OMG Shops - Lets get some Magic

These items rule. THESE ITEMS SUCK. These items rule. THESE ITEMS SUCK.

One of the many tried and true DM's laments, your players want magic items but just not those magic items. So you populate the world with shops and magic items galore. But how do you keep it from ruining your power curve and nerfing the adventure you've laid out for your players? Well welcome to today's DM Dalliance as we tackle this tale as old as time.

So one of the rabbit holes I often fall down as a DM prepping for a game is creating shops and putting starting items in them. Its kind of my favorite part and I go a little crazy with it, just ask my Sat game players about the over the top Edna Mode designer potions lady. NO CAPERS! I thought a series talking about the different types of shops might be helpful mostly because I thought a single post about all of them might be a bit overwhelming to both write and read.

I decided to start with the one that will probably be used and demanded by players the most, magical items. It is also an area that DMs can have alot of fun in creating as they get more comfortable with the game and designing aspects of it. I'm going to try and start small and build up towards the more crazy way of creating but we will see how long that lasts. Cause ya know ya girl has always gotta up the anty.

Lets start with the thing that the players see first, the shop itself. Setting up not just the outside look and feel of the building but the inside as well lends itself to really priming the kind of mood and interaction with the shopkeeper you want your players to have. The style of architecture, the materials its made of, any landscaping or plant life it has, fencing, the colors used, and any outside decorations all tell you something about the place the party is about to enter. What feelings do you want the building to invoke in your players will guide this part of the process.

Don't forget the inside either - what does the shop smell like? Is it hot or cold, muggy or open and airy? What sounds are there? What is the lighting like, and what is providing it? Is the space crammed pack forcing you all together in a bunch or is it sparse and easy to move about and browse? Add in all of the senses as the players step over the threshold into the shop. Let everything overwhelm them for a moment so that they have to take it in just like we do IRL when stepping into a new store for the first time. Step in, absorb and look around before engaging gives you a built-in buffer as a DM to take a breath before moving forward.

A classic favorite of most DMs is the process of naming your shops. I'm a personal fan of puns and jokes that have to do with what the shop is selling. I happen to like to think I'm the Horseman of Fun heralding in the Punocalypse but my GF would just disagree with a heavy sigh and some series side eye game as she is subjected to it in our Saturday games. When I'm stuck though I like to look in a few places for inspiration: Donjon (both 5e and d20), this puny names thread on reddit's r/rpg, Rob Twohy's Magic Shop table, and honestly just falling down some good old Google rabbit holes. Or on occasion pulling from whatever thing I'm watching, listening to or reading while planning the town. Or if you just don't have the time or brain power for it check out this Magic Shop Name Generator by the lovely folks I use all the time to get inspiration for names.

The above will work for all of the Shops for any items store, so I'll probably just reference this part in the future posts, but we need one extra step for a magic item store. The person who owns and runs this shop knows magic enough to sell and possibly make magic items. That means they probably aren't going to be satisfied with just a normal mundane shop, or mundane means of doing typical business. So add some of that into the environment. Throw in dancing lights to provide the lighting for the space, make the shop bigger on the inside, or seem to transport you to another place. Don't be afraid to open the reigns a little bit while doing this to maybe show off on just all the shop, and in turn the shopkeeper, could do for the party for the right amount of coin.

You've now got your shop ready to go to set the mood and prime your players for their first interaction with the Shopkeeper so lets get to creating. To make it a little easier on myself I like to pick one or two aspects that I want this NPC to be about that I can build everything else around. Doing so lets me have the NPC be flexible and able to roll with those random right hooks PCs like to throw while still staying true to how the NPC would react. It can be kind of like when you build a character with an ideal, flaw, or bond that helps drive them. It can be a quirk or characteristic you want them to display like a disturbingly deep knowledge of raunchy romance novels, always looking like wind is billowing through their hair and flowy shirt, or that they are over the top in gesture and speech. Or if you really want to play with how much you can make your PCs laugh, groan and be suspicious of you then I suggest picking a person (fictional or real) from the IRL side of things to twist and manipulate into the NPC. Edna Mode suddenly becomes Edna Modeinski a Gnome and over the top designer potion maker who is pushy and larger than life. Making them unique will help the PCs latch onto the NPC and the shop so that you know they will come back here when in town, and can possibly leverage it for plot later if needed.

Also I'd like to interject with don't be afraid to pick a race for the Shopkeeper outside of what you would typically think of, either for running the shop itself OR for the characteristics and personality you've set up for them. There are so many races provided by WotC for players that you can use, or you can take the DMs prerogative and make a monster race a shopkeeper NPC. You have limitless power so why not have a Medusa running a magic shop, or an awakened hydra for that manner. Think of all the customers you could manage and help at the same time with no other staff but yourself. Inject fun and wonder into your game in the small ways as well as in the larger more storyline effecting ones.

For naming, just as before think about what you want to convey. I do recommend looking up the guides provided in the books on naming conventions for the race of your NPC. Honestly, it helps a ton to be at least be given a lane to go hog wild in. You can also use the same Fantasy Name Generator site I listed above for the Shop name, as they have a generator for just about everything there. No like serious. Think of a thing you need to name and they have a generator for it. I personally still am a fan of sprinkling some IRL references in via the Shopkeeper name as well so that if my PCs decide to be polite and introduce themselves they get a little fun in-game nugget of info to pull in their RPG completionist tendencies.

To stock your shop you need to decide if you want to go with the items provided in all of the WotC publications, cause there are oh so many, go homebrew or do a combo dance of the two. Personally, I like to take from both Column A and Column B to keep my players guessing. For this bit though I'll be talking like we are just going to be using the WotC provided items, the same selection and stocking technique though can be applied to the homebrew items I'll talk about later.

The best way to approach this is to front-load a little bit of extra work during the initial campaign planning phase which lets you breeze through generating new stores throughout the life of your campaign. I tend to break up all magic items up by the Tier of Play that they are most appropriate for. This could be a post all of its own but for a great reference on the Tiers of Play is most anything put out by Wizard's particularly their Adventure League Player Guides, I'm partial to the Tyranny of Dragons one. (To clarify I've read alot of Adventure League stuff but haven't had a chance to participate in one yet since there isn't a game shop by where I live. One by work popped up so hoping to change that.) But pretty much the tiers break down as levels 1–4, levels 5–10, levels 11–16, and levels 17–20. Since magic items via a shop are going to be expensive it shouldn't be a problem but I'd put the level at a high enough one for the first tier of play where players are unable to obtain more than 1 reusable magic item, while ones that are consumed like health potions you don't have to worry about limiting so much.

Okay so we have our Tiers of Play laid out, we've sorted the magic items by these tiers (you'll see that an item can be on more than one list and that's perfectly fine). I then create 3 random lists for each tier of play with magic items I feel best fit the campaign, the world, or things I tailor for the players. Normally you don't have to worry about a list larger than 20 but go as ham as you'd like. When making the store pick a list from the tier of play that currently applies to the players, roll 1d6 (min of 2) times on the list to stock the store. This method comes with the bonus that if you're players revisit a store at a higher tier you don't have to scrap everything, just roll on the new lists. You can also switch up the stock ever so often to show the life of the shop while the players are away. This might lead to some fun side quests and bargaining to get the shopkeeper to make an item that a player had their eye on but that was sold while they were away.

Now when adding your own flair in the form of magic items there are levels of complexity we can explore. The quickest and easiest way to create some homebrewed magic items is a simple reskin. No design work or mechanic tweaking needed. Just find a magic item that mechanically does what you want it to, doesn't matter what the description says it looks like. Once you find it then swap in whatever description and flair you want. It will seem like a completely different and new item to players without anything really changing or possibly upsetting the balance of your game. An example of this would be taking something like the Rope of Entanglement, lets say I am doing a Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign that I have a player in whose backstory has them as a Fisherperson. I might instead describe it as a fishing net and make schools of fish act as a single target for thematic purposes. I didn't change the mechanics it still latches on to one target on a command word and attempts to entangle them. Now though the player might toss the net as shouting it and I'd probably say its a 10 ft squared net instead of 30 ft of rope.

Adjacent to reskinning but more in the tweaking family is changing damage types to fit the new theme or skin of the magic item. A flaming sword that does fire damage when engulfed in flames now does ice instead and is encased in crystal ice shards that shatter when attacking bursting cold over the target. A Sword of Life Stealing that did necrotic damage and gave temp hit points to yourself, now instead does radiant damage and gives those temp hit points to a nearby ally. Think of this as an intermediate step between doing no mechanical adjustments to a magic item and getting a bit crunchy with it.

You might say - "Well JustKay reskinning and tweaking seems simple enough but doesn't cover what I want, no magic item exactly fits what I'm looking for." Well imaginary voice being used to push this post forward there is still hope! If you've searched and can't find something that exactly fits what you want but you can find one or two things that come close we can do some substitutions. Now we get into the crunchy mechanical bits of magic items. As we all know from just playing, on both sides of the table, not everything can possibly be accounted for in the base material from Wizard's and that includes magic items. There is a very large library though so chances are you can get pretty close and start there. But watch your power levels for the items and make sure you are substituting in things of equivalent value. Eyeballing this with no playtesting is something you get a feel for over time so don't be afraid to be upfront with your players, let them know you are giving them a really cool homebrew thing but if its too OP you will dial back what it can do to make the game fair and fun for everyone.

So that was alot of yaking, lets get to an example. In my Saturday homebrew game (I call Order of the Cross & Axe) I have 7 players spread out across races and classes for a pretty balanced group. I've been trying to make sure their backstories and goals weave into the world. You can do this in alot of different ways, probably see a blog post about that topic later, but a small way to do this is to give them magic items that fit those. They can be an aspiration to what you know the PC is going for, represent their current state even if it isn't popular, or give a little something to keep them from constantly almost perma-dying (I'm looking at you low CON Bloodhunter). Now I know some of my players read this blog so don't worry there aren't any real spoilers because its a fake example using you all. I have a Paladin in the group who doesn't know who the God/Goddess is that they worship only that they saved them on the battleground, and have vowed their fealty to them. So at higher levels it would be nice to give some oomph in the form of a magic item that represented an aspect of that God/Goddess. We will definitely be picking a God that isn't the one I already have planned out because I'm a petty DM like that. Lets pick Ioun, a god of knowledge and prophecy, as our guinea God. For this God there already exist some magic items called an Ioun Stone that comes in a variety of flavors. None of them really fit what I'm looking for and adding together any of them would be pretty OP. BUT they offer an interesting insight into the kind of gifts this particular God gives as a starting point. Our Paladin is very much in the business of ignoring their own needs and focusing on the party so I want something that they could use on themselves if it was dire but that they also had the option of using on another player, maybe to a lesser extent. Looking at the Ioun Stones of Protection and Regeneration I can see what level each of the tiers of rarity the stones are at and combine the two things I like from them into a new Ioun Stone of Guardianship. Which I've provided for all on DnD Beyond here if you want to check it out for your game. While the stone orbits your head you get a +1 to your AC but as an action, you can use a command word to send the stone to orbit the head of a single ally during battle that is within 30ft of you and they gain 5 temporary hit points, the stone returns to you once the temporary hit points are depleted or when you use an action to say the command word. The stone regains the ability to grant temporary hit points in battle after a short rest.

Above I used existing models to figure out power levels, thematic elements, and even bonuses and buffs provided. Most of the time you can get away with just the steps for making magic items that we've already gone over. Occasionally though no matter how much you search through Wizard's products, check out the supplements from 3rd party creators or even suss out shared homebrew items from the community you just can't find what you need. At that point, it is time to tackle creating a magic item from scratch. Now this is definitely a learning curve kind of deal. I know I said that earlier with substitution but with a brand new item its hard to know how it will interact with things that were already accounted for when you review existing items. Especially as most DMs aren't going to get the chance to do extensive playtesting with an item before it gets passed to a player in their game. Pure homebrewed items can kill your balance and need to be retconned pretty quickly. I've helped many a frantic DM who handed something over to their players that ended up being too OP or game breaking to figure out a way to dial it back to an acceptable level in game before it was too late and killed the whole campaign.

I'm not saying don't do it. I am personally a huge believer that the only person who knows the best thing to give your PCs is the DM, the person with the big picture. Of course, I say that often winging many aspects of my campaign because I have PCs of unintended chaos. Honestly, this will have to be a topic we cover in its own thing later cause it would double this post size. But a few quick tips as it were -

1. Figure out the Tier (level block) the PCs are in when you will be giving this item to them.
2. Pinpoint one or two aspects you want this item to help with.
3. Pick a rarity, this will determine how effective or powerful the item is.
4. Where possible stick to the wording of effects that exist in Wizard's products, they know what is going on with their system.

With that little rambling over with, I’m JustKay your regular DM Dalliance on the web and I’ll see you next post.