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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jefe Bergenstein" data-source="post: 6513765" data-attributes="member: 31506">Can we please dispel this myth? I was looking at running the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth the other day, and the amount of magical crap you get in that is anything but rare. The human/orc hippogriff poachers have splintmail +2, a crossbow of speed, a shield +1 and a few consumables. And before we get to the standard grognard tall tale of how hard it was to find anything... no it wasnt. Half this crap is just lying on a body or in a monster nest. There's a longtooth +2 dagger guarded by a clay golem. Bracers AC 5 on a dead elf called out in boxed text. A couple of formians guard boots of levitation and cursed boots of dancing. Hey, there are TWO +2 battleaxes, just in case you need a spare! There's about 20-30 other permanent magic items sprinkled around. That's more than 5E suggests you award in an entire campaign, so maybe for the first time in D&D, magic might actually be rare again. They talked a big game in the DMG about how rare magic items should be, but that's not how it played. RAW by the treasure tables and in published adventures, magic items were hardly "rare" in AD&D. There's this tired old revisionist idea that they walked uphill through 20 levels to catch a whiff of a potion of healing... I have no friggin idea what AD&D these guys played, but it sure as hell wasn't like the adventures TSR published. We had so much +1 garbage that our henchmen's henchmen were tired of it, yet the books tried to tell us they were such rare special snowflakes we should gush over each one, that wars were fought over a single +1 dart, and that no one could think of buying or selling them.</blockquote>

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