Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 3606338" data-attributes="member: 11760">For what it's worth, one of those at least partially responsible for the 3E magic item assumptions, Monte Cook, has magic items purchasable -- to an extent -- in his campaign setting.In Ptolus, there's three tiers of magic item sales:1) Most temples sell holy water (with possible restrictions depending on the customer), and may sell healing/curative potions and low level scrolls. Given the uneasy relationships between the faiths in the city, not everyone can get a potion or scroll from every temple, and even those faiths that will sell to a given customer won't necessarily sell out of every temple. The pseudo-medieval-Catholic Church -- Lothianism -- has one church out of the many in town that sells these, and it's the church for the dirty, dirty adventurers, the equivalent of a Midnight Mission sort of place. When your players decide they want to worship one of the city's wackier gods, they may well be shutting themselves out of the low end magic item market. (And if they worship Lothian, there's all sorts of complex things they've just signed up for, as you might imagine.) I think this is pretty similar to how a lot of DMs handle potions/scrolls/holy water anyway.2) Ptolus is built on the ruins of multiple civilizations, including the laboratory/armory/barracks of Ye Olde Evil Wizard, so magic items trickle up with adventurers periodically and there's a store or two that specifically traffics in them. The inventory here is explicitly limited and includes a few bozo items that no one's going to be excited to get.3) Finally, there's a group that makes magic items to order, but they're a lot closer to scary real world arms merchants or violent drug dealers. They have a bad habit of murdering anyone who starts selling magic items without being affiliated (making items for friends is OK) and the power to back it up. Since they're a semi-secret arm of a prominent organization, there's lots of people they might not actually take on as customers (assuming said people can find them to begin with) and if they provide a product, there's no saying it'll work as intended. And, most importantly, since the Dreaming Apothecary has no actual storefront per se, they're the easiest to drop out of the setting for DMs who don't like them. I suspect that Monte didn't have their wares constantly available, given how he wrote them up. I know that if my gnome illusionist/bard ever gets high enough to have the money and desire for a magic item, I'd be a LOT more comfortable getting a friend to make it for me than dealing with the scary-ass Dreaming Apothecary.</blockquote>

Verification