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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Intense_Interest" data-source="post: 4221066" data-attributes="member: 65904">Merchants survive because 90% of the time their goods in no way are worth stealing by any super-powerful and/or organized group.Merchants are usually shipping in Commodities or Products.  Wheat for Iron Work, for example, or Cotton for Cloth.Assuming that the Teleportation Ritual is limited in some way by weight or size AND has a flat fee for a use, most high-value low-weight items like Art, Gems, and Magic Items would be shipped via these means and would push out any of the bulk profit Commodities.  50lbs of diamonds is worth more than 50lb of grain.Therefore for most merchants, they will never really have the magic items that would be worth stealing for a level 15 Dragon to add to his hoard, especially if there is a chance that a group of level 15 PCs might be in the caravan.So for these merchants, magic items are a side-business at best.  If Stupid Peasant #5 finds the Lost Sword of Sable the Strong in a field somewhere, you could buy it for what would be to him a tremendous cost (enough to buy better house and more land) but would only be not only 1% of what the actual worth is.  Its likely that no one would know that he is shipping it so it is worth the risk of investment.Now when you add PCs with their sale of magic items, why should he give even a realistic price for that sword?  He already got an Artifact-level item for a pittance, why would he purchase at market price something like a +3 Poison dagger?  The major question isn't why Merchants survive.  Its why they have items for sale in the wilderness for the PCs in question.  A merchant would probably want to bring the items to a city where he could get a better price for it on average because of more demand, so if you want to end-around the competition you have to pay a major markup for it.Now if they want a specific item, they will probably have to go to a city where items could be teleported back and forth, and then they would still pay a major markup because of the increased demand.</blockquote>

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