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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SpiralBound" data-source="post: 6369959" data-attributes="member: 8396">As someone else said, you're the GM, what is within your dungeons is up to you.  If you're looking for ideas, guidelines, or some such thing to customize your loot and make it stand out, then I would recommend you consider what your mini-dungeon is first.If your mini-dungeon (as an off the cuff example) is the 7 chamber burial tomb of an ancient Dwarven Clan Elder who was buried with his wife and several high ranking members of his household, then you might expect to see a lot of Dwarven items! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />  Seriously though, who was the guy?  What makes him different from every other dead Dwarf?  Perhaps he was a famous defender of his clan against giant attacks and he was renown for his pious nature and his close affiliations to the church of a specific Dwarven god in your campaign.  Maybe his wife was a great healer?  This is a rather simplistic and stereotyped scenario I know, but it is only to illustrate my point so bear with me.So we have Olaff Sniggurson, Clan Elder of Clan Brommingard, a once large and famous warrior clan who is now nearly disappeared, their ancient clan halls abandoned and the handful of remnant members scattered among the households of other clans.  They did not fall in disgrace, they simply were victims of the low Dwarven birth rate - too many costly battles against giants and not enough children in each generation to maintain the clan in the face of continual population loss.  Oh, if only Olaff had known how his clan would end... (sniff...) <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />Okay, one paragraph is plenty of back story for this.  Now, what kind of ideas jump out?  Reach weapons, heavy armor, and heavy repeating crossbows for starters.  Giants need to be damaged from afar.  How about halberds?  Some long-distance ankle chopping on a 15 foot tall giant whose already been softened by a regiment of heavy crossbowmen sounds about right.  Toss in a really nice masterwork halberd with the Keen property.  How about a ring on Olaff that gives a Dodge bonus?  Some fancy plate mail befitting his station couldn't go astray.  Now, Olaff was a godly man and likely donated heavily to the church, so choose some deity-specific religious and magical items.  Don't forget some items representing the other tomb occupants.  His wife may have some masterwork healer's tools, a healing oriented magic item, and perhaps some unique or at least uncommon healing spells.  Then you can consider who else in his household was interred with Olaff, what would make sense to have been placed with them?My point is, since as the GM you call fiat on what you can or can't do, there isn't really any absolute ruling on the "correct" way to stock a dungeon.  Thus, the best way to do it and especially to make it memorable for the players, is to build it around a narrative theme.  once you have a context for your mini-dungeon, you'll find that all kinds of ideas will pop forth.If your mini-dungeon is instead the long-lost torture pits of a horribly cruel necromancer Baron who used to experiment on his subjects until he was dragged down by his creations, then not only do you have some ideas for what kind of monsters to put there, but you also have a couple of thematically appropriate directions for selecting weapons, scrolls, magical and even mundane items to put within.So, while all the advice on what web sites or books or GP values to reference are useful, the first thing you need to decide is where are your PCs going?  What is the relevance or reason for the existence of the dungeon?  Good luck!</blockquote>

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