Random Shop Stock Generator?

[Meierme176]

I am trying to build my world and have a LOT of unique merchants. I was wondering if there is a 3.5 generator that could help me come up with stock based off shop type. Like if I have a weapons smith, I only want it to populate weapons. If a generator doesn't exist, how would you guys go about doing this?

[RNightstalker]

It might be easier to come up with a system of availability, where all simple weapons are available and 90% of martial weapons are available, etc. Maybe a little RP/Gather Information to find the only one in town with a repeating crossbow. The availability could be determined by the race of the smith: longbows and longswords in an elven shop, hammer and axes from a dwarven smith, etc.

Another alternative could be using a treasure generator if you can set it to weapons only?

[Aegis013]

Try donjon (Donjon.bin.sh). Under D20/Fantasy it has a magic item shop generator. In your example, you could choose "weaponsmith" and the town size and it'll randomly generate the store's stock. It'll even generate a shopkeeper NPC and some random details of that sort.

It only uses info and items available on the SRD, so if you want stuff included from the MiC or other sources, it may not suit your needs.

[Asmotherion]

are usually describe some common items that would be expected to be in the shop. If the player was looking for something specific I just do a percentage roll to see if it's available in stock.

if you want more sophisticated mechanics, I'm afraid I'm not aware of an existing generator. it is however very easy to improvise. just list some items thar are probabile of being in stock in a d100 table. first roll the d100 to see how many items the shop has; then roll that many times on the table. Finally, roll a d10 to see the stock the shop has available for each item. quite time consuming I know but actually worth it when creating a setting from scratch.

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

There's a guild of magic item shops, each one's back room is empty except for a permanent teleportation circle. They each have a person who retrieves orders from the back room once payment is collected. That person takes the payment through the teleportation circle, and arrives at a counter in a secure location.

He places an order at that counter and provides payment for the item. That person takes it to their back room, through a permanent portal to a pocket plane. That pocket plane is the most secure location in the universe. They take the payment and order to a counter there, and the item is retrieved from the warehouse.

A similar process is followed when adventurers sell items. It's taken through the same route and exchanged for payment at a fixed rate. Since the shop itself isn't buying it, no haggling is ever possible.

Records are kept for each store, and the workers are paid via the same method. Nobody has ever successfully robbed the vault, any who have attempted are blacklisted for life along with any current and future known associates. Such individuals aren't able to ever buy or sell magic items again, without going through a middleman who charges a hefty fee.

[Fizban]

Before you can generate standing inventory, you have to decide how much standing inventory there should be. Followed by just how random you want it to be. Actually before both of those you have to consider whether "weapon" shop is appropriate, considering that magic items are expensive and you either need someone who creates them or who trades in such expensive goods directly in order to find one.

An appropriate standing inventory for a shop is equal to the standard treasure for beating all the defenses the shop has (possible double or triple if you think you can make your shop defenses strong enough that the PCs would rather fight a boss-tier monster than a shop, but trap CRs and rewards are wonky). No, this is not very many magic items at all. Turns out the moment you look at anything, the "gp limit" rule breaks down and you have to switch to tracking the NPCs which can craft items, and maybe the NPCs with enough levels that they're wielding items (which they won't want to sell anyway so. . . ).

For how random- the DMG has some nod to the commonality of certain armors and weapons, but come on. There is no reason anyone will enchant anything other than full plate, breastplate, hide (for druids), chain shirt, or studded leather (for people with no armor proficiency), unless you rebuild the entire base armor table so each armor has a reason to exist. As for weapons and other items, there's more chance of weird exotic weapons being dug up and going around, but in an actual trading system no one is going to pay full price for those, and now you have to think about how prices should work.

You don't need to have permanent Teleportation Circles in every town- just one arcanist merchant with Secret Chest and maybe Sending (or Whispering Sand) and Teleport, with a suitably warded and securable room, which can appear in roughly 50% of Small cities and every Large city or larger. The network of traders have lists of each others' inventory (in code of course), and you can presume that any item you don't find suitably exotic is found somewhere. Or you can shortcut and go straight to calling up outsiders that live in the extraplanar cities. And either are only needed if you can't wait for crafting.

d20srd.org also has a random shop generator (http://www.d20srd.org/d20/magic/shop.html). No idea what criteria its using, but when even a Thorp can have a +2 weapon, it's probably entirely arbitrary rather than respecting the existing rules.

[Meierme176]

It might be easier to come up with a system of availability, where all simple weapons are available and 90% of martial weapons are available, etc. Maybe a little RP/Gather Information to find the only one in town with a repeating crossbow. The availability could be determined by the race of the smith: longbows and longswords in an elven shop, hammer and axes from a dwarven smith, etc.

Another alternative could be using a treasure generator if you can set it to weapons only?

I like this idea, though I may do it on a larger scale.


Try donjon (Donjon.bin.sh). Under D20/Fantasy it has a magic item shop generator. In your example, you could choose "weaponsmith" and the town size and it'll randomly generate the store's stock. It'll even generate a shopkeeper NPC and some random details of that sort.

It only uses info and items available on the SRD, so if you want stuff included from the MiC or other sources, it may not suit your needs.

I think I will use this to generate a "specialty stock" as well as have a general stock that every weapons smith, armor smith, etc. will have.


are usually describe some common items that would be expected to be in the shop. If the player was looking for something specific I just do a percentage roll to see if it's available in stock.

if you want more sophisticated mechanics, I'm afraid I'm not aware of an existing generator. it is however very easy to improvise. just list some items thar are probabile of being in stock in a d100 table. first roll the d100 to see how many items the shop has; then roll that many times on the table. Finally, roll a d10 to see the stock the shop has available for each item. quite time consuming I know but actually worth it when creating a setting from scratch.

Oh, I might actually do this for enchantments. Thank you!


There's a guild of magic item shops, each one's back room is empty except for a permanent teleportation circle. They each have a person who retrieves orders from the back room once payment is collected. That person takes the payment through the teleportation circle, and arrives at a counter in a secure location.

He places an order at that counter and provides payment for the item. That person takes it to their back room, through a permanent portal to a pocket plane. That pocket plane is the most secure location in the universe. They take the payment and order to a counter there, and the item is retrieved from the warehouse.

A similar process is followed when adventurers sell items. It's taken through the same route and exchanged for payment at a fixed rate. Since the shop itself isn't buying it, no haggling is ever possible.

Records are kept for each store, and the workers are paid via the same method. Nobody has ever successfully robbed the vault, any who have attempted are blacklisted for life along with any current and future known associates. Such individuals aren't able to ever buy or sell magic items again, without going through a middleman who charges a hefty fee.

Oh I will most definitely be using this idea but giving it Fizban 's spin. I will have my magic shops have a special chest that they will drop an order in and after a set time, they will hear a knock telling them that it has been delivered.

Thank you all for your advise, you helped a lot!

[Fizban]

Note that the reason I specify the Secret Chest spell is that it is impossibly secure. No one but the caster can retrieve the chest, and it even has a 60 day dead man's switch if the caster is unable to retrieve it. The only way to intercept it is with an "extraplanar expedition," which heavily implies that like the alternate function of Teleport Object, the intent here is not just putting it on the ethereal plane in the same spot (which you could do with a Blink spell), but that it vanishes to a random spot. Which means that the only real hope of finding it is by having personally seen the chest or an object it contains and using Discern Location, or using Wish.

Of course, I do not believe that the kind of monolithic "we have everything available at all times and branches in all places" magic item mart is supported by the rules, simply because there aren't enough high level casters to do that. A two-way object teleporting chest is massively expensive, far more than a permanent Teleportation Circle, and teleport object itself is 7th level, and having a way in is a huge security problem multiplied by the number of entrances. You need a Small city just to have a 75% chance of one 9th level wizard, who might have the spells required to safely store an excess of items. Each Metropolis has only four high level wizards, and none have 9th level spells. Depending on how big your world is, there's barely anyone to contact unless the DM is adding tons of extra fiat leveled NPCs, and published setting large enough are of course broken into different countries and factions that don't form a monolithic magic mart.

At best I'd say roll randomly for whether the local mercantile inclined wizard has some extra stock in a Secret Chest which happens to be what you want, or knows someone elsewhere who has it on hand (and can Teleport you between for a separate fee), or is able to Planar Bind up a genie to do some shopping or Wishing, or is an associate of the one 17th level wizard who fancies themselves a magic mart and hands out scrolls of Teleport Object (2,275 gp surcharge for the lower level local to scroll of Teleport Object the money and order, plus 1,190gp for the holder to Teleport Object the goods back). And that's like a 50/50 chance (just arbitrary choice there), otherwise they don't have any connections and the only stuff you can get in town are things that can be produced or wrested from the few other high level NPCs.

Because an actual magic item mart requires like an order of magnitude more organization and power than most campaign's Organizations.

[Morof Stonehands]

Self promoting here but I created an excel spreadsheet random treasure generator that incorporates every book/adventure/magazine/web article that I know of (over 6000 items). You can choose exactly what sources you use. It has a store inventory generator in it as well, with stock (up to 15 items) being limited by the community size as outlined in the DMG. It currently only has 4 stores (non-Magic Armor, non-Magic weapon, magic items, general non-Magic goods). But I’ll be making an update at some point and will add some more preset stores!

[Emperor Tippy]

The easiest way is to go with Magical!Amazon.

Planar Binding lets you call and bind a Hound Archon, which has at will greater teleport. Give it a bag of holding and it can carry things around easily.

Get to higher level and you get a Permanent Telepathic Bond with your personal delivery Archon. At lower levels, they get given a circuit and have message locations. When that kind of service is handling all of the delivers worth and significant amount of money, what is left in the shops is whatever low level odds and sods the shop has collected and are liable to have a decent chance of being sold to visitors; everything else getting sold via Amazon.

For extra hiliarity, have the Church of Boccob running the service and have it use Solars of Boccob for its enforcers and higher level agents. Attack the Hound Archon making a delivery? Well suddenly you have half a dozen Solars equipped for war dropping in on you a round later and chastising you for attacking their delivery dog.

[TallerSpine]

The d20srd.org Random Shop Generator is my favorite (Fizban already linked, but here it is again):

https://www.d20srd.org/d20/magic/shop.html