Pretty well all improvised. Some settings have a lot of resources to take inspiration from, but Wildemount not so much.
All mundane items in the books have prices, and the DMG has recommended pricing for magical items. Xanathar's Guide to Everything has some expanded guidelines for magic item pricing.
PHB has prices for most mundane items characters would want. How you handle the stores is up to you. In smaller towns, there might just be one general store that has everything, while in larger cities, there might be some specialty shops.
Keep in mind that you don't really need to use stores per se if you don't want -- the game isn't about shopping. It's really easy for the players to say "I want to stock up on rations and healer's kits" and you to say "OK spend however much you want on them and write down how many you bought." There's no need to role play it. Now if the shopkeeper has some adventure hook, or you have a player who's good at haggling and you want to give them a chance to shine, or you really just want to, then sure go for it. But usually, its not absolutely necessary.
Yeah, largely improv. But a good baseline would be that every place is going to have a smithy (what its capabalities are will depend on the size of the town/village but they could all pretty much do basic repairs on mundane armor and weapons). You'll find a livery of some sort in most towns along trade roots. There'll probably be an apothecary of some sort to find basic things like herbs and spices. A general store for basic stuff. There are more kinds of shops you might find.
There's a shop quick reference on DM's guild that, while it doesn't give names, it does give a nice rundown of the types of things you're likely to find at the different shops, what kind of shop is likely to be found in what type of settlement, and a baseline guide for pricing. It's called Shops and Stores if you go looking for it there.
It's up to you — and a little bit of common world-building sense goes a long way.
Large cities have more of everything and perhaps even some rarer goods if you have the coin. Some cities may even specialise in a particular thing (mithral armour in a dwarven city above a mithral mine for instance). Small remote villages may only have 10% of what's listed in the PHB equipment section, and that's only if Errol comes in to mind the "store". He's usually out wandering his fields. He don't have much else than cheese, but it's tasty.
The more you allow, the more you can expect the players to rely on this town and return to it frequently. It's also a clever way to gently guide players to places you want them to go by telling them that town A up the road has item or material component B. Now if they want B they go to A. I currently have a cleric in my group that wants a glass eye to cast the spell clairvoyance. That's great as I can make glass are common or rare as I like, and good glass sculptors even rarer. He wants the spell, so his motivation is high and he's on the look out for good glass if only to ask, who made that for you?
By denying the stock in a certain town, you can suggest that the trading routes are perhaps under attack by bandits (sort out the bandits and the town may get healing potions again)... or that a chancellor is skimming off the top, or that they're just needing some investment - some good coin - from adventurers to get a bigger wagon with fresh oxen. If a town did have good stock in healing potions, but now don't because an army just marched through - that's great because the events of the world materially affected the PCs.
Shopkeepers (innkeepers, beekeepers, et al) are all great sources of roleplaying fun, that highlight problems in their city (from their point of view), provide good or bad information on the local area, provide a reason to return in a couple weeks when that order comes in, provides missions for the PCs if they look capable, places for the rogue to practice their thieving skills or the beginnings of adventure to a mad crazy dungeon.
The last way to use them is just to handwave ordinary things your players want to get. Don't roleplay the shopkeeper, just have them buy another 20 arrows at the listed price and move on to the interesting bits of the story.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Rule for drama. Roll for memories. If there isn't a meaningful failure condition, do not roll. Ever. (Perception checks, I'm .... clunk, roll, roll, roll, stop... 14, looking at you... maybe?)
It is all improvised. However, if you read or watch fantasy you can use that as a guideline depending on what you want your world to be like.
e.g. Game of Thrones had a street of blacksmiths shops in King's Landing. It was a large city with various districts, shops and thriving commerce. On the other hand, smaller towns and villages had a lot less. A village might have a tavern/inn if it is on a large enough road to support travelers and might only have a part time blacksmith for fixing farm implements or horseshoes.
As for pricing, I would start with the prices in the PHB as the basis of your economy and scale rewards appropriately. If you want things more realistic then consider that it will take quite a bit of time for a trained artisan to create a suit of well fitted plate armor customized to a particular character. The idea of being able to pull on any suit of armor (particularly plate) doesn't make much sense since everyone's size, arm length, leg length, girth, are all different. Plate mail has customized pieces of metal fitted to a characters proportions (arms, legs etc) ... the odds of a random suit of plate fitting well are likely pretty small. Other sorts of armor would need adjustments that could probably be done by a trained artisan in a reasonable length of time.
its worth watching an epsiode or two of things like American Pickers or Pawn Stars to get a feel for haggling.
If you feel upto it, use the PHB costs as the cost the minimum amount a merchant wants to get so has a mark up for 50-100% to account for haggling, so a long sword may have a "book" price of 15gp but the blacksmith selling it may have it marked up as 30gp. The if the party want to haggle let them roll a charisma check you feel s appropriate and then the roll they get is the percentage discount they get, so if they roll a natural 20 you can sell it for the 15gp base price, if they roll a 15 they get 15% off so can buy the sword for 25gp 5sp (or just round downt to the nearest gold piece).
The thing to also rememeber for merchants is they all want to make money, so no amount of charisma or magical enhancement should ever make them give things away for free unless they have been subjected to a domiante person and/or modify memory spell.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
* Need a character idea? Search for "Rob76's Unused" in the Story and Lore section.
Hi everyone,
I'm starting a campaign based in Wildemount now that the book is out.
I have a question, how do i know what stores exist in each city? what items they provide? and what are the prices?
Same goes for taverns and such.
Is it all improvised?
Please help.
Pretty well all improvised. Some settings have a lot of resources to take inspiration from, but Wildemount not so much.
All mundane items in the books have prices, and the DMG has recommended pricing for magical items. Xanathar's Guide to Everything has some expanded guidelines for magic item pricing.
Improvised for the most part but I find it handy to have a random name generator or a few pre made things on hand.
A great site for names for NPC's, buisness, locations etc is https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/
You might also find the random generators on https://donjon.bin.sh/name/markov.html handy as well for treasure/item/shop stock generation as well
PHB has prices for most mundane items characters would want. How you handle the stores is up to you. In smaller towns, there might just be one general store that has everything, while in larger cities, there might be some specialty shops.
Keep in mind that you don't really need to use stores per se if you don't want -- the game isn't about shopping. It's really easy for the players to say "I want to stock up on rations and healer's kits" and you to say "OK spend however much you want on them and write down how many you bought." There's no need to role play it. Now if the shopkeeper has some adventure hook, or you have a player who's good at haggling and you want to give them a chance to shine, or you really just want to, then sure go for it. But usually, its not absolutely necessary.
Yeah, largely improv. But a good baseline would be that every place is going to have a smithy (what its capabalities are will depend on the size of the town/village but they could all pretty much do basic repairs on mundane armor and weapons). You'll find a livery of some sort in most towns along trade roots. There'll probably be an apothecary of some sort to find basic things like herbs and spices. A general store for basic stuff. There are more kinds of shops you might find.
There's a shop quick reference on DM's guild that, while it doesn't give names, it does give a nice rundown of the types of things you're likely to find at the different shops, what kind of shop is likely to be found in what type of settlement, and a baseline guide for pricing. It's called Shops and Stores if you go looking for it there.
My Homebrew Backgrounds | Feats | Magic Items | Monsters | Races | Subclasses
It's up to you — and a little bit of common world-building sense goes a long way.
Large cities have more of everything and perhaps even some rarer goods if you have the coin. Some cities may even specialise in a particular thing (mithral armour in a dwarven city above a mithral mine for instance).
Small remote villages may only have 10% of what's listed in the PHB equipment section, and that's only if Errol comes in to mind the "store". He's usually out wandering his fields. He don't have much else than cheese, but it's tasty.
The more you allow, the more you can expect the players to rely on this town and return to it frequently. It's also a clever way to gently guide players to places you want them to go by telling them that town A up the road has item or material component B. Now if they want B they go to A. I currently have a cleric in my group that wants a glass eye to cast the spell clairvoyance. That's great as I can make glass are common or rare as I like, and good glass sculptors even rarer. He wants the spell, so his motivation is high and he's on the look out for good glass if only to ask, who made that for you?
By denying the stock in a certain town, you can suggest that the trading routes are perhaps under attack by bandits (sort out the bandits and the town may get healing potions again)... or that a chancellor is skimming off the top, or that they're just needing some investment - some good coin - from adventurers to get a bigger wagon with fresh oxen. If a town did have good stock in healing potions, but now don't because an army just marched through - that's great because the events of the world materially affected the PCs.
Shopkeepers (innkeepers, beekeepers, et al) are all great sources of roleplaying fun, that highlight problems in their city (from their point of view), provide good or bad information on the local area, provide a reason to return in a couple weeks when that order comes in, provides missions for the PCs if they look capable, places for the rogue to practice their thieving skills or the beginnings of adventure to a mad crazy dungeon.
The last way to use them is just to handwave ordinary things your players want to get. Don't roleplay the shopkeeper, just have them buy another 20 arrows at the listed price and move on to the interesting bits of the story.
Rule for drama. Roll for memories.
If there isn't a meaningful failure condition, do not roll. Ever. (Perception checks, I'm .... clunk, roll, roll, roll, stop... 14, looking at you... maybe?)
It is all improvised. However, if you read or watch fantasy you can use that as a guideline depending on what you want your world to be like.
e.g. Game of Thrones had a street of blacksmiths shops in King's Landing. It was a large city with various districts, shops and thriving commerce. On the other hand, smaller towns and villages had a lot less. A village might have a tavern/inn if it is on a large enough road to support travelers and might only have a part time blacksmith for fixing farm implements or horseshoes.
As for pricing, I would start with the prices in the PHB as the basis of your economy and scale rewards appropriately. If you want things more realistic then consider that it will take quite a bit of time for a trained artisan to create a suit of well fitted plate armor customized to a particular character. The idea of being able to pull on any suit of armor (particularly plate) doesn't make much sense since everyone's size, arm length, leg length, girth, are all different. Plate mail has customized pieces of metal fitted to a characters proportions (arms, legs etc) ... the odds of a random suit of plate fitting well are likely pretty small. Other sorts of armor would need adjustments that could probably be done by a trained artisan in a reasonable length of time.
As a PS to my previous post....
its worth watching an epsiode or two of things like American Pickers or Pawn Stars to get a feel for haggling.
If you feel upto it, use the PHB costs as the cost the minimum amount a merchant wants to get so has a mark up for 50-100% to account for haggling, so a long sword may have a "book" price of 15gp but the blacksmith selling it may have it marked up as 30gp. The if the party want to haggle let them roll a charisma check you feel s appropriate and then the roll they get is the percentage discount they get, so if they roll a natural 20 you can sell it for the 15gp base price, if they roll a 15 they get 15% off so can buy the sword for 25gp 5sp (or just round downt to the nearest gold piece).
The thing to also rememeber for merchants is they all want to make money, so no amount of charisma or magical enhancement should ever make them give things away for free unless they have been subjected to a domiante person and/or modify memory spell.
On my phone so can't confirm. But I think this is the one I use. Hads items and prices. Not everything but can be added to as well.
That's not it.. I'll check back when I'm on my PC and post the link.
Edit:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cVd_k7vDOa9cojkdRvj03M2Z1BWv0FHZRwqc0TE7W5E/edit?usp=sharing
That should work. It's a spreadsheet with options. I forgot where I found it though so can't give credit. I didn't make it.
It's mostly high end items. If you want other items you can add them to it and customize it to your whim.