Ultimate Equipment Preview: Roll Up Some Loot!

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Rumor has it that everyone, both players and GMs, love to get their hands on new gear. From the new sword that would be perfect for your PC—or even better in the hands of a villain—to a wizard’s staff, gear and magic items have always been an exciting part of the game. Fortunately for all those treasure seekers out there, we’re just five weeks away from Gen Con and the release Ultimate Equipment, the next exciting hardcover book for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

The new toys in this book are divided up into a series of handy chapters, starting with nonmagical weapons, armor, and gear. The book then moves on to present endless pages on new magic items, from rods, staves, and rings, to artifacts and intelligent items. This mighty tome contains more wondrous items than any other book in the Pathfinder library, conveniently divided up by the slot that it occupies.

Over the next five weeks, we are going to be looking at some of the items in this book, but instead of just showing off a few spreads, I thought this would be a great excuse to take a look at the random treasure generation system found in the appendix. Each week, I’ll use the system to generate a few pieces of treasure for you to drool over. This week, we’re going to start out with something simple: the treasure trove of a goblin tribe. Assuming the entire tribe is approximately a CR 5 encounter, we’ve got 2,300 gp worth of loot to assign. Since goblins are humanoids, they can have a wide variety of treasure types, so we are going to go with Treasure Type D: Coins and Small objects. As you can see, this table has a variety of entries for me to choose from, but to equal 2,300 gp, I’m going to take a 2,000 gp entry and a 300 gp entry. I could mix it up with some other tables as well, but I’m going to keep it simple this week. Rolling up the two entries, I get the following:

2,000 gp Reward (total value 1,910 gp)
60 gp, 5 pp, potion of levitate, scroll of hydraulic torrent, and a scroll of mass cure light wounds

300 gp Reward (total value 482 gp)
40 sp, 28 gp, potion of bull’s strength, and a scroll of flaming sphere

Each reward gives the GM a series of additional rolls to make in the appendix and throughout the rest of the book to determine treasure to assign for the encounter. If I instead wanted a bunch of minor treasures, I could have bought four 500 gp rewards and one 300 gp reward. The result would have been a lot more coins and lower-priced items. You might notice that my 300 gp reward came out a bit over, while the 2,000 gp reward ended up a bit under (with the total coming out at 2,392 gp). The system is balanced so that over time, most of your treasure rolls should average out to give the party the right amount of treasure.

Well, that about wraps up this week. Now that we’ve covered some of the basics, next week we’ll be fighting a trio of vengeful mummies to see what loot they might have, and will be taking a look at some of the brand new items you can find in this book.

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer