Worlds of Design: The Problem with Magimarts

I dislike magic item stores ("magimarts") in my games. Here's why.

I dislike magic item stores. Here's why.

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Picture courtesy of Pixabay.

Magic items are a part of every fantasy role-playing game, and wherever player characters meet, someone will want to buy or sell such items. What the players do among themselves is their business, in most cases; but when non-player characters (NPC) are involved the GM must know where magic items come from, how rare they are, and how hard it is to produce them. [Quoting myself from 40+ years ago]

Magimart: Still a Bad Idea​

I don't like the idea of "Magimarts" -- something like a bookstore or small department store, often with a public storefront, where adventurers can come and purchase (or sell) magic items. I said as much over 40 years ago in an article titled “Magimart: Buying and Selling Magic Items” in White Dwarf magazine. My point then still stands: at least for me and in my games, magic-selling stores don’t make sense.

They don’t make sense from a design point of view, as they may unbalance a campaign or cause power-creep. From an adventure point of view such stores partly eliminates the need to quest for specific powerful magic items. From a realistic point of view they would only provide targets for those who are happy to steal.

The Design Point of View​

From a game design point of view, how experience points, gold, and magic fit together makes a big difference. For example, if you get experience points for selling a magic item (even to NPCs), as well as for the gold you get, adventurers will sell magic items more often. If adventurers acquire scads of treasure and have nothing (such as taxes or “training”) to significantly reduce their fortunes, then big-time magic items are going to cost an awful lot of money, but some will be bought. If gold is in short supply (as you’d expect in anything approaching a real world) then anyone with a whole lot of gold might be able to buy big-time magic items.

Long campaigns need a way for magic items to change ownership, other than theft. As an RPG player I like to trade magic items to other characters in return for other magic items. But there are no “magic stores.” Usability is a big part of it: if my magic user has a magic sword that a fighter wants, he might trade me an item that I could use as a magic user. (Some campaigns allocate found magic items only to characters who can use them. We just dice for selecting the things (a sort of draft) and let trading sort it out, much simpler and less likely to lead to argument about who can use/who needs what.)

The Adventure Point of Views​

Will magic stores promote enjoyable adventuring? It depends on the style of play, but for players primarily interested in challenging adventures, they may not want to be able to go into a somehow-invulnerable magic store and buy or trade for what they want.

Magic-selling stores remind me of the question “why do dungeons exist”. A common excuse (not reason) is “some mad (and very powerful) wizard made it.” Yeah, sure. Excuses for magic-selling stores need to be even wilder than that!

I think of magic-item trading and selling amongst characters as a kind of secretive black market. Yes, it may happen, but each transaction is fraught with opportunities for deceit. Perhaps like a black market for stolen diamonds? This is not something you’re likely to do out in the open, nor on a regular mass basis.

The Realistic Point of View​

“Why do you rob banks?” the thief is asked. “’Cause that’s where the money is.”
Realistically, what do you think will happen if someone maintains a location containing magic items on a regular basis? Magimarts are a major flashpoint in the the dichotomy between believability (given initial assumptions of magic and spell-casting) and "Rule of Cool" ("if it's cool, it's OK").

In most campaigns, magic items will be quite rare. Or magic items that do commonplace things (such as a magic self-heating cast iron pan) may be common but the items that are useful in conflict will be rare. After all, if combat-useful magic items are commonplace, why would anyone take the risk of going into a “dungeon” full of dangers to find some? (Would dungeon-delving become purely a non-magical treasure-hunting activity if magic items are commonplace?)

And for the villains, magimarts seem like an easy score. If someone is kind enough to gather a lot of magic items in a convenient, known place, why not steal those rather than go to a lot of time and effort, risk and chance, to explore dungeons and ruins for items? There may be lots of money there as well!

When Magimarts Make Sense​

If your campaign is one where magic is very common, then magic shops may make sense - though only for common stuff, not for rare/powerful items. And magic-selling stores can provide reasons for adventures:
  • Find the kidnapped proprietor who is the only one who can access all that magic.
  • Be the guards for a magic store.
  • Chase down the crooks who stole some or all of the magic from the store.
Maybe a clever proprietor has figured out a way to make the items accessible only to him or her. But some spells let a caster take over the mind of the victim, and can use the victim to access the items. And if someone is so powerful that he or she can protect a magic store against those who want to raid it, won't they likely have better/more interesting things to do with their time? (As an aside, my wife points out that a powerful character might gather a collection of magic items in the same way that a rich person might gather a collection of artworks. But these won’t be available to “the public” in most cases. Still just as some people rob art museums, some might rob magic collections.)

Of course, any kind of magic trading offers lots of opportunities for deception. You might find out that the sword you bought has a curse, or that the potion isn’t what it’s supposed to be. Many GMs ignore this kind of opportunity and let players buy and sell items at standard prices without possibility of being bilked. Fair enough, it’s not part of the core adventure/story purposes of RPGs. And magic stores are a cheap way for a GM to allow trade in magic items.

Your Turn: What part do magic-selling stores play in your games?
 

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Lewis Pulsipher

Lewis Pulsipher

Dragon, White Dwarf, Fiend Folio

Horwath

Legend
I love the magic items store. Takes away the players' dependence on the dice or providence of the DM to get something they find fun, removes the 'magic must be special' thing that reduces the fantastic nature of the world, and makes sense seeing that people will sell ANYTHING when they get a chance, from radioactive water to non-material concepts.

As for the idea that they'd be robbed; that's what magical storage and illusions are for.
there is a reason why Max Rockatansky had explosives rigged on his gas tanks.
 

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billd91

Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️‍⚧️
I'm not a fan of the magimart but I agree that there'd be a market for many different sorts of magic items. That's why I'm perfectly OK with the 5e downtime method of finding or selling magic items. They take time to find or at least find a broker who knows of a particular item for sale or a buyer who wants what the PCs are selling.
 

CleverNickName

Limit Break Dancing (He/They)
We use the Downtime rules for finding and buying magic items. Potions and scrolls are an exception; these can be purchased at the appropriate Guild directly.
 

Shadowedeyes

Adventurer
I'm definitely not a fan of unlimited/restriction less magimarts. I've found that if player's can get their hands on anything, it just ends up buying predictable "best" items, which gets kinda old. However, it makes sense magic items would be a commodity, even if a rare one, so I'm not 100% no selling/buying magic items ever either.
 


GuardianLurker

Adventurer
I'm kind of in between. I understand why people feel like you just shouldn't be able to go down to Morlan's Useful Items Shop and pick up a Staff of Penutlimate Cosmic Power, or a +3 Sword of Unending Slayage. For one thing, the market for such things is both tiny, and sporadic. Brokerage for that level of items - or those high-level auctions (like Sotheby's in the real world) make a lot more sense.

For the more mid-tier items - the ones that old Morlan himself might be able to make, but would just sit around gathering dust, commissioning them makes a lot more sense. Morlan doesn't stock +1 Swords of Marmot Slaying, but he can certainly make one for you. Come back in 2-3 months.

For the low-tier items that have a consistent level of demand - potions of healing, for example - well, that's ol' Morlan's stock-in-trade. These kinds of items are also often consumable, enabling repeat business. And are frequently cheap enough that even your well-established peasant/free-holder can afford them for a pure emergency.

As for buying them, Morlan happily takes the low-tier stuff. He's persuadable on the mid-tier, as he might be able to work out a deal within his network. He doesn't deal with the high-tier stuff, but he can probably point the characters to the right place - which might not be local.

The other thing to notice is that low-, mid-, and high- tier items are relative classifications. If Morlan is in the character's starting village, the breakpoints for those classifications are all fairly low. If he's in the regional trading hub, the power creeps up. And if he's in the city housing the Royal Magical College, well...
 

I've ran PC who have robbed the magic item store. 😔 not proud, but old school leveling is a grind.

Also as we saw in the D&D movie if you put a magic amulet behind glass, someone is smashing and grabbing.
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
Street-front stores where wealthy PCs (and anyone else) can pick up whatever magic they happen to need? No. (I'd say never, except were a PC or party to decide to start one then "never" wouldn't apply. :) )

Buying, selling, and trading of random items; and commissioning of specific ones? Absolutely yes.

To elaborate:

One underlying premise I hold in any campaign is that the PCs are not the only adventurers in the world. There's at least some other adventurers out there now, and have been before, and will be again. And many of those adventurers will, if any good at it, eventually end up with some magic items; and sometimes (or often?) those items won't be things they themselves can use. Add to that the various magic items that hang over fireplaces as trophies that might hit the market in estate sales if-when their owner or family dies off, and there's always going to be some random things out there looking for new owners.

A second underlying premise is that pretty much anything has - or can be given - a cash value. This would simply be an outcome of a combination of a) eons of trading assigning fairly consistent relative values to items and b) the absolute cost to get one made. If for example it costs a small-a artificer 450 g.p. for the materials required to make a +1 dagger, it's unlikely said dagger would go on the market for less than 500 g.p.; and thus 500 g.p. quickly becomes the base value of a +1 dagger. Lather-rinse-repeat for every magic item out there, and now you've got a table of bespoke-to-item values (short-cutting by valuing items formulaically by "level" or rarity, as 3e and 4e did it, leads to some garbage numbers mostly because usefulness isn't considered); malleable by the DM to suit the situation e.g. a +1 dagger with some nice jewels in the hilt might go for 600 g.p.

A third underlying premise is that what's found in the field is not necessarily going to be tailored to the PCs in any way. I should probably also note that despite running a 1e-adjacent system I've never given xp for treasure found, thus that's not a consideration in any of this.

How do item sales happen? Well, there's three main sources of supply:

First, adventurers are likely to encounter (or be brought into contact with) other adventurers during downtime through guilds, temples, common patrons, or any number of other means. From there, it's a short jump to those adventurers swapping notes on a) what they've been doing and b) what non-essential gear they might have to sell or trade at the moment; and sales and trades spring from there. The PCs themselves contribute to this market when they unload items they no longer need, or couldn't ever use, or just can't afford* to keep.

* - sometimes a party will find something so expensive that it represents most of a treasury's value, thus forcing them to choose between keeping this one item or being able to pay for other things such as training.

Second, major guilds (usually Thieves or Mages) and-or temples can and sometimes will act as brokers or clearing houses; and as these sort of places will already be high-security anyway, the robbery option becomes more risk than it's usually worth. Nobility and-or retired adventurers looking to unload items would tend to go this route. Couple that with the minor items (scrolls, potions, continual-light rocks, etc.) such places would tend to make anyway, and they become a good source for items.

Third, not everybody who commissions the construction of a bespoke item is going to come back and pick it up. Depending on the item, making it can take months or even years; and there's no guarantee the commissioner - particularly if an adventurer by trade! - will survive that long. Thus, artificers sometimes find themselves stuck with these things, and will be looking to recoup the costs incurred in making such by selling them (never mnd that the commissioner probably paid up front as well).

And there's usually just one main source of demand that we have to concern ourselves with:

The PCs and their associates.

And so, the end result of all this is that whenever the PCs arrive at a significant settlement there's a chance that - if they make inquiries - there will be some items available for purchase; with both the number and specifics of said items completely random. (Excel for the win in generating said random lists!) The chance varies - a village will almost certainly have nothing; a major city will almost certainly have at least a few things available and sometimes several dozen - and is also varied by other considerations e.g. in a nation girding up for war, any available magic weapons and armour (other than stupendously high-end stuff) are likely to be snapped up before the PCs can hear about them; while in a nation just coming off a war magic items and weapons might be relatively easy to find.

Or, someone patient can find an artificer and commission the construction of an item. The construction process often takes far more in-game time than the PCs are willing to wait, however, so IME it usually goes that the item is commissioned now and picked up several adventures later - if the commissioner has survived and can make it back here.
 

Tonguez

A suffusion of yellow
You just need to seperate the common apothecary store, alchemist lab and artificers workshop products off from the rarer magic academy, or religious relics and them again from the truely legendary artifacts.

Imc legendary items cant be made, it is the legend that empowers them. Other items require contact with arcane or divine authorities, with only apothecures and alchemist being readily available for healing salves, smelling salts, acid vials and pots of alchemist fire.
 
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