Crafting & Treasure

Chapter 11: Crafting & Treasure

Characters acquire treasure from the glittering hoards of their foes, as rewards for defending the innocent, and as favors from the grand personalities they treat with. As they progress through their adventures and improve their station in the world, characters collect ever more fabulous items from enchanted armor and weapons to spell-infused staves.

Treasure comes in all sorts of forms, from humble copper coins to incredibly powerful and valuable magic items. The GM controls the flow of items in the game as the PCs win them through adventures, find them for purchase, or acquire the formulas to make the items themselves.

Items can support characters by granting bonuses to their statistics, allowing them to cast more spells, and creating all sorts of effects that can’t be achieved in any other way. Magic items come in many varieties, from enchanted swords that can harm even incorporeal undead to containers that can store a king’s ransom within a tiny space; many are permanent items that can be used repeatedly. Alchemical items, by contrast, are not intrinsically magical and are often consumed when used. Both have a variety of uses, from curing the sick to lighting foes on fire. Some treasures are neither magical nor alchemical, but are instead crafted from precious materials or using specialized expertise.

This chapter provides rules for using different kinds of items encountered in the game. Rules for distributing treasure and creating treasure hoards can be found on page 508 of Chapter 10: Game Mastering.

• Using Items, beginning below, describes how to activate items and explains the statistics for items.
• Table 11–1: Treasure by Level, beginning on page 536, lists the options for treasures, arranged by level, category, and Price.
• The catalog of items, which begins on page 543, presents descriptions and rules for all sorts of different treasures that can appear in the game, sorted by category (page 533 has a list of key categories and subcategories). This also includes a section on precious materials found in the game world, which can give items unusual properties.

Using Items

This section presents the rules for how characters use alchemical items, magic items, and other special items during play.

The myriad types of items give their powerful boons in different ways. Some function automatically, while others need to be activated. While you need only swing a flaming greataxe to scorch foes, you need to invest a diadem of intellect for it to work, imbibe an elixir of life to heal yourself, activate slippers of spider climbing to walk up a wall, activate your mail of luck to protect yourself, and Cast a Spell using a magical scroll.

Constant Abilities

Some magic items have abilities that always function. You don’t have to use any actions to do anything special (beyond wearing and investing a worn item or wielding a held item) to make these abilities work. For example, an everburning torch always sheds light, and a flaming weapon deals fire damage every time it deals damage.