Creating Magic items cost

[Yogibear41]

When creating a magical item the DMG and other various books lists a base price/market price and then the creation price or the money you need to spend to create the item.

My question is what exactly are you buying with that money? Now its obviously some sort of material component but what is that exactly?

This is mainly in regards to say a person who is in the middle of nowwhere, but has thousands of gold pieces and wants to create a magic item, however there are no magical shops/other things for hundreds of miles around him, should he be able to create said item assuming he has everything else he needs" working area, forge, time, etc?


I realize of course that the magic item cost has to be put in place for game balance reasons, with that in mind is it also possible that the item creator simply needs nothing but his own magical energy, and the item that he plans on infusing magic into?

[Emperor Tippy]

You are buying the time and effort of the crafter to go and use a scroll of Shapechange to turn into a Zodar and wish you up exactly what you want. ;)

More seriously, it can be whatever you want and can be fluffed however you want.

Perhaps magic items are made by taking gold (an extra special material for whatever reason) and using the ritual that they learned (the relevant Craft X feat) along with a hefty chunk of their life force to turn it all into the item that they had in mind.

Or perhaps it was to get the ten thousand exotic ingredients that you need, pay for a Wish to take you to the Forge Of Magical Might inside the personal plane of the forge god, and then cover the cost of using the forge.

Whatever works for you. And it could even vary from individual to individual in the same world.

Maybe it's just represented by you bribing a Dragon to Wish it up for you using your XP to power it.

[Cicciograna]

Or perhaps it was to get the ten thousand exotic ingredients that you need

I always imagined this: you visit magic shops, peruse alchemists labs, search into curiosities looking for strange ingredients and power components to use in the ritual to enchant the item itself, bargain with other spellcaster, barter with cosmic powers, hire other adventurers to recover a peculiar ingredient while you are busy crafting the item itself.

Perhaps a crafty DM could discount the price of a magic item sending his very adventurers looking for the ingredients theirselves, thus sending them into side plots; or give his players another set of PCs (the hired band of adventurers) for a short period of time, thus allowing them to take a breath from their main campaign.

If you don't have a personal lab or working space, you rent one for the duration of the task, supply it with the needed substances, and pay for someone to assist you and clean the eventual mess you could leave :smallbiggrin:

Finally, if these options don't suit you, you could always imagine that the creation of a magic item requires the extraction of the intrinsic value that sentient races give to money: its value is not in the gold itself, but instead in the idea that's behind the concept of currency, the power that a society bestows upon those tiny, round pieces of metal. You don't pay with "gold", you pay with money: in a place where gold is the only metal found, gold coins are worthless, and you won't be able to use them to craft magic items. In a world where currency is represented by green pieces of paper with a face and a number printed on them, you must use those.
And if you use the bodies, the flesh and the very souls of sentient beings as currency, well, you're Evil, but you can surely substitute those to gp in your rituals, as many dark gods like to do. I don't presonally know the exchange rate of souls vs gp, but they certainly do.

[Skysaber]

I've always been influenced by the first edition crafting rules, where to make, say a scroll of stone to flesh, you needed ink from a giant octopus, plus a few quills made from the feathers of a cockatrice, basically bits from appropriately themed monsters, plus a couple of herbs and minerals.

Although it must be said, those were funky herbs and minerals. A sprig of something gathered by moonlight by a blind man, bits of a specific rock ground by a man who had no hands, three virgin's tears, etc.

And, since no one wants to go through all of that effort alone, you spend money at shops where savvy merchants have collected stuff generally useful, commission others to go out and collect the few specific things you need for this project, add on some monster bits and go.

So the quickest, most convenient road to making items is what the players do. They spread around some gold to pay for all of the reagents they need, funky ones and all, then spend some time closeted in their labs combining it all and emerge with a magic item.

But a hermit living alone in the forest can still make magic items. He just has to do all of the legwork collecting the funky bits himself, or find appropriate alternates. Time goes from weeks to years, but it doesn't have to cost anything but xp - which is probably why so many artifacts were produced by lone madmen.

[Skysaber]

The weird thing is, most of a fantasy world's economy could be tied to this. Say a wizard needs, as one of his funky, exotic components to enchant something, "a cherry blossom petal that has fallen at midnight into a still pool". Well, he grumbles and go and finds some cherry trees that overhang some pools, waits for cherry blossom season, grumbling the whole while, collects what he needs and leaves. Such an ingredient can take a year to collect if you find out you need it right after the season has passed.

But it's a pretty fair guess that wherever thee are fruit trees, and especially ones over decorative ponds, there are peasants tending to them. They would have listened to that wizard grumbling, as he probably stayed at an inn among them, and what reason does he have to keep it secret? It's not like they are going to stop him from grabbing some petals. If he's of a level to be making magic items it's doubtful they could stand in his way if they wanted to, and what reason do they have to try? No, he's just upset over the time this errand is wasting, so he grumbles.

But the thing is, most wizards have apprentices, and even those who don't make notes. When one wizard makes a recipe for something, others are going to find out about it. And if it was a useful enough item for one wizard to make, others may find they want it too. So next year rolls around, and those peasants around that pond note that the cherry blossoms are about to fall again, and some of them go out at midnight to gather them just as they saw the wizard did. Why? Well, if one wizard needed them, why not more? Besides, peasants are always hard up for currency and could use a litle boost.

So they sell those handfuls of petals and the story of why and how they gathered them to a passing merchant for a few coppers, who goes to some town or other, passing along the petals and the story of how and why they were important to a guy who owns a magic shop - who consults with a wizard who probably contacts the first wizard to confirm things. Once the details have been nailed down, the shop owner pays the caravan master a few silver for those petals, and then puts them in a box on a shelf, confident that should the recipe of that first wizard get around he'll have customers come looking for them.

And he has every reason to be right about that assumption, because the wizard he consulted to talk to the first wizard about "is this a genuine ingredient or not?" now knows that recipe exists, and that one of its more troublesome ingredients now sits on a shelf in that shop. The first wizard, the one who made the recipe in the first place, then got contacted about "are these petals the same thing you used in your recipe or not?" knows that if he has to make a second batch of the first one, that it will be much less painful this time, as instead of waiting around a whole year he only has to visit that shop and pay out some gold.

So the guy, his colleague, their apprentices, all of these plus many other associates and perhaps some more people the merchants talked to, are all aware of this supply available, and what it could be used for. And should that first box of petals sell, the shop owner talks to that caravan master, who goes back to that peasant village and says "next year I'd like more of the same, please."

And those peasants have every reason to give it to him because, hey! A few free coppers! (That become silver when sold to the shop merchant, who then gets gold from those wizards).

Thousands or even millions of little ingredient pipelines like that could exist, and reasonably should in any fantasy world where wizards are out collecting obscure ingredients to create magic wonders. Adventurers go out and collect gold, which they then give to shopkeepers for goods (mostly in the form of magic items) who pay it to wizards and priests who create those items, who use parts of it to pay for their ingredients, and so on throughout the economy.

[Skysaber]

Sorry about the multi-post. I just can't seem to stop thinking about this.

Pushing out our example about the cherry blossoms a bit. Let's say that recipe becomes popular, that lots of people start to use it. That means there is a continual market for the ingredients, but some people working on this discover that some years the reagent acts different than at other times. Some investigation follows, and a mage ties the potency of the fallen cherry petals to what phase of the moon shone in the pond as it fell.

Well, the first change that happens is some guys crack open old almanacs to see what the phase of the moon was when the cherry blossoms fell in which year, and the next thing you know there are several boxes of blossoms on the magic shop shelves clearly labeled with full moon, new moon, waxing crescent, waning crescent, overcast, and so on, with varying prices for potency.

Now lets say a mage starts working on a more powerful version of the first recipe. He knows he wants whatever effect the cherry blossoms were giving the first recipe, but none of the known kinds have enough oomph for him. So he does some research and determines that what he really needs is a bunch of the same cherry blossom petals that had fallen at midnight into a still pool, only gathered by a noble's daughter.

Well, he goes to the shopkeeper who says he'll look into it. The shopkeeper sends an agent to the noble over the village that has been gathering these cherry blossoms each year (so he doesn't sound too barmy when he makes the request), and, hat in hand, he presents this request to the noble, who promptly charges him a small fortune, but agrees to send his daughter out to gather cherry blossoms at midnight that year.

Paying people to perform such otherwise unreasonable requests for you just to see if it works is probably where the bulk of all magical research costs go.

Still, cherry blossom season comes by, and the noble explains to his daughter "This will pay for a whole new unit for our army, and we need the troops!" and the daughter sets off with a proper escort to the pond, grumbling all the while about how unreasonable her father is being.

If the reagent works out the way the mage thought it would in making a newer, better version of the original recipe, that daughter would be there the next year as well, and the next, until in a few years it's an annual celebration where just before midnight a few squires clear the surface of the water by dragging a sheet through it, so only those that fell precisely at midnight would be on the water for the girls to gather.

At the stroke of midnight, somebody subtly kicks the tree to encourage more blossoms to fall, while a handful of ladies in waiting sit beneath its branches waving paper fans as if to fan themselves, but really everybody knows what it really does is blow petals that might land on the ground into the water, while the noble's daughter and her younger sister gather them up out of the pond with long handled butterfly nets.

A bard sings softly, and everybody has a great time, and more importantly they get a great income out of it and brag far and wide about the quality of their cherry blossom reagents.

Left undisturbed, such a scene would mature into those girls teaching their daughters and granddaughters how to gather cherry blossoms at midnight, while all over the world wizards are busy puttering with the reagents.

So, yes, some reagents would be farmed. In some cases they'd have to be. What happens when a wizard is pottering along when his project suddenly stalls as he finally narrows down what he needs as "Sand gathered from the middle of a desert by the hand of a man who had never before touched land"?

All of the really powerful magic items make you pay through the nose to make them. Buying stuff that does not exist in any form would do that.

At first the wizard would probably approach merfolk to strike a deal with them to see if that would do it. But when his tests reveal it doesn't, what then?

Well, he's got to arrange for it to happen. There is no other way to get what he is out for. So he probably does something like approach a sea captain to get the captain's pregnant wife on board to have the child on board the ship and, if the child is male, bring it up so it never touches land.

All of this costs a terrific amount, both to convince the captain in the first place, then pay for his inconvenience over the years as it progresses, and possibly even add enchantments to his ship to protect this investment as sea travel is risky. Finally, a number of years later, he flies the young man out to the middle of the desert to get his sand.

So, if you want to know why that +10 sword is expensive, now you know why. They probably had to pay that sea captain's family enough to buy a whole new ship, enchant it, then still leave enough to retire on after the deed was done. When the unused portion of that handful of sand winds up in a box on the shelf of a magic shop, the mage who put it there on commission wants his investment back.

And the funny part is, when that town falls as kingdoms often do, and years later when adventurers are walking through that magic shop, they find those cherry blossom petals gathered by noble girls, and the rest of that sand, and all of the rest of what would have been gathered there, and they demand, "So we're going through the ruins of a magic shop, what do we find?"

And he tells them, "Well, you open some boxes to find dried herbs, a bit of bone, some kind of rock, one holds some sand..."

Player cuts him off, "Sand? Must be some kind of dust. I throw a handful in the air."

"Nothing happens."

Other player, "Oh, man! What's with all of this junk? Where is all of the Magic?"

[Yogibear41]

I'm glad I inspired you :smallsmile:

good stuff you've got there, think I will send a link of this to my DM he would probably enjoy reading something like this.