The Means of Magic

One of the issues that’s dogged Dungeons & Dragons since the beginning is the eternal dichotomy between magic items being really freaking cool, and magic items getting kind of redundant because your characters just keep on collecting them forever. The fiction that fantasy gaming is inspired by has a radically different setup, creating scenarios where the finding of a magic blade or wand is a capstone moment in the single adventure that defines a protagonist’s life. But the protagonists of our games don’t stop at one adventure, and neither does the hunger for magic loot.

Chapter 2 Excerpt (Magic Grimoire) — Magic Items Preview

As long as magic items last eternally, every new magic item found in the game undercuts the awesomeness of all the old magic items sooner or later. Magic items feel important at the big moments in a character’s life — a sword claimed from the destruction of a battlefield, a ring seized from a fallen foe, a staff hidden away in a tomb for a dozen generations, and on and on. But as characters rack up more big moments and the magic that comes with them, older items that once felt memorable are inevitably set aside, becoming little more than footnotes in a life story of adventuring.

Games that make attempts to create a magic item economy — including third and fourth edition D&D — make this process a little easier to deal with by creating a sense that magic items are meant to be sold off at some point. But the scale of that economy seldom makes complete sense, built as it is around the paradigms of 1) adventurers are rare sorts of people, 2) magic items are so obscenely expensive that only adventurers can afford them, and 3) if the market is so small, why are so many magic items being made that old dungeons are all somehow full of them?

There are lots of different ways to try to shape a better approach for magic items from a world-building perspective. Chief among those are the easy options of carefully limiting magic items and absolutely not worrying about where they come from. (To cover all its bases, D&D 5e wholeheartedly embraces both approaches.) 

CORE20 takes a different approach, though, by working with the idea that magic is ubiquitous in the world, known to and made use of by most people. This ubiquity is driven by the idea that magic items are relatively inexpensive and freely traded, making up an important part of the world’s economy rather than just being the overpriced toys of adventurers and villains. And what makes both those ideas work is that magic items in CORE20 don’t last forever.

The workaday magic items known to every edition of D&D and pretty much all other fantasy roleplaying games, from weapons to armor, wands and scrolls, magic rods and idiosyncratic one-off items, are imbued with magic that’s ephemeral. It fades over time, with the magic of potions and scrolls draining away within weeks or months if they aren’t used, to weapons and armor fading more slowly but never lasting the length of even a moderately successful adventuring career.

Because magic items don’t last forever, their value within an overall economy makes them pricey but not preposterous. An ephemeral magic potion of cure light wounds kept on hand by a village healer for emergencies costs 5 gp — a week’s wages for an average laborer in CORE20. The magic of an ephemeral longsword +1 found as treasure has a nominal value of 200 gp, consistent with the value of a great many nonmagical luxury goods, but not in the same ballpark as multiple years’ laborer’s wages or the cost of a modest house. (In CORE20, an open magic-item economy and a more restrained baseline for the cost of magic means that characters earn a bit less for adventuring than they do in traditional D&D, whose biggest problem is giving characters things to spend their money on. But that’s a topic for another update.)

Ephemeral magic gives characters the opportunity to naturally set magic items aside when those items fade. But it also gives them the opportunity to decide that a favored weapon or magical implement is worth keeping around, because the same economy that fuels the creation and trade of ephemeral magic items also allows those items to be remagicked — and at a lesser cost than crafting or commissioning an item as brand new. In this way, magic items become another part of what builds the story of a character’s adventuring life.

(Art by Chris Yarbrough)