left after spending his initial character creation funds, turning that one, ridiculously common and mundane thing into a fairly important part of his character and the campaign (short-lived as it was). If that can happen in a 4E campaign, then it is possible to make anything wondrous and exciting, but it needs to be done by the people playing the game, not rules or fluff in a book.</blockquote>

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