How to sell a LOT of adamantine without unbalancing the plot and WBL?

[Propagandalf]

This is from the Serpent's Skull Adventure Path, so minor spoilers ahead.

So, our 13th level party just saved a plot important NPC from the castle of serpentfolk. He was being held in a cage of pure adamantine and in chains of pure adamantine. And that was not the only cage in the room...

So we now have 1200kg (2643 lbs.) of "pure, magically strengthened" adamantine (weight is GM's estimate since it wasn't marked down anywhere).:smallbiggrin:

Needless to say that's a quite a lot of moneeh right there. The problem is that as far as the GM can figure out, the writers never intended for the PC's to loot the cages themselves, just break them and free the NPC... He doesn't want to screw us over and just GM fiat the "magical adamantine" into garbage when it leaves the castle, but neither does he want to give us that much gold to buy stuff with.

So my question is: How to turn all that wealth into possessions without completely wrecking the WBL? :smallconfused:

Some things we already discussed:
-Buy land and deeds (or a castle or a town etc.).
-Use it to craft armor and weapons (this would be an epilogue of sorts since it takes a lot of time).
-...?
-Profit.

So, any ideas?:smallsmile:

[urkthegurk]

Have the cages belong to an archmage, from whom the serpentfolk stole these devices. Perhaps the original owner died, and their heirs want to collect the material. So the owner offers a reward to the party for their retrieval of these cages, something like the land-and-titles, or maybe (if their high-level) their own demiplane.

Plus, melting down what is essentially a set of incredibly rare artifacts, perhaps thousands of years old, would essentially be a crime, both morally and perhaps literally. This is a reality sometimes you face when you do tomb-raiding as a living. Would there even be a market for that much Adamantine? The buyer would have to be incredibly rich, perhaps the only perspective buyer turns out to be the representative of a demon lord, and the metal will be used to house baby souls or something comparably awful. Selling them as a group is similarly difficult, selling them one at a time, or selling the melted down material over a period of years, as the market finds demand and cash to make the purchase, might be too wide a time frame for most players. And there's always the chance that, with that much adamantine sitting around, it would get stolen.

ANyway, thats all. Basically, I'd advocate making the sale of that much stuff more complicated, and treat it like an adventure in itself, even if you don't play it out scene-by-scene.

[Red Fel]

One option is simply an inability to pay for it. Consider the fact that there is a finite amount of money in any given place, it's possible that even the wealthiest benefactors simply can't afford to pay a fair price, in money or land or titles, for all that adamantine. Now, favors, that's a different form of currency entirely, and one that doesn't generally unbalance WBL. Heck, you might have the party trade it to some church or supernatural being, in exchange for a feat or feat-equivalent power-up, or simply a promise of future aid.

And what is WBL, anyway? WBL is a descriptive metric designed to suggest that, at any given level, if your party is equipped with an approximate value, they should be reasonably able to confront level-appropriate challenges. WBL, like CR or alignment, is not a straightjacket; there is no requirement that WBL must be adhered to, or that all cashflow must stop until WBL is rebalanced. It's not hard to work around unbalanced WBL. For example, have the PCs confront stronger enemies with less lootable goods until their levels catch up with their newfound fortune.

Or, backtracking - the land-and-titles option, while it technically counts as wealth, in no way impacts your combat capabilities, which is the primary purpose for the WBL metric. If you own a fortified keep, that doesn't make you any better-equipped to slay a dragon or close a portal to the Abyss. What it does do is give your PCs a great big juicy adventure hook or three - outfitting, populating, and protecting a castle.

Here's a great way to spin it. Your party returns having rescued the NPC, and takes the adamantine to a local high-ranked noble. The noble promises to put the adamantine to good use (plot hook the first: did he keep his promise? Or will the PCs later meet magically reinforced adamantine golems or something?), and rewards the PCs with their own expansive castle and title. Just one problem - the castle is infested with (insert monster here), and the PCs have to clear it out in order to claim it. (Plot hook the second: Clearing the keep.) Once your PCs clear the castle, however, it's theirs, and they'll probable receive a bit of extra purse from the adamantine with which to furnish it. Now, having a castle is nice and all, but securing and populating it is even better. (Plot hook the third: Designing a castle; plot hook the fourth: attracting servants and serfs.)

Bam, you now have several adventures charted out, and your PCs have a personal investment in the world. The castle will pay dividends both in plot hooks and its ability to generate wealth in the long run (having servants is nice, but having a small personal vanguard and blacksmiths and craftsmen is even better); but won't unbalance WBL for purpose of encounter challenge ratings.

[nyjastul69]

It might be a simple as a supply and demand issue. If they drop that much adamantine on a single settlement of any size, the price will likely drop significantly. The size of the community might not be able to buy any of it. In addition, dropping that much valuable metal in a community, that can handle it, might anger other merchants. This situation is rife for RP situations the players haven't really thought through.

[Slipperychicken]

Melt it down into bars, maybe use Fabricate to triple its value by turning it into finished goods, get someone with a very good Diplomacy score to negotiate prices for you, and hop between planar metropolises hawking your adamantine products. Then retire to a life of luxury. Make your own plane of existence, with blackjack and hookers. Actually, forget the plane..


Also find that castle's treasury and steal everything in there. Those people have got to be loaded if they can throw down so much money on adamantine cages.

[pwykersotz]

Keep the cage. Seriously, the next time you need to contain something, you have a ready made cell in your portable hole.

If you don't foresee a use, just melt it down to bars and keep it on hand for future weapon development. You don't need to liquidate it at all. It can also be a handy bargaining chip for negotiations..."I have three bars of magically treated adamantine for you if you make my zoning issues disappear."

[Sam K]

Don't forget, large amounts of high value goods that can only be used by a small market segment (how many people actually need adamantine?) can be incredibly hard to sell, especially in bulk. While adamantine is expensive and rare, there are limited uses for it, and most require other special skills or resources. The kind of people who can use it (people with lots of class levels) may not have much gold laying around (much of their wealth is tied up in gear), and people who have lots of gold around may not want to spend it on hard-to-move goods (merchants prefer goods they can quickly turn a profit on).

Buyers with class levels is most likely to engage in a trade of favours; this is essentially what PCs do quite often (undertaking missions for rewards). A church or mage academy can offer expensive spells cast, or trade for other rare goods (but it's quite hard to persuade someone to part with magic items or other directly useful items in exchange for what is essentially raw material - you are unlikely to get the market price this way).

In addition to trading for land or assistance, you could try to get a trusted merchant/fence to slowly sell it off. This gives the DM an easy way to handle the income, because it can be turned into a steady stream of revenue instead of the "big chunk of WBL breaking gold" it otherwise risks becoming. The merchant will take a cut; I wouldn't be surprised if he wants 50%, which is reasonable assuming he can move it at a steady phase and can provide security for the merchandise.

[Slipperychicken]

Maybe you could get planar arms dealers to help you move all that adamantium?

[atemu1234]

I think that keeping it is the best option. If it's pure adamantine, then there actually is an issue, as it has to be alloyed with other metals (I think that's what the description said) to be used in anything, though this if anything makes it more horribly expensive. I recommend that you melt it into one pound bars and get a fortified keep to hold them, and operate out of there.

[HaikenEdge]

I agree with the sentiment of keeping them; adamantine cages and chains are difficult to break or burst, making them ideal for when you need to hold captives of your own. If there are multiple cages, perhaps you should consider using them as bargaining chips/gifts when dealing with nobility; so, gift a noble an adamantine cage and chains, so they cna better restrain their most dangerous prisoners, and maybe you'll be able to be on more friendly terms with the nobleperson.

[Slipperychicken]

I think that keeping it is the best option. If it's pure adamantine, then there actually is an issue, as it has to be alloyed with other metals (I think that's what the description said) to be used in anything, though this if anything makes it more horribly expensive. I recommend that you melt it into one pound bars and get a fortified keep to hold them, and operate out of there.

What if you just used "adamantium pieces" of a unit of exchange, like people do with gems and diamonds? Adamantium is much more valuable than gold, so people should be willing to trade for it.

[atemu1234]

What if you just used "adamantium pieces" of a unit of exchange, like people do with gems and diamonds? Adamantium is much more valuable than gold, so people should be willing to trade for it.

I always thought it wasn't used as standard currency because it's rare. But if you have 2,400 kilo bars of it, maybe you could. Still, I'd expect them to weigh around 1/10 of a pound like normal coins, so they'd still be rare.

[dextercorvia]

The best way to handle it without wrecking WBL is to buy some setting related benefit instead of gear. Now, instead of the cruddy inn, you have a floating castle base, or something. It doesn't give you a mechanical advantage, just a status one.

[Slipperychicken]

I always thought it wasn't used as standard currency because it's rare. But if you have 2,400 kilo bars of it, maybe you could. Still, I'd expect them to weigh around 1/10 of a pound like normal coins, so they'd still be rare.

I didn't say it would be a standard currency, just that you could use it as a trade good (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/equipment/wealthAndMoney.htm#wealthOtherThanCoins). Just like how people exchange pounds of platinum or electrum or gold, only you're using adamantium instead.

You'd go up to a vendor, negotiate a price for the goods, and hand him the equivalent value in adamantium (whatever the exchange rate is). It should be just as good as gold, if not better.

[atemu1234]

I looked online. Apparently it costs about 200 gp per pound. 2643 x 200 is 528,600 gp, or 52,860 pp. Not enough to really go that far off of WBL provided you level fairly quickly. My campaigns are often far behind WBL, but we do okay.

[Coidzor]

Installments.

The only convenient purchaser they have can't pay in wealth or magic items directly, but they do have some form of property they can give. This is less pertinent as far as giving them a home base if the castle of serpent people they just murdered is desirable real estate, of course, but it can still give them a territory they have some tie to that they may have to protect or investigate further or develop or what have you, or be another way that they can get the wealth value added to the party's coffers over time rather than as a lump sum.

If you make them employers of some sort, then they'd have some need to make payroll and that would be one way to level things off as well. Or it could be the "nest egg" they need to form a corporation/business/organization.

[Dr.Gara]

Just having it around isn't going to shatter your WbL at all. And selling it, as established, is next to impossible. Sure, a few thousand gallons of printer ink is really, really valuable, but there is no way in hell you're selling it all at once. You'll have to sell it bit by bit, liquidating parts of your massive asset. It basically works out like an investment, where you can't dump all the stock at once, so you drop bits of it until you make a profit.





Or you can use it to make a really hard to break wall, up to you.

[Coidzor]

And breaking WBL really isn't that scary as long as you prioritize broadening expenditures, things like Shax's haversack, rather than having one's expected gear and decent access to higher level effects that may or may not manage to trivialize certain things that were expected to be challenges.

[VoxRationis]

You could just sell the restraints as-is, which could conceivably lower the price due to a "lack of versatility," if the DM rules that the people don't have the technology to do anything with adamantine. But I'm guessing that's not the case.

[Reshy]

Could always make an Adamantine Golem (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Adamantine_Golem) and have it follow the party if you can find someone to make it. It'll probably be too big to fit into a dungeon or what not but it'd be useful if your party needs muscle. That way they get a bonus out of it in the form of what is basically a walking battering ram without the risk of them breaking the economy. Though I typically prefer doing crazy things over say, trading it in for favors or what not. Maybe a city is preparing for a war and could use that Adamantine for armor? Doing that would give you a lot of good karma with that particular nation.

[NichG]

Start a company 'Mystic Metals Exchange' or something like that, using the adamantine to finance and supply yourself. Use your adventuring to make planar contacts. Encourage the DM to use this as a plot point where random planar travelers come to you wanting to exchange some odd material for adamantine or some other thing, so you gradually turn a huge surplus of one material into a bevy of unique samples and things like that. Later on, if this gets big, the DM can have planar diplomats come to you as the prime contact in this crystal sphere to negotiate business, or have fiends/celestials seek you out for special materials to make the MacGuffin Swords of Conquering Good/Evil for their current prime projects, or have political prisoners use your transports to smuggle them off plane, or ...

The best part is, you don't have to stop adventuring and become bureaucrats or anything - hire a few NPCs to run it in your absence, and put all but ~300-400lbs of the stuff in a locked dimensional space so the NPCs aren't tempted to just run off with it (after all, they could have high-powered PCs after them, a material that is hard to dispose of subtly, and only a fifth of the total wealth that is tied to the business, or they could just do their low-risk, high-paid jobs)

[Telonius]

The problem is that as far as the GM can figure out, the writers never intended for the PC's to loot the cages themselves, just break them and free the NPC...

Yeah, you should always assume that if you describe it, the players will attempt to loot it. Massive adamantine door? The players will destroy the wall around it and cart it off.

I'd suggest that with that much pure adamantine, they're going to be very interesting to any master craftsmen who might be interested in obtaining it for whatever purposes. (Dwarves and Gnomes come to mind; maybe some Giant or Elf master smiths as well). If they don't sell it immediately, they'd probably be contacted by representatives with offers.

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

Dungeon fixtures are typically not something that can be retrieved. For example, they may have been placed in this room while the castle was being built, and now will not even fit through the door. Since they're magically strengthened, you wouldn't be able to crush or bend them to make them fit, and Shrink Item can't be cast on magical items.

Say they were made by the Drow, and turn to ash as soon as they're touched by sunlight.

[torrasque666]

I had a DM who made the mistake of giving us a 1 million platinum bounty on an npc in our midst. We just set up the limitation that it couldn't be used for anything actually used towards the game, just fluff. Probably came up with that after I offered to find people that I could pay to beat up and get XP from. So now we have a demiplane with our own tower that has a floor for each party member.

[WarKitty]

Dungeon fixtures are typically not something that can be retrieved. For example, they may have been placed in this room while the castle was being built, and now will not even fit through the door. Since they're magically strengthened, you wouldn't be able to crush or bend them to make them fit, and Shrink Item can't be cast on magical items.

Say they were made by the Drow, and turn to ash as soon as they're touched by sunlight.

This is a good way to make your players mad. If they go to the trouble of retrieving all that they should get some reward.

Personally I like the idea of selling it off for real estate. That much adamantium could be given to a dwarven clan in exchange for building a castle. Because having your own castle is actually really cool and can be a fun adventure hook, without unbalancing anything.

[Diarmuid]

One thing I dont think anyone has mentioned yet, is that it's completely unknown how "useful" or valuable the cage and chains are as raw material. If they've already been "magically strengthened", is it going to be easy to melt it down to use in some other fashion?

Now, they may certainly have high value in their current forms due to the intention of those forms, but as a raw material I wouldnt assume you could get a normal fair market value per pound as many are assuming.

[Coidzor]

Dungeon fixtures are typically not something that can be retrieved. For example, they may have been placed in this room while the castle was being built, and now will not even fit through the door. Since they're magically strengthened, you wouldn't be able to crush or bend them to make them fit, and Shrink Item can't be cast on magical items.

Say they were made by the Drow, and turn to ash as soon as they're touched by sunlight.

I'm reminded of a certain GM who made everything on dead NPCs explode as soon as the PCs went to search their bodies.


One thing I dont think anyone has mentioned yet, is that it's completely unknown how "useful" or valuable the cage and chains are as raw material. If they've already been "magically strengthened", is it going to be easy to melt it down to use in some other fashion?

Now, they may certainly have high value in their current forms due to the intention of those forms, but as a raw material I wouldnt assume you could get a normal fair market value per pound as many are assuming.

Most of us seem to have been less focused on the exact amount of the wealth and more on something nice that isn't intimidating to the DM, doesn't give the players the feeling that they're getting Monty Haul'd, doesn't risk them getting access to magical effects that are outside what the rest of the AP expects the players to have within their grasp at all, and/or doesn't just screw the players over with the might of DM screw.

So I'd say that's part of it and the other part is that the DM seems to be convinced that it's a fair chunk of wealth.

[hymer]

the OP who is the DM

I don't think he is, though:


(weight is GM's estimate since it wasn't marked down anywhere) [...] The problem is that as far as the GM can figure out [...] He doesn't want to screw us over and just GM fiat the "magical adamantine" into garbage when it leaves the castle, but neither does he want to give us that much gold to buy stuff with.

[Coidzor]

I don't think he is, though:

Ahh. My mistake then. Well at least there's the other bit then.

[Studoku]

It's the second rule of adventuring: Steal everything that's nailed down- that means it's valuable.

[Coidzor]

It's the second rule of adventuring: Steal everything that's nailed down- that means it's valuable.

And if you can manage it, steal the castle too. :smallcool:

[Big Fau]

[LIST]
Installments.


This. Instead of having the adamantine supercede the WBL, have it become the party's WBL over the course of the next few levels (namely by only making Xgp available to them from the sale and distribution of the adamantine, and having some low-EL encounters or low treasure enemies to catch them up to the level they need to be at).

RAW, non-weapons/armor/shields have no value if made from adamantine. Mithral has a value by weight, but adamantine doesn't. Realistically you could have some encounters with animals/zombies/other treasure-less enemies mixed into your planned retinue of regular encounters (cutting the amount of treasure you give out in half), then let the sales from the adamantine catch the PCs up.

[NichG]

This. Instead of having the adamantine supercede the WBL, have it become the party's WBL over the course of the next few levels (namely by only making Xgp available to them from the sale and distribution of the adamantine, and having some low-EL encounters or low treasure enemies to catch them up to the level they need to be at).

RAW, non-weapons/armor/shields have no value if made from adamantine. Mithral has a value by weight, but adamantine doesn't. Realistically you could have some encounters with animals/zombies/other treasure-less enemies mixed into your planned retinue of regular encounters (cutting the amount of treasure you give out in half), then let the sales from the adamantine catch the PCs up.

Except that getting treasure is fun, so while this will maintain the game balance, its better if you can do something else to achieve the same result. Since the players seem to be on board with trying to come up with a compromise solution to the influx of wealth, its best to take advantage of that and find some way to expend the wealth without increasing personal character power but which is still cool from an in-character perspective.

[Propagandalf]

Thanks for all the great ideas! :smallbiggrin: (Oh, and I'm one of the players. :smallsmile:)

The DM decided that we can use the wealth freely on castles, deeds and landownership.
So we'll probably be buying couple of small islands of the coast of Sargava as we'll as creating an extradimensional castle via Create Demiplane.

My greedy gnome summoner (for a mental image think of Scrooge McDuck at his worst :smalltongue:) will take care of the construction & negotiations. :smallamused:

The party's dwarf Monk has already settled for a extradimensional turnip field...:smallbiggrin: