Aetrimonde

For a quick change of pace (to hopefully help with some writer’s block…), I’m going to go over some of the advice that the GMH gives to help GMs insert treasure and monetary rewards into an adventure.

In the meantime, don’t forget that I’ve got a poll up that will determine which kind of Divine magic Ipki Chainbreaker will specialize in! (Currently leading: Wrath, consisting of rays of searing light and lightning bolts from the heavens.) If you’d like to see something in particular, go make your voice heard!

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Treasure Value

Aetrimonde’s game balance assumes that characters will accumulate wealth, and turn it into useful magical items, at a certain rate. The calculation is easy: during an adventure where they gain a level, characters should receive treasure roughly equal to their EV during that level. So a level 8 character, whose EV is 180, should gain roughly 180gp of treasure by the time they attain level 9.

This assumption means that characters of a certain level should have roughly a certain amount of wealth, in the form of coin, magical items, and various other useful equipment:

Level	Wealth	Level	Wealth	Level	Wealth
0	100	7	1010	14	2470
1	200	8	1180	15	2750
2	310	9	1360	16	3050
3	430	10	1550	17	3370
4	560	11	1750	18	3710
5	700	12	1970	19	4070
6	850	13	2210	20	4450

When placing treasure into an adventure, you may wish to keep the PCs’ current wealth relative to this target in mind: this is one area where different approaches can drastically change the tone of a campaign.

Reversion to the Mean

One way to handle treasure is to adjust how much you hand out to account for the PCs’ fortunes relative to their level: if they’ve recently blown a bunch of money carousing, or paid a lot of bribes to avoid fighting, or bought a bunch of consumables like potions and volatiles that they then used up, you may want to place more than the usual treasure into their next adventure to bring them back up. And, on the flip side, if your players are fond of looting everything down to the doors from the dungeons they venture through, and are therefore flush with cash, you might cut down a little bit on the rewards you place (or even provide opportunities to spend gold…) until their wealth is back in line with expectations.

Savvy players, if they catch you doing this, may start to feel that there isn’t much point in seeking out money, or saving it, if you’re just going to top off their coffers regardless. This works for some kinds of campaigns and PCs, and not for others: a story about mercenaries going from job to job, always looking for paying work, loses some of its punch if the players notice that they never actually have to worry about money.

Laissez-Faire

The other approach to treasure is to simply hand it out at the suggested rate, and then let PCs do what they will with it. If they blow their money on ale at the tavern, give it away as alms, or spend it on potions and volatiles that they then use up, it’s gone for good and they won’t be getting it back unless they can scrounge up some extra loot to sell, negotiate for higher pay from an employer, or engage in a little entrepreneurial thievery.

Laissez-faire treasure adds a bit of grit to a campaign by placing the PCs under more of a resource constraint. Done well, this encourages them to spend money wisely and seek out opportunities to earn rewards, but it can also encourage players to go through a dungeon stripping it of its furnishings down to the wall sconces…which detracts from the tone of a serious campaign about saving the world from an ultimate evil.

Placing Treasures

Because it takes 10 XP to gain a level, the absolute simplest way to place treasure into an adventure is to calculate the amount of treasure that the PCs would collectively gain in a level, divide it by 10, and place that much treasure as a reward for each XP-granting encounter. That has two drawbacks, though: it’s boring, getting a predictable amount of treasure along with each XP, and it also limits opportunities to give out magical items as treasure (because even the cheapest magical item runs more than you would give out for even a huge encounter granting 3 XP).

To improve on this, you can still start by breaking the total amount of treasure for the level into 10 equal parts–but then, scatter the parts unevenly throughout one level’s worth of adventure. Some encounters, even XP-granting ones, don’t need to have treasure in them; instead, place bigger treasures (containing magical items where possible!) in climactic encounters, and scatter a few small treasures around the rest of the adventure.

To provide a simple example, suppose that the plan for a one-level adventure involves:

• Three combat encounters granting 1 XP each.
• A puzzle granting 1 XP.
• A complicated skill encounter granting 2 XP.
• A social encounter requiring a lot of roleplaying, granting 1 XP.
• A climactic boss fight granting 3 XP.

With the treasure for this adventure divided into 10 chunks, one way to break it up would be to place one chunk each on one of the small combat encounters, the puzzle, the skill encounter, and the social encounter…and all of the remaining six on the boss fight.

To add a little more variety and verisimilitude to your treasure allocations, you might want to slightly adjust the values of each of the ten chunks by moving a few gp between them here and there: this avoids having several treasures of exactly the same value. You might also hold back one chunk (removing it from the boss fight) and keep it as a “floating” treasure that you can award if the PCs do something unexpected and deserving of a reward (and if not, it can go right back into the boss fight treasure).

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Up Next

I’ll be picking back up next time with another Gazetteer post on the Unclaimed Reaches of Ipki Chainbreaker’s backstory. And if you haven’t voted in the poll to determine what kind of Divine magic Ipki will specialize in, go do that now!