More precisely, the Mike Mearl's adventure the Three Faces of Evil is an Item Card Hog. By my count there are 114 magic items in that adventure, including 77 potions! At two potions per Item Card booster, you'd need 39 boosters (or more than three display boxes) to cover that. Granted, the DM can have every Labyrinth Dweller (14, 1 potion each), Grimlock Archer (2, 2 potions each), Tiefling Guard (7, 3 potions each), and Acolyte of Vecna (4, 4 potions and 2 scrolls each) burn through a lot of their resources before the party gets their hands on it, but you'll still have a lot of cure light wounds potions lying around.
I absolutely loved running the adventure (I'm a tactical DM at heart), but it wasn't until I did a full magic item count that I truly comprehended why I had already recycled all 26 of my Potion cards (2 Item Pack 1's and 1 Hero's Hoard display box) multiple times. Future DMs, be warned!
By my count there are 114 magic items in that adventure, including 77 potions!
By comparison, the first four adventures in the Savage Tide have 113 magic items, not including the ones carried by the Jade Ravens or the PCs crew in the Sea Wyvern's Wake. Strangely, the number of magic items seems to be going down with each Tide adventure (the first had 43, the latest has only 17).
Creative Director
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Savage Tide is certainly going for a less is more approach to magic items. Rather than load every NPC up with dozens of low-level magic items, we're being more conservative so that when we DO hand out magic items, they tend to be larger and bigger and more potent. And by extension, less likely to end up being put in the big pile of Stuff to Sell, since this campaign has a lot fewer places and chances for PCs to sell of unwanted magic items.
~WEG~ Go for Vow of Poeverty and give the items to charity!
Jason Bulmahn gave a very useful suggestion on the topic of repeat potions on hordelings.com that I thought deserved to be mentioned here as well:
"As for the 23 Shield of Faith potions problem, we had this come up in our office too. Our solution was to give out a limited number of the cards, say 3, with charges on the back, just like a wand. If a PC drank one, they just marked off the charge. It works pretty well for us."
http://www.hordelings.com/frontend/forums/postView.php?post_id=39960
Derek Poppink
Item Card Uberfan