Spells available to buy in a Town sized X

[Old Micah]

Hello all,

The heroes in my Iron Gods game just saved the town Torch for the second time and are being celebrated as the town saviors. The wizard turned to me and said, "What spells can I buy here?" Hmmm

Torch has 4,300 people, which makes it a large town. That means it has a spending limit of 10k gold, and has 3d4 minor items, 2d4 medium items, and 1d4 major items for sale.

And... 5th level is the highest available spell available for purchase.... But what particular spells? I can't find anywhere that says that for a large town, there are Xd6 1st level spells, Yd6 2nd level spells, etc.

Thanks to one of my players, I have a hacked together spell list, so I'm considering:

1) Make it up the numbers or roll: (max level avail for sale - spell level + 1) x d6 and generate a random list of spells available for sell? Doable, but treats all spells (rare or not) the same

2) Common spells have a XX% (75?) of being available. Rare YY% (5?) (But how do I evaluate how common a spell is?) Bleh

3) All spells are available for purchase. Really don't like this as I think some spells should be bargained/quested for.

If it's not in the rules somewhere, how are other DM's managing this?

Thanks for your time!

[bhampton]

Old Micah wrote:

Hello all,

The heroes in my Iron Gods game just saved the town Torch for the second time and are being celebrated as the town saviors. The wizard turned to me and said, "What spells can I buy here?" Hmmm

Torch has 4,300 people, which makes it a large town. That means it has a spending limit of 10k gold, and has 3d4 minor items, 2d4 medium items, and 1d4 major items for sale.

And... 5th level is the highest available spell available for purchase.... But what particular spells? I can't find anywhere that says that for a large town, there are Xd6 1st level spells, Yd6 2nd level spells, etc.

Thanks to one of my players, I have a hacked together spell list, so I'm considering:

1) Make it up the numbers or roll: (max level avail for sale - spell level + 1) x d6 and generate a random list of spells available for sell? Doable, but treats all spells (rare or not) the same

2) Common spells have a XX% (75?) of being available. Rare YY% (5?) (But how do I evaluate how common a spell is?) Bleh

3) All spells are available for purchase. Really don't like this as I think some spells should be bargained/quested for.

If it's not in the rules somewhere, how are other DM's managing this?

Thanks for your time!

Hmm, at times like this I'm glad my party has a sorcerer instead of a wizard. Personally, I would sort of do it on a case by case basis, "which spells do you want?....Yup, you can find all those, or hmm, you find them all but XX which is quite rare".

In my last campaign, I was a wizard and our GM made it hard to find spells, which was particularly frustrating for me, basically I was limited to the 2/level new spells (I think on a rare occasion I found a couple scrolls of really basic spells). After that, I'm sort of leaning to the be lenient in letting the wizards find common spells.

As to how to evaluate common spells, I'd say if it's in the CRB it's quite common, UM maybe less common, but something from one of the smaller sourcebooks or a regional/racial spell list uncommon or maybe not available.

[justaworm]

If it is below the settlement's base value (2000gp for a large town), then it is available 75% of the time with "little or no effort". It is your call if it would be available with "considerable effort" (as part of the remaining 25%). (The purchase limit is how much a shop can buy from the PCs).

In most towns, I would tend to 'Yes', as long there are sufficient NPCs to provide the item in question. However, if it falls into the 25%, I would start involving skill checks (likely diplomacy - gather info to track down a private seller, or something similar).

Settlements wrote:

Base Value and Purchase Limit: This section lists the community's base value for available magic items in gp. There is a 75% chance that any item of this value or lower can be found for sale in the community with little effort. If an item is not available, a new check to determine if the item has become available can be made in 1 week. A settlement's purchase limit is the most money a shop in the settlement can spend to purchase any single item from the PCs. If the PCs wish to sell an item worth more than a settlement's purchase limit, they'll either need to settle for a lower price, travel to a larger city, or (with the GM's permission) search for a specific buyer in the city with deeper pockets. A settlement's type sets its purchase limit.

If you want to include specific scrolls as part of the major, medium, and minor magic items, I would do it this way:

(1) Only consider scrolls that are above the base price (so you aren't muddying up the total available magic items with ones already available at 75%+ chance).
(2) The easiest way at this point is to just use the rules for generating a treasure hoard to determine available scrolls. Of course, this will limit it to the ones in the predefined table, which is pretty well stocked. This is found in the appendix of Ultimate Campaign. This table breaks out the spells by common/uncommon as well.

[Mathmuse]

Pathfinder Adventuer Path #85, Fires of Creation, has an article on Torch that contains the town's stat block.

TORCH
N Large town
Corruption +0; Crime –1; Economy +0; Law –1; Lore +0; Society +4
Qualities insular, strategic location, tourist attraction
Disadvantage heavily taxed
Danger +5

DEMOGRAPHICS
Government council
Population 4,320 (3,167 humans, 498 dwarves, 392 halforcs, 168 gnomes, 32 half-elves, 28 halflings, 25 elves, 10 androids)
<notable NPCs section skipped>

MARKETPLACE
Base Value 2,400 gp; Purchase Limit 5,000 gp;
Spellcasting 3rd
Minor Items 3d4; Medium Items 1d6

SPECIAL QUALITIES
Heavily Taxed Torch is very heavily taxed by the Technic League, and has fewer resources available than a town of its size normally has. (Economy –2, reduce final base value by 10%, reduce purchase limit by
50%, spellcasting –2, available magic items as per settlement 1 category smaller)

The article also mentions specific magic and special-material items available in the shops around town, such as the Torch Guildhouse. As far as I know, the highest-level casters in town are 5th-level wizard Khonnir Baine and 6th-level cleric Joram Kyte. Thus, Khonnir's spellbook is the only source of 3rd-level wizard spells in Torch, but other wizards in town could provide other 1st-level spells and a handful of 2nd-level spells. I extrapolated Khonnir's spellbook based on his prepared spells and his unusual history.

Khonnir Baine's Spellbook
1st - air bubble, animate rope, color spray, corrosive touch, crafter's fortune, expeditious excavation, expeditious retreat, feather fall, floating disk, jury-rig, mage armor, monkey fish, mount, mudball, protection from chaos, protection from evil, shocking grasp, unseen servant
2nd - acid arrow, blur, fire breath, glitterdust, mud buddy, pyrotechnics, resist energy, returning weapon, web
3rd - arcane sight, cloak of winds, dispel magic, displacement, fireball, fly, haste, slow, versatile weapon, water breathing

In my campaign, I decided that Torch was the skymetal center for Numeria, and skymetal items of twice the base value and purchase limit could be found there.

The party could also travel to the other cities in Numeria. Chesed (Population 59,690) is the largest, Starfall (Population 32,400) is the second largest, and Torch, surprisingly, comes in third. I put several wizardry schools in Starfall, for the children of Technic League members. They sold spells. Hajoth Hakados (Population 6,780) is just over the border in the River Kingdoms, and my party preferred to shop there or at the Tarnished Halls mobile black market on the Seven Tears River.

[Dave Justus]

First off, the 'spells for purchase' doesn't refer to purchasing a spell to add to your spell book, it refers to purchasing spellcasting services, having a cleric cast cure blindness on you for example.

The cost of hiring a wizard to teach another wizard a spell isn't defined anywhere that I know of. I generally assume that you either have to just buy a scroll or spend pretty much the same as what a scroll would cost. That makes things easier in my opinion and there are already plenty of rules for scroll availability as mentioned above.

Generally speaking, it isn't unbalancing at all to allow a Wizard to get all the spells they can afford (well, Wizards are a bit unbalancing, but this is their big class feature, and the 'extra' spells they get this way aren't what is going to make them unbalanced anyway). Some spells, (blood money would be a great example) shouldn't be easily available though, but that is baked into the flavor of those particular spells.

[Mathmuse]

Dave Justus wrote:

The cost of hiring a wizard to teach another wizard a spell isn't defined anywhere that I know of.

It is in the Magic chapter of the Core Rulebook, in the section titled. "Adding Spells to a Wizard's Spellbook."

Core Rulebook, p. 219 wrote:

In most cases, wizards charge a fee for the privilege of copying spells from their spellbooks. This fee is usually equal to half the cost to write the spell into a spellbook (see Writing a New Spell into a Spellbook). Rare and unique spells might cost significantly more.

That would make the fee for seeing a spell 2.5gp for a 0th-level spell, 5gp for a 1st-level spell, 20gp for a 2nd-level spell, and 10gp times the square of the spell level in general.

I forgot to mention that in my party, the PCs took the Local Ties campaign trait and were Khonnir Baine's employees. He let them copy spells out of his spellbook for free. Handing the magus's player that list of Khonnir's spells and saying, "You can copy any of these that are on the magus list," was convenient. Of course, scribing a spell into the spellbook still cost as usual.