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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Echohawk" data-source="post: 9323213" data-attributes="member: 9849">I have a dohwar merchant who sells magic items in my Spelljammer campaign because (a) the style of the campaign leans heavily away from realistic and more importantly (b) my players love shopping. However, it isn't the sort of shop where just anything is available. Instead, each time they visit, the merchant has a specific selection of available items: a score or so common magic items, and a small number of hand-picked rarer items. This allows me to seed some appropriate items for PCs who may be lagging slightly behind their companions in power levels for whatever reason, while parting the PCs from the excessive quantities of cash that build up over time in 5e games. It also means that the compulsive shoppers in the group have a reasonable collection of common magic items. My experience of 5e is that the common items are not-at-all unbalancing even if you have a lot of them. Most of the time they are forgotten about, but every now and again, one of them ends up adding a lot of flavor to the campaign. During one visit, a character impulse-bought a pot of awakening[1]. The player promptly forgot all about it, only to have it hatch into an awakened shrub mid-voyage a few games later. That little shrub is now the ship's mascot and has played a pivotal role during at least one encounter with raiders when it was tossed an explosive device that needed to urgently be thrown overboard. [ATTACH=full]359138[/ATTACH] Also, whenever they visit the merchant, each character gets a single opportunity to request one specific magic item and make a percentage roll to see if the merchant happens to have it in stock. The odds are quite low, and scale based on rarity. However, if someone asks about boots of elvenkind during one visit, and the shop doesn't have those, then the odds will increase slightly that the merchant will have them the next time they visit, because the merchant knows they are looking for them. This means that the PCs stand a good chance to eventually get something they really, really want, provided they are patient. They are now sixth level and so far, a requested item has only twice been available. I have not generally had magic shops in previous campaigns that I've run, but for our current campaign this approach has definitely added to everyone's enjoyment. [1] From Xanathar's Guide to Everything: "If you plant an ordinary shrub in this 10-pound clay pot and let it grow for 30 days, the shrub magically transforms into an awakened shrub at the end of that time. When the shrub awakens, its roots break the pot, destroying it."</blockquote>

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