What magical items can be found to buy (RPG Blog Carnival)

Advantage on Arcana gives us this months prompt Magic Shops and Their Alternatives for the RPG Blog Carnival. For this I wrote up how it works in my campaigns.

For my menagerie world campaigns, magic items can come from a number of typical sources
- wizard "guilds" - craftsmasters, journeymen making them new as part of learning - what is available is whatever they are teaching/learning
- artificers crafting to order, incl. hedge wizards, shamen, deep forest witches, etc.
- vaults of noble families, temples, etc - incl. caches laid down by previous generations
- hoards/treasuries of monsters and men - 'owned' but not for sale
- battlefields or ruins of previous epochs and civilisations
- traders originating from the above - closest to archetypal magic shops

Of these, the first two are new magic items and where you are probably going to get many of your potions and other consumables.

Vaults are 'in service' items where members of the noble house, knightly order, temple or what have you may be carrying them into battle and there is typically a group that knows what is there and regularly takes them out and uses them.

Hoards/treasuries are mostly one-way; the dragon or other collector grabs things because they are valuable more than because they are useful and there are far fewer beings with knowledge of what is in the hoard or permission to take anything from it.

All else being equal, consumable things like potions and scrolls will get used over time and not last the long march of history. More permanent enchantments like swords, rings and so on, can be created, used, lost, found, and used again, surviving the long aeons whether lost or in use.

The high resistance to damage instilled by magic item enchantment means that for the most part those items will persist long past most of the rest of their culture of origin going to dust.

Some other things to bear in mind
* Not all epochs and sources create magic items you would want to use - e.g. Predator Queen bastardisation of elven know-how - whether through dangerous side effects that the creators were unaffected by or did not care about
* Different sources produce things that might not be focused on effects you want or may be from races who can do a thing already - feather fall and fly rings will be scarce among item caches of the winged insectfolk
* Magic items may be built assuming access to now lost precursors, reagents or support materials - leyline mirrors, etc. - equivalent to requiring batteries that are no longer produced, perhaps overcomeable with some tweaking
* Some groups and times may have produced things to over come issues they faced that are not relevant - a tremorsensing subterranean race having 'lenses of seeing' equivalent that grant the ability to perceive light - stuff that duplicates a sense or ability most people have today.

Altogether this means that recovering a random selection of magic items across time - dredging a lake for instance - is likely to turn up some significant amount of undesirable items for the above reasons. These will be mixed in with interesting items.

For purposeful, focused heroes, useful items are likely to go into their backpacks and scabbards while the rest will be hauled out and sold. Two likely avenues for sale would be to spend the effort to identify and understand what each item is - the better to command a good price - or to just sell them by weight, the buyer taking the risk and potential reward of the haul being good stuff or un-sellable curios.

Once in the hands of a magic merchant of whatever form, high utility things are likely to sell rapidly since cash-flush adventurers will pay premium to have the right item at a clutch moment. The odder things will turnover more slowly which together means that most merchants will have a deep back catalogue of weird stuff that few want and a shallower selection of classically useful items.

There may be some lesser markets for the less useful items. A noble family may put on a trophy display of weird old items, artificers and wizard guilds may keep a 'library' of reference items of study, some sages may buy these esoteric magical items to support their understanding of their creators rather than the utility of the item itself.

Given that high end magic is going to be viewed akin to hiring of mercenary companies - not everyone is permitted to do it and people keep sharp watch on who is buying what, looking for concerning patterns. Any local power-player will be at the least interested and may seek to limit the access to means to claim or destabilise their power. For this reason access to high end magic could be one of the reasons to get in the good books of the local wizards, nobles or temples - some stuff may never be for sale and only for the borrowing.

All this to say, one can just have magic items on shelves with price tags, but far better for those prices to be just notional places to start a broader negotiation around 'how will you pay me' and 'do you even have the right to buy this'. Making magic items easily acquired for coin in the marketplace feels a little late capitalist - a map to a ruin with a fearsome reputation (and thus unlooted) or bartering service to a wizard for them to make you a magical item - these are the things that will make your world feel different from the day to day we are all trying to escape.

Post script - it also occurs to me that once a PC becomes sufficiently high level and able to craft things, people will come to them look for items from them and willing to trade service for those things - a nice way for high level PCs to do some domain management or tie off lower priority loose ends.