Explaining MagicMart / quick item creation

[ffone]

As a DM I'm happy to enable players to sell off their treasure and buy/commission/upgrade their own toys (and tend to award XP and GP in a ratio that tracks WBL.)

I'm curious about ways to explain MagicMart by the rules and with verisimilitude. In other words, "how is it they always have what I want in stock?" and/or "how is it they are able to craft/upgrade the item I request so quickly?"

I realize a DM can handwave / declare by fiat certain NPCs have special, unstatted, unsourced abilities (and that many prefer more limited item availability anyway - this thread is not about that debate). But it's fun to find RAW ways to (or the closest to RAW fudge).

- IIRC artificers have feats for faster/cheap creation (25% off I think?) and there's an epic feat for 10x speed.

- A crafter is limited to an 8 hour shift per day ("must be a union reg!") but could 3 guys rotate on one item to make 3,000 gp of progress a day?

- Are there abilities/feats/classes etc. for cooperative/group item creation? (Sort of like how mythals and certain uber magic rituals are done in groups.)

- Could the crafter warp to a 'Santa's Worshop' type pocket plane with a flowing time trait so that they get in many days of work per day of Prime Material time?

- Can MagicMart be accomplished Amazon-style through divination and teleporting: each store has a 'catalog' and when you make a request, they "MageEx" the item/courier from somewhere across the multiverse amongst their vast network of stores and repisitories?

- Wish can insta-create items, but has a surcharge (2x XP cost + 5000 XP, which in gp at the usual 5:1 conversion amounts to a 20% increase in the market price + 25,000 gp). A DM could make players pay this surcharge for 'rush service' from an NPC, but is there a way to justify a network of NPCs getting around and waiving this? Like Thought Bottle type exploits or getting-Wishes-as-spell-like-abilities-to-cheat-the-XP-cost? Perhaps this crafter cabal would somehow use efreeti, noble djinn , or other (Sp) Wish creatures?

[Marnath]

I realize it's a video game, but Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark features a pot that can summon a Djinn merchant 3/day who has access to all the stores in Sigil, or something like that. You can sell him anything, basically and it wouldn't be hard to imagine that give him a day or two and he can find you practically anything, from a resource base that big.

[Reluctance]

The simplest solution is downtime. Give the characters some well-deserved rest after their latest adventure, and that gives commissioned crafters time to get the work done. I doubt that players will care too much if a couple of months pass between their adventures, so long as they get the appropriate swag.

While it doesn't help with upgrading existing items, it also helps to remember that anywhere you can buy an item that takes more than a day or three to make, you'll have thousands if not tens of thousands living there. It's less "welcome to magic mart!", and more about finding somebody who already has the item and is willing to sell it. It's a bit of a coincidence that the item the PCs are looking for happens to be around, but not much of one; there's not much a determined person with deep pockets couldn't buy in real-world NY or LA, either.

[holywhippet]

The magic store could use divination spells to learn what items will be in demand in advance. They might not know it will be Bob the fighter who wants a girdle of giant strength, but they will know that someone with enough gold to buy a girdle of giant strength will be coming to buy one soon.

Otherwise, they could work like any normal store -they know from experience what the popular items are and have a number of them in stock. Less popular items they might have a few of, but they do have them just in case.

[BossMuro]

If you're willing to get a little silly, you could always create a plane-travelling merchant who is prescient, and has made a point to track down the appropriate items beforehand.

EDIT: Aargh, ninja'd again!

[Gorgondantess]

Hmmm... MageEx... item union...
Suddenly I have a vision of a brutal, cutthroat, worldwide item trading corporation that is able to undercut all of its competitors with instant delivery of goods. They have a network of enforcers who kill anyone who dares to steal from them or not join the MageEx union.
"Anything. Anytime. Anywhere. MageEx."

[Urpriest]

I usually strike a bit of a balance. Items out of the books will generally be available for purchase immediately if they're within the town's GP limit (cities are deceptively big places, it's not unreasonable for something like that to be in stock), but custom items will have to wait until they can be made. There's a lot that can be done with just items from the books, so with the occasional patch of downtime this is generally fine for approximating what resources the books expect characters to have access to.

[Gamer Girl]

Don't forget the many, many, many worlds.

A single, average D&D mulitverse has:

1.At least a dozen, maybe as many as infinite 'game' worlds on the Prime Plane.(i.e. every ones home game).
2.You get all the elemental planes, and inner planes.
3.You get all the Outer planes
4.You get all the places in-between
5.And don't forget about other realities and multiverses

The end result is that there are billions and billions of folks crafting magic items at any one second(on Toril 102 folks are making a magic item worldwide, 520 azer are crafting magic items on Elemental Fire, 204 dwarfs are crafting on a demi-plane, 3,920 demons are crafting items in the Abyss, 25,678 formians are making items on Mecanicus, etc.)


Then you throw in war and natural effects. On the Plane of Air was the floating city of Ar, that was destroyed by a wind storm and everyone in the city was killed....but that left 1,320 magic items laying around to be looted. On the world of Blackhawk, the evil overlord attacks and burns the good city of light to the ground..and 540 magic items are left scattered in the rubble.


In short, in a multiverse, you will have trillions of items floating around.

[Volthawk]

I sometimes like to have the magic mart be an actual in-game group, who hires artificers, casters and mundane crafters, providing many items, both mundane and magical. They usually have quite a bit of power too, since they tend to be the best-equipped force around, and have constructs to back up any normal troops they have, not to mention being the major way to get most magic items (since to get a high-level magic item out of the guild, you need a) Someone high enough level who b) isn't in the guild and c) will actually make it for you.) and having the raw power of casters.

[Z3ro]

Hmmm... MageEx... item union...
Suddenly I have a vision of a brutal, cutthroat, worldwide item trading corporation that is able to undercut all of its competitors with instant delivery of goods. They have a network of enforcers who kill anyone who dares to steal from them or not join the MageEx union.
"Anything. Anytime. Anywhere. MageEx."

What a brilliant idea full of plot hooks that players will never ignore. Perform this quest for us, or our union won't let you buy magic items!

[Amblehook]

All MagicMart needs is a way to send short messages back through time, with the specifications of a magic item, and *poof* the adventurers come just in time for the item to be completed.

Actually, something like this happened in an epic game I played in. Except that one of the party members wanted an item that would take hundreds of years to craft. Since there was only one being alive for that long that had that ability to craft such an item, he spent four hundred years crafting instead of adventuring, thus changing history forever. The evil kingdoms he overthrew now thrive. Dragons he had slain still roam free. A completely different world.