Buying, Selling, and Trading Magical Items

In most AD&D campaigns, magical items are rare enough that it is nearly inconceivable that people would buy or sell them like any other commodity. For various

reasons, magical items tend to be concentrated in the hands of player characters and their principal enemies. This means that the PCs never really experience the true scarcity of enchanted items and lose the sense of wonder that most people in their world would feel at even seeing a magical sword, a wand, or a nifty item like a carpet of flying.

The effect of this scarcity is simple: Allowing the player characters to purchase or trade magical items is a privilege, and a rare one at that. It’s an opportunity that comes along quite infrequently in a campaign, and in many cases it should be an opportunity that the players spent time and adventuring to create. In other words, if a player decides that his character wants to find a ring of fire resistance and purchase it, there should be a lot more involved than a stroll down to the corner store. The character might have to hire a sage and spend weeks running down the chain of possession of the last known ring of fire resistance to appear in the area, and then he may have to locate its current owner and make an extremely generous offer—including trading magical items of his own, or undertaking some quest or service for the prospective seller—to have a chance of purchasing the ring.

If the character is content to check in with the nearest arcanist once in a while, it could take months or years before the arcanist happened to stumble across the item the character was looking for—and even then, someone else might be interested in the same item. A bidding war, threats, or outright assassination attempts could result from two wealthy characters both trying to acquire the same item.

Selling items isn’t always easy, either. The PCs have to locate a buyer, and then agree on a fair price. Nobody in a small village will have the money required to buy a real magical item, and even a prosperous town may only have two or three individuals who could afford to buy what the PCs are offering for sale. Items such as potions or rings tend to be easier to sell, since anyone can use them, but books, wands, staves, or other items suited for priests or wizards only will be much more difficult to sell. In any event, the PCs are likely to see only 30% to 80% of their asking price for any given item, and they may have to demonstrate that the item works (or pay for an identify spell from a neutral party) in order to clinch the sale.

The Cost of Magical Items: Enchanted items are rare and valuable. Without exception, they are the rarest and most expensive commodities to be found in a fantasy setting. They are valued accordingly. Even if a character happens to locate a magical item for sale (an extremely rare event), the cost of the item is usually prohibitive, to say the least. As a basic rule of thumb, magical items should be worth anywhere from 5 to 20 times the listed experience point value, and a minimum of 200 gp for one-use items, or 1,000 gp for persistent items. In many cases, the DM should set the cost for an item at a significant percentage of the character’s total wealth—if someone has the only magical ring for sale in the entire kingdom, they’re going to demand a huge sum for it, even if it’s only a ring of protection +1.

In addition to the money involved, a character may have to offer a magical item of similar value in trade, or offer to perform a service or undertake a quest to sweeten the deal for the seller. Regardless of the final deal struck, a player character should be careful of switches, swindles, or reneging; more than one adventurer has gone to his death believing that a brass ring with Nystul’s magical aura is a ring of wishes or spell turning.

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