It’s up to you and your players how much importance you want to place on gold, equipment, and loot in your campaign.

Your players might operate as a band of thieves who rob their adversaries, a group of spiritual devotees who abstain from acquiring possessions, or a company of adventurers whose approach to wealth and possessions lands somewhere in the middle. You can also utilize wealth and equipment to adjust the dial between realism and fantasy. If your game has a more survivalist tone and players need gold to buy food, their interactions with opportunities to acquire wealth will be very different than if you handwave the cost of rations.

Distributing Gold

Using gold as a quest reward can give your players a fun way to procure new equipment for future adventures. This book leaves the price of items up to you, allowing you to decide how much importance you want to place on gold in your campaign and how costly individual items are if and when they become available.

If you don’t want to worry about gold in your campaign, you can let PCs shop by abstracting payment and letting each player choose one or two items. When you do this, rather than letting them choose from every item, you can encourage them to shop around by only offering a few items that make sense for that location, have bonuses and abilities you want to make available, or fit your party’s tastes and goals.

If you’d rather gold play a larger role in your game, the following sections provide further guidance on pricing equipment.

Distributing Equipment

At character creation, players can choose from the starting weapons and armor. The remainder of the equipment is organized by rarity and should be made available to players as the party journeys through the campaign. For example, you can stock a few options in shops along the PCs’ journey, provide equipment as part of an NPC’s reward, or allow them to pull weapons and armor off of the adversaries they’ve defeated. The average costs of items and services can be found on the Average Costs table in the upcoming “Economy of Your World” section.

You can raise the price of weapons and armor with unique magical qualities or worldbuilding implications. For example, armor the PCs can use to disguise themselves or an enchanted sword that has been outlawed in a specific region will fetch a higher price.

Regardless of how you treat the overall economy in your campaign, keep in mind how common a weapon or armor is in a particular city or region—and how generous or stingy a particular shopkeeper might be.

Distributing Loot

The tables of items and consumables in chapter 2 are organized to help you distribute loot based on its prevalence and impact. The lower the number of an item or consumable on a list, the less it tends to impact play and the more commonly it can be found in a typical fantasy economy.

Consumables are fun to use and less powerful than permanent items, so you can offer common consumables pretty regularly during a campaign. Outside of buying them from shops along the way, you might consider having an NPC offer a bundle of consumables as a gesture of good faith to get in the PCs’ good graces, or scattering a few around an enemy camp for the PCs to pick up as they sneak through. When the campaign nears its climax or you want to highlight an important moment, you might find a narrative reason to give the PCs a few rare or legendary consumables and items.

You’re highly encouraged to make your own items and consumables for your campaign to personalize it for your story. Like other equipment, loot has no set gold cost; instead, the cost should reflect how often you’re giving gold as a reward, as well as how commonplace that loot might be locally.