ReadMe: The Sorcerer's Scrollbar After about a year of struggling with manuals, trial and error, and misconceptions carried over from my blithe days of Turbo Basic programming, the first release of MUShop is done, and I am pleased to share it with the greater community of DMs. Along with other programs I have written over the years, and will slowly be converting to Visual Basic, I've been motivated by a desire to make campaigns more detailed and specific, and simultaneously less time-consuming. Anyone who's DMed knows the endless hours of rolling dice to populate cities, roll up monsters, and flip through charts in books. In my experience, outfitting a single medium-range magic shop with 50 items took more than two hours! All this is time taken away from contriving devious plots, supporting your family, studying for comps, or savoring the Grateful Dead. Now, your task will be vastly simpler, and faster! My program's a snap to use. Install it, double-click on the cool icon I designed, and you're in business. Alas, there's a small element of bad news. On my rice-box 486, with 8 megs of RAM and a DX2-66 CPU, the program balks at churning out more than 20,000 or so items. I get some weird message about "overflow". So if you're planning on opening a Sears Roebuck Magic Shop, you'll need a few runs. But it's enough for most of us, I suspect. Anyway, you say how many shops you want, and then choose the size of the town. The only relevance of indicating the size of the town is that this affects the type and number of spell components found, as well as the chances of finding spellbooks. What the program does --------------------- Here's how the program flows. First it picks a general category, like weapons, armor, or miscellaneous magic. Then it picks properties, like "+3", "-2 for Elves", "of Charming", etc., and then selects an item for these properties, like "Longsword", "Potion", "Ring", etc. For many of these, such as rings, wands, and potions, physical descriptions are generated as well. It's that simple. In addition, the program determines if the shop has spell components, blank spell books, used spell books, Write ink, treasure maps, or other interesting books. Some items can be crocked, usually in a delayed-action style, and there can also be fluff magic. For all items, the xp value is calculated. This makes a good foundation for sale value, which can be adjusted for the location of the shop, the party's purse, the shopowner's reaction roll, etc. One of the best things about this is that it also generates fully-prepped spellbooks which include all the AD&D spells and the Great Net Spellbook spells. Pricing Items I was initially against putting in prices. This was because it encourages players to think that once they've amassed enough gold, they "should" be able to buy whatever they want. And the last thing any DM needs is more stuff for the players to refer to and use as a basis for complaining about how expensive things are. In any case, many variables should affect how much PCs pay for something; all are roleplaying opportunities. But many people asked for prices, and so I relented. I adapted the xp/price ratios from the first-edition DMG, averaging where necessary (for example, in wands/staves/rods, some items have an xp/price ratio of 2/3, others have 1/10; I average at around 1/6. I present representative items from the various groups (ring, wands, etc.), with their default values, and let you enter what you think a good value is. This is compared with the default, produces a ratio, which is applied to each item in the class generated. For example, a +2 longsword would usually be 5,000, which is what I show. If you enter 10,000, then prices for all swords are doubled. But don't treat these prices or ratios as gospel, and judge for yourself in all cases. And please be sure to edit the results to make sure they are consonant with the tone of your campaign (and your own whims). Of course, you should also keep in mind that some things should hardly ever be for sale. One example is a Ring of Wishes. Why sell it when you can wish for just about anything money can buy, and then some? And some things would be so dangerous, like the wands of weaponry, that they should hardly ever be publicly offered for sale. Think of serious modern weapons. You can always get a price for a cruise missile, tank, fighter, or aircraft carrier, but try buying one, even if you have the money saved up! So use your judgment, please! Some things can never be bought, only earned... Weird Results Something else cries out for judgment, or at least imagination. The way this program mixes and matches, occasionally you get some weird result, like "National Flag of Portable Hole". Tough one! Until you think that perhaps the flag features a castle, or a star or an animal whose mouth may be opened, to provide access. And perhaps its magic may only be accessed when the wind is blowing. These weird items are great spurs to creativity, and can drive players nuts. Weird Items Speaking of weird items, I have included some fluff items and also some peculiar ones. Hence one might get "Lipstick of Immunity to Constitution Drains" (at least while kissing vampires!), and "False Teeth of Wizardry". Of course these only have the desired effect while being used, which could lead to some amusing situations, for the DM at any rate.... Insist that they be roleplayed! Cursed Items Why would cursed items be sold, and often for full price? In the vast majority of cases, because the shopowner doesn't know. And neither should the players, at first... Potions Regarding potions, realistically they should be a little more standardized, rather than being completely randomized as they are here. In my own campaign I've listed all the potions, oils, philtres, etc., and for each one generated three sets of properties: common, uncommon, and rare. This shouldn't be too tough for you to do, either, by collecting the descriptions from here. Naturally, I've written a separate program for this, too, and will upload it sometime next year, when I get around to re-writing it in Visual Basic. Credit Where Credit Is Due My first inspiration for this came from the author of The Tome of Vast Knowledge, Douglas P. Webb, and here I would like to thank him. Credit must also be given to people who wrote so many great articles so long ago in Dragon and especially other, greater, magazines, like The Dungeoneer and The Judges Guild Journal. I can't take credit for all the good things here, since others compiled more than a decade ago so many of the charts I consulted, especially the insufficiently recognized genius Wes Ives. But more than anything else, I want to thank Bob Atwood, my first and best DM, who was and is lightyears ahead of everyone else in creativity and programming prowess. His first MUShop generator was written a decade ago! Caveat One Two caveats. First, this program doesn't break clerical spells into spheres. Second, it's campaign-specific. That is to say, languages and cultures mentioned come from my own world, Kantallismere. Subbing your own is easily done while editing the shop in general. I should also mention that not every item from all the various hardcopy and net books is covered here. Nonetheless, this'll still make life immensely easier for anyone running a campaign. As I mentioned, it used to take me two or three hours to prep a medium-range magic shop; this churns out 380 items a second on my ricebox. The savings in time are astronomical. Caveat Two People who have really studied programming will be disgusted by the kludges and workarounds here. All I can say is, how come they didn't write something better and earlier? And if TSR has such vast resources, creativity, and concern for its customers, why didn't it produce something like this years ago? Of its (and SSI's) dismal "Dungeon Master Assistant", the less said, the better. Final Thoughts I was thinking of asking something like US$10.00 for this. But then I thought about how others have given so freely to me over the years, and read in my well-worn Bible, "Go thou and do likewise", and "Give, and it shall be given to you". Along with this, it should be explicit: many other talented hands prepared original charts on which much of this program is based. I would never seek to take credit for that. If anyone feels like sending me ten bucks, that's cool, and I'll be encouraged to do more with this and write more stuff. But I neither seek nor expect anything from anyone in exchange for sharing this program. The Future In the second version of this program, if there's sufficient response to this first one, something I'll include is menus for generating as many as you want of specific items, like wands, staves, daggers, etc. In fact, I already have this done on a separate, Turbo Basic-based program. One prescient writer also suggested detailing the proprietor(s) and his/her/their areas of magical fabrication expertise, along with areas of items which can be reliably identified, etc. I like this idea. I also have a standalone spellbook generator done; as soon as I do some donkeywork, I'll probably upload that too. In the future, which means in the next 18 months, I'd like to do a Thieves' Guild generator, a merchant-train generator, and an NPC party generator. Also a treasure generator. A treasure generator would be different from this program in that it would include a greater variety of stuff: natural treasures, different types of cash, clues, non-magical treasure items, demon amulets, eggs, etc. Plus, I already have Turbo Basic ones done for generating sages, undead, giants, truly wicked dragons, liches, and large groups of NPCs (as in for a small town); I'd like to convert these to Visual Basic. And some of the items here, such as phylacteries and amulets, could be more detailed as the rings are. But time's the thing. I'm a consultant working full-time to support my wife, son, mortgage, and hobbies, and can work on programming only sporadically. And since I've had to teach myself everything about Visual Basic, the learning curve has at times resembled the high Himalayas. Finally This is shared in the interest of enriching the quality of our collective play, of making campaigns more interesting, keeping players on their toes, and of discouraging that obnoxious, pernicious, most munchkinly player habit of constantly trying to psyche out the DM through brazen or clandestine reference to the DMG during play. In addition, I wanted to save more time for the things, the people, and the Dead tapes I love. May it achieve this goal for you as well. Denrandrien, at darkstar@c2.hinet.net P.O. Box 81-691 Taipei, Taiwan, ROC