EQUIPMENT

In the marketplace of a big city, armorsmiths and weaponsmiths offer a wide variety of arms and armor for those with the gold to buy them. Here you can find practical, sturdy swords and perhaps a few elven blades of exceptional quality.

Alchemists sell acid, alchemist’s fire, and smokesticks for those who want something flashier than a trusty blade. Wizards (or, more likely, their brokers) even sell magic scrolls, wands, weapons, and other items.

This chapter covers the mundane and exotic merchandise that characters may want to purchase and how to go about doing so. (Magic items are covered in the Dungeon Master’s guide.)

EQUIPPING A CHARACTER

A beginning character generally has enough wealth to start out with the basics: some weapons, some armor suitable to his or her class (if any), and some miscellaneous gear. As the character undertakes adventures and amasses loot, he or she can afford bigger and better gear. At first, however, the options are limited by the character’s budget.

STARTING PACKAGES

Each class has a starting package that provides default equipment (as well as default skills, a default feat, and so forth). If you equip your character with the default equipment, you can customize these packages a little by swapping in some equipment of your choice for the indicated equipment. Trades like this are fine as long as the value of the equipment you swap in isn’t higher than the value of the equipment given in the package.

EQUIPMENT A LA CARTE

If you don’t want to take the standard package for your character class, you can instead purchase weapons, armor, and miscellaneous equipment item by item. You begin with a random number of gold pieces that is determined by your character’s class, and you decide how to spend it (see Table 7–1: Random Starting Gold). Alternatively, your DM can assign average starting gold for each character, as indicated on Table 7–1.

TABLE 7–1: RANDOM STARTING GOLD

Note that buying beginning equipment this way is an abstraction. Your character doesn’t walk into a store with handfuls of gold and buy every item one by one. Rather, these items may have come the character’s way as gifts from family, equipment from patrons, gear granted during military service, swag gained through duplicity, and so on.

Assume your character owns at least one outfit of normal clothes. Pick any one of the following clothing outfits for free: artisan’s outfit, entertainer’s outfit, explorer’s outfit, monk’s outfit, peasant’s outfit, scholar’s outfit, or traveler’s outfit. (See Clothing, page 131.)

AVAILABILITY

All the items described in this chapter are assumed to be available to PCs with the wherewithal to buy them. Many of these items are very expensive and rare. You won’t find them on the rack at a store in a town. But a character with the coin to buy an expensive item can usually connect with a seller and get a desired item.

If you want to buy something not described in this chapter, the general rule is that you can buy anything that costs as much as 3,000 gp. Buying a more expensive item, such as a +2 longsword, means either going to a big city where rare things are for sale, making a special deal with someone who makes or can provide the item, or paying a premium price to a merchant who makes a special effort to get you what you want.

Depending on where in the fantasy world the character is, it might be possible to buy more expensive items without a problem, or it might be more difficult to do so. In a small town, for example, it’s practically impossible to find someone who can make a suit of full plate armor. The DM determines what is and is not available depending on how he or she runs the world and where the characters are in it.

WEALTH AND MONEY

Adventurers are in the small group of people who regularly buy things with coins. Members of the peasantry trade mostly in goods, bartering for what they need and paying taxes in grain and cheese. Members of the nobility trade mostly in legal rights, such as the rights to a mine, a port, or farmland, or they trade in gold bars, measuring gold by the pound rather than by the coin.

COINS

The most common coin that adventurers use is the gold piece (gp). With 1 gold piece, a character can buy a belt pouch, 50 feet of hempen rope, or a goat. A skilled (but not exceptional) artisan can earn 1 gold piece a day. The gold piece is the standard unit of measure for wealth. When merchants discuss deals that involve goods or services worth hundreds or thousands of gold pieces, the transactions don’t usually involve the exchange of that many individual coins. Rather, the gold piece is a standard measure of value, and the actual exchange is in gold bars, letters of credit, or valuable goods.

The most prevalent coin among commoners is the silver piece (sp). A gold piece is worth 10 silver pieces. A silver piece buys a laborer’s work for a day, a common lamp, or a poor meal of bread, baked turnips, onions, and water.

Each silver piece is worth 10 copper pieces (cp). A single copper piece buys a candle, a torch, or a piece of chalk. Copper pieces are common among laborers and beggars.

In addition to copper, silver, and gold coins, which people use daily, merchants also recognize platinum pieces (pp), which are each worth 10 gp. These coins are not in common circulation, but adventurers occasionally find them as part of ancient treasure hoards.

The standard coin weighs about a third of an ounce (fifty to the pound). It is the exact size of the coin pictured in the illustration on page 168.

TABLE 7–2: COINS

WEALTH OTHER THAN COINS

Most wealth is not in coins. It is livestock, grain, land, rights to collect taxes, or rights to resources (such as a mine or a forest). Gems and jewelry also serve as portable wealth.

TRADE

Guilds, nobles, and royalty regulate trade. Chartered companies are granted rights to dam rivers in order to provide power for mills, to conduct trade along certain routes, to send merchant ships to various ports, or to buy or sell specific goods. Guilds set prices for the goods or services that they control, and determine who may or may not offer those goods and services. Merchants commonly exchange trade goods commodities without using currency. As a means of comparison, some trade goods are detailed on Table 7–3: Trade Goods.

TABLE 7–3: TRADE GOODS

SELLING LOOT

In general, a character can sell something for half its listed price. Characters who want to upgrade to better armor or weaponry, for example, can sell their old equipment for half price.

Trade goods are the exception to the half-price rule. A trade good, in this sense, is a valuable good that can be easily exchanged almost as if it were cash itself. Wheat, flour, cloth, gems, jewelry, art objects, and valuable metals are trade goods, and merchants often trade in them directly without using currency (see Table 7–3: Trade Goods). Obviously, merchants can sell these goods for slightly more than they pay for them, but the difference is small enough that you don’t have to worry about it.