Within your campaign, it’s up to you and your players how much importance you place on gold, equipment, and loot. Your players might operate as a band of thieves who rob all adversaries they face, they might be a group of spiritual devotees who abstain from acquiring new possessions as much as possible, or they might take an approach to wealth and possessions that land somewhere in the middle. You can also utilize wealth and equipment to adjust the dial between realism and fantasy. If you’d like to add a more survivalist tone to your game and players need gold to buy food, then they’ll likely interact with opportunities to acquire wealth very differently than if you choose to handwave a full pack 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.

If you don’t want to worry about gold in your campaign, you can always just let PCs go to a shop and talk with the merchant there, abstracting payment and letting each player choose an item or two. When you do this, rather than letting them choose from the whole tier list, you can encourage them to shop around by only offering a few that make sense for that location or fit your party’s interests.

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 have access to all starting weapons and armor (see “Equipment” in chapter 2). The remainder of the equipment is organized by rarity and should be made available to players as the party moves through their campaign. Often, this looks like choosing a few options to make available at shops along their journey or providing a new weapon as part of an NPC’s reward.

If you choose to give gold as a reward, but don’t want your campaign to be particularly driven by it, you can make most weapons and armor worth two handfuls of gold per tier (so two handfuls for Tier 1, four handfuls for Tier 2, six handfuls for Tier 3, and eight handfuls of gold for Tier 4).

If you want gold to play a larger part in your campaign, you might instead make most weapons and armor worth two handfuls of gold per tier (so two bags for Tier 1, four bags for Tier 2, six bags for Tier 3, and eight bags for Tier 4).

Regardless of your approach to setting prices, keep in mind how common a weapon or armor might be in a particular city or region—and how generous or stingy a particular shopkeeper might be.

Distributing Loot

When giving out loot, the lower the item or consumable number is on the list, the less impactful it tends to be. Consumables are often less powerful just by their nature, so if you want to give something to every low-level player, consider common consumables (see “Consumables” in chapter 2). If you’re looking for something a little more permanent, consider common items (see “Items” in chapter 2). On the other hand, if players are reaching the pinnacle of their campaign and you want to give them something very powerful, consider a few rare or legendary consumables and items.

You are highly encouraged to make your own items and consumables as you see fit for your campaign, mix and match loot to make it personalized for your story, or make choices of what to have in your world from the list and what to make unavailable. As with equipment, loot has no set gold cost; instead, the cost should reflect how often you are giving gold as a reward as well as how commonplace that loot might be locally.

Economy of Your World

More guidance coming soon on how to use gold for other aspects of your world!