Shops: Snake Oils and Little Miracles
For this next installment, we are going to be helping the average DM create more sophisticated shops for their campaign, whether big or small a town needs some sort of attractions, local treasures, and maybe even some tourist traps for the party to get lured into, or for them to frequent if they happen to get a home in the city, but lets dive into some creation to help the stock stand out to our party.
Taverns, Inns, and Spas
To get us started, lets talk about our drinking establishments, relaxation areas, and places for our weary travelers to rest their head. Inns and Taverns are some of the bread and butter of D&D, between our starting point, a constant quest spot, a place for our wonderful troupe of misfits to get into some bar fights and other antics this place will be a safe haven and for one reason or another be frequently visited. We can start with a menu giving the party meals for some amount of money, based on how 'upscale' that this establishment is, drinks, and a bed. We can go right outside town for our ingredients for the menu, is there a farm? Then steaks, pork chops, lamb, and plenty of veggies for our adventurers. Do we have a traveling caravan who comes and delivers supplies to the town? Then maybe we can expand our menu to more intricate meals of lavish boar meals served with fresh apples. We also can look into the surroundings for our drinks, we could have a local mead brewery, or winery for the tavern to get their drinks from, basing this on a possible several things, such as who lives in this town, which I discussed in a prior blog post you can find here, elves of all kinds, snobby humans, and gnomes would probably be more akin to a winery whereas orcs, dwarves, goliaths, and genasi would be more akin to the hearty mead to accompany their meals.
Onto the beds and other sleeping needs, is this a high class establishment? We'd have the price higher up (our playgroup only uses gold, so in this case 25-50 gp range for a night), and would have more things in the room such as a nicer bed, a closet, and possibly a chest to keep their things in or other amenities. If we are in a little dingy side town, starting town, or the such we would be looking at a low to moderate rate (5-15gp) and think about having the food included with the bed, and a decent amount of time in these towns we have possible 'companionship' available because of the kind of area we are in. Moving on to the more scarce facilities of spas, we have a few options of what we could do here, just a relaxation area for a few gp and no benefit or we could have it as having "special healing properties", we could make that as simple as a free small heal akin to a short rest, or it could be something bigger like a Greater Restoration and have the rumors of how great this spa is be true. Now that we have handled the relaxation, lets talk about some real shops and talk about how to structure them
Shopping Spree!
Your party just defeated your campaigns first big encounter, heading back to town your group has taken a long rest, leveled up and have awoken with a reward waiting for you from the innkeeper, One thousand gold for you and your three party members to split! Alas there seems to be no shops, and the ones that are there don't have any inventory! Lets dig deeper into your shops so they don't run out of stock and keep having your parties patronage. We have a few typical archetypes for shops to look at such as a potion shop, a blacksmith, and lets say a tool shop. Fortunately enough for us, we have the Player Handbook for tools and blacksmith wares. Some of the best ways for you to accomplish your goal of stocking your shop is to grab the items from the PHB and using the money values in there to make your shops quick and simple, your swords, armors, and basic tools are taken care of. However there does come a time where your players will want their sword to be more efficient in combat, or they just cleared out the mines of some nasty kobolds and were lucky enough to find some mithral, cobalt, or even some assorted gems to make themselves a better weapon or armor, what do we do then? Lets go from the easiest to the hardest for this, creating a new weapon or a new set of armor can be done very simply by gathering the materials and being given an allotted time that the item will be finished, tacking on an amount of gold for the material and for the time to create the item, usually a multiplication of say 3-5 based on the material for the overall price (mithral armor is usually around 500gp based on my research and experience). The more complex situation now, is the question of enchanting weapons and armor, which is up to DM discretion. There are many ways for someone to enchant their items based on research, between you enchanting an item yourself, by making an arcana check with DC equal to 8 + 2 x Spell level, which for cantrips would always cast them at level 1 damage instead of scaling with the character.
Secondarily, how my typical playgroups have addressed this, you may take a gem of x type plus your item to an enchanter and pay money and wait an allotted amount of time to have it enchanted with the damage type that the gem you provided gives (ruby being fire, sapphire being ice, and etc), and vice versa with armor giving you resistance to said damage type. Now the more intricate enchantments, such as an arrow of slaying, are completely up to the DM discretion and usually are a flat rate and having to find a very specific NPC to have even a slight possibility of getting said enchantment due to its strength. Finally, back to our starting prompt, the potion shop. This one is slightly difficult to discuss, because the only book we have to go off of is the Dungeon Masters Guide which just gives us a list of the items on pages 187-188. I believe that these should be anywhere between 25 gold (for minor and regular healing potions which minor heal for 1d4+4) and 500 gold (Potion of Giant Strength, Fire Giant or higher variants). For stock, always have healing potions and the such of common and uncommon rarity available, and even give the capabilities of having your players learn the healing potion recipe(s) basing it off of medicine or nature, depending on their character. Now onto some more specialty shops for more advanced player usage.
Specials! Buy 1 Get 2 Free!
In this section, these won't necessarily all be shops. We have gone over most of the real shops that will be frequent and will be encountered regularly to be dealt with, but there are some special cases that we will talk about in this section, such as guilds, mage colleges, travelling merchants, and "magic shops" to put a blanket onto our last topic. Now what is a guild? Most of the time it is a group of people or something close to a company that your players can work for. That isn't all it can be though, they can always get specials that normal adventurers wouldn't naturally get, this can spearhead your story into some bad decisions or can make your players a few extra gp to play around with. A main thing that the guild can offer though is free board, free meals, and if desired better deals or access to equipment. We can also discuss the capabilities of being trained in skills so that your players can do something in their down time such as getting taught how to use thieves tools, or being taught an extra language! Using this facility to their advantage will also give a possibility of not having to keep track of as many extra NPCs and only having 3-4 NPCs named in the guild for ease of DMing. Next to the Mage Colleges, we can buy exclusive magic books, get possible better prices selling magical items that the party doesn't want to the enchanting teacher, or your parties wizard could get some benefit out of studying there and have to pay less for inscribing a spell into their book (at the DMs discretion of course). Travelling merchants can be very fun to create, just having enough items to get them through and more likely to barter and trade for their wares, but in very limited stock so just having a notecard worth of information for them is always a good idea. Our final note, while in a blanket statement, is on "magic shops" which can mean a number of things. First we could take it literally and have the shop be magic in many ways, including magical items, or magically there. Next we can always have a component shop, for the players who'd rather have a component bag than an arcane focus, and for the players who want to practice alchemy or use another one of the artisan tools that are very under utilized, and to some extent ignored in 5e. The final option for this is a miscellaneous magical shop, such as a fortune teller, or a specific enchanter, and the such. With the fortune teller, however, divination magic comes at a price, and sometimes based on the benevolence of the seller could be small and a few pieces of gold or if they're more on the malevolent side such as a hag, or demon they could take a price such as your memories, magical items, or even something more dear to your character.
In conclusion, stock up and use the handbooks to your advantage, and hopefully this stocks your store shelves for many campaigns to come. Never be afraid to look online for homebrew items if you are not sure of what to use or want some more interesting stock, and as most things in D&D go talk to your players, they could have something magic or not that sounds like an item that they would want to use or find and you can always tweak the way your shops work later on!
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