When the chests are more valuable than its contents...

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by Plane

Do you sell them to breeders?

Yes. In at least one old version of the D&D Monster Manual it noted that griffons can only be trained if raised by their rider from a hatchling.

[scc]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Translate that to dungeoneering; congratulations, your thief has just justified those points spent of Connoisseur (Furniture) and identified that chest as worth a fair few gp. Now, how many of the party will be needed to carry it down five floors of the wizard's tower? And do make your DX rolls for each floor, because calculating the crushing damage if and when it lands on the cleric who was trying to supervise is going to be a bore.

This is where the Lighten Burden spell and an Infernal Ogre Barbarian in the party are valuable. And if you own a draft dragon and articulated freight wagon (From Safehold) so that it's possible to haul off 30 tons of stuff, so much the better.

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Tell me about it. (We downsized housing a year or so back. The local charity shop ecology benefitted considerably from various old-but-not-exactly-fine-art storage things that had come down to us via my in-laws.) But to be honest, I can't always blame the world for not rushing to take this stuff.

To begin with, old-ish stuff isn't actually that rare. Real antique masterpieces are one thing, but a lot of stuff was cranked out for the middle-class market in Victorian times, plus or minus. Nor is it all beautiful. But more relevantly here, it tends to be heavy; just getting it onto a van to is no joke, and it's going to sit and loom in most living space, and be a swine to reposition if you regret your first choice of location. Gathers dust like a very dusty thing indeed, too.

Translate that to dungeoneering; congratulations, your thief has just justified those points spent of Connoisseur (Furniture) and identified that chest as worth a fair few gp. Now, how many of the party will be needed to carry it down five floors of the wizard's tower? And do make your DX rolls for each floor, because calculating the crushing damage if and when it lands on the cleric who was trying to supervise is going to be a bore.

Sadistic GMs can also carefully time the revelation that the damn thing is riddled with woodworm, giving it a negative value, because the Carpenters' Guild will put a bounty on your heads for bringing it into the city. (I mean, real-world woodworm are a thing; can you imagine what fantasy world woodworm are like? See Discworld for the .303 bookworm.)

heh reminds me of a treasure I used once in a game set during the ECW.

The party were looting (erm sorry 'saving valuable artefacts from a parliamentarian ransack squad') among which was a heavy, complex and pretty delicate automata that included the human form* in it.


Fun watching the party squirm since they knew what they had in their possession, an item of immense value if:

1). they could get it out
2). not damage it
3). keep it safe
4). find a suitable recipient who was both interested and had deep enough pockets for it.
5). do all this during an ongoing civil war.


Ultimately they got it out and ended up selling the thing in Ghent to a merchant (after a pretty fraught crossing)


I actually used the same scenario years and years ago (with a different table), set in and using WFRP1ed. IIRC they end up getting it to Marienburg!





But yes heavy, ugly Victorian stuff not great for house moving or reselling, (but still better than heavy ugly and badly painted in later periods, Victorian furniture)







*so parliamentarians of a more frothing religious bent might take umbrage at the hubris of humans mocking the divine design etc (the treasure itself was likely a bit anachronistic for the setting as I was inspired by later stuff but hey)

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

heh reminds me of a treasure I used once in a game set during the ECW.

I ran a similar adventure, where PCs were obliged to deliver a large stone sarcophagus by river and overland - it was meant to play a larger part in the campaign, but alas, like many gaming groups, it was not to be.

[Kromm]

Rules-as-written GURPS Dungeon Fantasy has this built in: A good-quality chest is $200; a solid metal strongbox is $250. While a cheap, Roman-style padlock is just $20 (and offers no appreciable security), a key-turn padlock can cost as much as $8,000 if sufficiently finely made (in real life, such locks were often made of bronze or silver – i.e., coin metals – and were so valuable that they were chained in place to keep them from being stolen).

I also made a couple of nods to the idea of the packaging being more important than the contents in Dungeon Fantasy: I Smell a Rat. Aside from calling out the value of the strongboxes and padlocks, there's a door that can be stripped of sheeting for profit, and also paint that can be scraped off and reverse-engineered for a valuable recipe.

Personally, I quite like this kind of thing. I've seen more than a few blackwood or ebony or mahogany boxes worth a few hundred dollars . . . filled with old ticket stubs, lint, and broken safety pins. I've seen high-tech digital locks that'll set you back $100+ . . . securing old sheds with broken windows and nothing inside but bat droppings. It's surprisingly realistic to have containers and security systems that are worth more than anything they protect.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

For example, an enchanted broadsword would need a one pound sheath made from Ancient Wood to maintain its enchantments. That would increase the cost of the item by $1,000, but the broadsword could easily have much more powerful enchantments. You could even have unstable enchantments and stable enchantments in the same world, though stable enchantments would likely only be used for very cheap magical items.

I occurs to me that this is a good way to implement "wildcards" for gear. If the sheath to protect the sword is the expensive part, then you can quite easily turn that sword of fire into a sword of ice or lightening: the expensive component is the same for all of them.

[RyanW]

How about a fetch quest in which the PCs are sent to retrieve a chest of great treasures? Their payment is the treasure. The patron only wants the chest.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by ericthered

I occurs to me that this is a good way to implement "wildcards" for gear. If the sheath to protect the sword is the expensive part, then you can quite easily turn that sword of fire into a sword of ice or lightening: the expensive component is the same for all of them.

I was in a game where that ended up being the case. A sword of "Not-living Flesh" Wraith was ludicrously hard to sheathe*. The eventual Living Sheathe ended up being waaaaaay more expensive than the sword, not even including that the sheathe was vampiric and had to be fed...



* And in the long run ended up being not nearly as useful as it first sounded...

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by RyanW

How about a fetch quest in which the PCs are sent to retrieve a chest of great treasures? Their payment is the treasure. The patron only wants the chest.

I love it! I can't count the number of times I've sent PCs to fetch the gold statuette, bronze statue, huge gem, or whatever, only to have the quest-giving NPC chop off the figure's head and pour out the real treasure, or crack open the gem to extract the larval monster for which it was an egg, and then tell the heroes they can keep the valuable metal or stone. This would be an interesting inversion . . .

"Hah, the lich lord must think we're fools! We unscrewed the head and took out the cursed amulet. He can keep the empty figurine!"

"Here's your pile of gold for the statuette. Bye, now."

Weeks later, the Grievous Gold Golem is terrorizing the countryside. Meanwhile, the heroes learn that the cursed amulet was the only thing keeping the construct dormant. Oops.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Kromm

I've seen high-tech digital locks that'll set you back $100+ . . . securing old sheds with broken windows and nothing inside but bat droppings. It's surprisingly realistic to have containers and security systems that are worth more than anything they protect.

I have a secure (class B), fire-resistant four-drawer filing cabinet that cost my mother $2,000 second-hand. It sits in my garage because it is too heavy for the floors in my house. For the past thirteen years it has contained

1. The key to its own confidential drawer
2. Its lock-resetting key
3. Its instruction pamphlet
4. Dust.