Announcing the Magic Item Shop Random Inventory Generator
Often, when a party gets to back into a reasonable sized town, they want to look for a wizard’s shop (or similar) to see if there are any magic items they can trade or purchase. Determining the shop’s inventory can be tedious, but the Magic Item Shop Random Inventory Generator makes that easy.
(Note: I’m not advocating a “MagicMart” in every city. If that fits your game world, great, but the Inventory Generator is just as valid for a city that might have just a few mages or priests that have small shops with just a few items each. In fact, the inventory generator may cut down on the magic in your game because the vast majority of items will not interest the players/characters. For example, how many fighters use a pick or trident?)
The Magic Item Shop Random Inventory Generator randomly creates a magic item shop’s inventory based on your desired criteria (# minor potions, # medium potions, # major rings, # minor wondrous items, # minor weapons, etc.) using the SRD for 3.5 rules. (The results can usually be adjusted or some items dropped for other fantasy games/versions.) It is just simple Javascript, so most browsers should run it without needing any plugins. See it at: Magic Item Shop Random Inventory Generator
The generator doesn’t include the costs for each item because that may vary widely based on your game-world, the city and the owner. Further you’ll only need to look up the costs of the items that interest a character. A few additional features are planned, but the complete core of the program is in place.
Nice generator! There’s a lot of “treasure horde” gens, but I haven’t seen a magic item shop gen with stuff from the books before.
I do have a couple of comments, since you mention you’re not done making improvements.
That’s a lot of little spaces I have to fill out before the generator will tell me anything. Might I suggest an overall “shop size” dropdown that can be small, medium, large, or random? That way people who are in a hurry and don’t care if there are 10 potions or 15 so long as the shop gives the impression of being well-stocked, won’t have to type a number in every box.
A couple of times, the same item came up more than once in a category. Is this intentional, and if so, does it mean that the shop has only that many items? That is, if “Oil of Magic Weapon” comes up once, they have only one of that potion, and twice, they have two? That makes sense to me for the major items, but not as much for the minor ones. Perhaps you could have some sort of toggle for repeats on/off, or maybe list beside each item how many the shop has in stock, ie, “Oil of Magic Weapon x3, Potion of Jump x1.”
A very nice generator, thank you. I did notice some anomilies:
When generating medium and major armors some of the abilities were listed twice on the armor. For example, Full Plate +5, Acid Resitance, Acid Resistance.
Apostrophies do not appear correctly in the item names.
Thoughts: Since this is a Ye Olde Magic Shoppe generator, it would be nice to have the OGL costs listed with the items for ease.
The shop size suggestion mentioned in the above comment section is a great one! Having a ~random~ button associated would be nice to.
Thanks for your work!
Thanks! I’ll be addressing most of these issues soon, including the shop size idea.
You can include a couple of tables with prices for 3.0, 3.5 and 4th edition. The user may choose which edition he wants to use. Also, you can insert a field where the DM can type a percent to apply globally to all items. That way, the DM can inflate or deflate prices depending on the town’s economy.
3.0 & 3.5 are pretty similar. Not interested in converting it to 4th, for a number of reasons. Adding a price multiplier seems like a good idea however.