To Take or Not to Take?
Not so long ago, our pals in the Anti-Party encountered an adamantine door. Judging by the number of you guys excited at the prospect of becoming fantasy copper thieves, stealing the “inconvenient treasure” from dungeons seems to be a popular pastime.
Adamantine doors specifically are a form of Dungeon Bypass (warning: TV Tropes link). The schtick is that rather than risking life and limb against horrors, tombs, and tombs filled with horrors, the party just steals the door. All you have to do is take a pickaxe to the dungeon stonework, rent a U-Haul, and drive away with a king’s ransom worth of precious metal. Assuming your GM hasn’t instituted a jerk-face blocking maneuver (“You fools! Adamantine cannot be reworked once it’s forged!”), you can all retire your characters and live like kings. That is, over course, assuming you can get 1,630 lbs. worth of door back to town.
You begin to see where I’m coming from with “inconvenient treasure.” The category includes antique furniture, delicate scientific apparatus, and all valuable schwag too cumbersome to fit in a bag of holding. Turning all that potential wealth into cold, hard cash is often its own adventure. And very often more trouble than it’s worth.
I have fond memories of this biz in my own games. Way back on Level 1 of my the Dragon’s Delve megadungeon, for example, the party encountered the following. Courtesy of Monte Cook:
Throughout the chamber, old but still serviceable wooden furniture can be found: a divan here, a bureau there, a wardrobe, a credenza, a few tables of varying sizes, and a massive, sumptuous bed. Even a marble bathtub hides behind a folding wooden screen next to a silver-plated rack for hanging towels.
If you heard that quest text and imagined Peter and Brian getting the couch out of the Death Star, you’re not alone. Cook made sure to point out that the room’s contents would be worth at least 2,000 gp, but only if someone actually managed to get all of it out of the dungeon.
There are ten pieces that would require some-one of at least average strength to carry, five pieces that require two to carry (even a supernaturally strong character would need help, not from the weight but the unwieldy nature of it, drawers and doors opening, and so on), and two pieces—the bed and the tub—that very likely needs four people to carry it. For the average adventuring party, it’s fairly unrealistic that they could pull off such a thing and get it all the way back to town.
My players tried anyway. Fighting against an indoor blizzard, giant scorpions, and a constant barrage of random encounters, they slowly but surely maneuvered the goods the several miles back to base. It was an impressive feat for a first level party. And being a jerk-face of the first order, I took great delight in introducing the wizardly owner of all that furniture one level later. The party wanted to get in her good graces, and so had to track down the new owners of all that furniture, buy it back, and schlep it once more into the dungeon. Fond memories, y’all! Good times were had by me.
How about the rest of you dungeon delvers? Have you ever dealt with logistics issues getting your trade goods to market? Tell us all about those metric tons of gold, overfilled portable holes, and suits of colossal-sized mithral full plate down in the comments!
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Well it’s not free if you factor in transport and repair costs, but depending on how intact it is getting it to sea would probably not be prohibitively expensive so long as you have a mage and/or an engineer
I don’t think these two have either of those, and land-locked piracy is a challenging pursuit
I had intended to include a link to the song “Last Saskatchewan Pirate” in that last sentence but apparently my luck with HTML tags ran dry today.
I have no cultural context for this mighty bop.
Oh, you think somebody went through the effort of putting in an adamantine door to keep adventurers out? No, no, no—it was there to keep something in.
Well, good luck tracking down the Horrendous Thing you’ve unleashed upon the world by not only failing to close the door behind you (what, were you raised in a barn?) but literally taking it off its hinges.
I hear the Horrendous Thing is wearing your faces, too—by way of thanks, of course; it wants everyone to know how grateful it is to you for releasing it from its ten-thousand year prison. Everyone who survives, at least.
I think the Temple of Elemental Evil has the whole ‘keep something dangerous sealed with valuable stuff’ element. A greedy adventurer can spell doom on themselves.
On the plus side, though, look at all these adamantine-lined walls! And the floor and ceiling, too! This stuff must be worth a fortune! Weird that someone would just leave it laying around. Ah, well; finders, keepers!
Cue the GM talking about “supply glut” and “decreased demand.” Bloody cheats….
A few instances that I recall. One is in Rise of the Runelords (minor spoilers ahead), where our party encountered a giant hermit crab, that made residence inside of a giant copper helmet. We needed ant haul spells to get the thing out. Later on, we entered a cave occupied by ogres, and found a statue of a giant, adorned in giant-sized armor. By then, we luckily had access to Bags of Holding.
In another AP, Return of the Runelords (bigger spoilers ahead), we encountered a portcullis that was made of Adamantine. Naturally, we considered cutting the portcullis into adamantine rods for easy sale and transport – but then we learned that the portcullis was merely enchanted to look like Adamantine, and was magically hardened steel instead. Which made sense, as we were in the dungeon HQ of a illusion-focused mega-wizard with a massive ego and God complex.
The bag of holding is always a weird one. For example, can you put a polearm in there? If we’re talking 5e, it wont work on account of the “2 ft x 4 ft” clause. But we all saw Mary Poppins growing up, and we all want that silly amount of portable hole storage.
Are Tanpheliar and Yelusir references to something? Or old-fashioned fantasy/random-generator gobbledegook names?
You’d have to ask Laurel. It’s the end of the semester, and my lazy ass contributed a blog and the word “landlocked” to this comic.
Amusingly, it was about this time last year that she wrote this one: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/forever-dm
We’re nothing if not consistent.
Swash and Buckle might be on to something – there are magic vehicles that are in fact capable of traversing a desert.
https://aonprd.com/MagicWondrousDisplay.aspx?FinalName=Dune%20Boat
Isn’t there a cartoon with this premise…? Ha! Found it: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055393/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl
That’s what Animate Object + Permanency is for.
…and you don’t even need to animate the ship, just a set of tracks. It’s entirely doable.
Is it excruciatingly more complicated and expensive than just building your own ship? Yes, but now you have the bragging rights of salvaging a ship from the middle of a desert.
Would make one hell of a ship of the damned.
“Even our boat came back from the grave!”
I like this comic, but I am filled with an overwhelming shame about recognizing what the title means.
I admit to nothing.
My inquisitor did use a portable hole to steal a high quality couch from an osirian temple that one time.
Laurel likes to talk about her Exalted group going in for some light tomb robbing. They made it to the first room, found a load of “thousand comforts lounges” lying about, then sold them at a huge markup.
Oh God does THIS bring back memories: We once made our DM rewrite his ENTIRE campaign because of one ill-informed decision to do this.
Our story begins in a fantasy world that was originally our own Planet Earth, once advanced into a nanotech-using sci-fi setting before suffering a catastrophic collapse and a second Ice Age causing it to regress to a medieval technology level. Our adventurers traveled through the many disparate kingdoms of what was Europe in the olden days, including an elven druid who ironically acted as our party’s lawyer and accountant, an eccentric kobold sorcerer who collected the ears of his fallen enemies who deliberately infected himself with lycanthropy, a halfling treehugger (custom class), a relatively normal half-elf bard, and me, Sir Georg Redcrosse, a paladin of Hieroneous with an AHNOLD SCHVARTZENEGGER voice.
Our adventures had brought us to the court of a local queen, who’d assigned us to various tasks, such as slaying a pair of man-eating griffins that had been terrorizing the populace, while hearing rumblings of hobgoblins massing in a horde along the kingdom’s borders, led by a powerful Khan and his worg-riding Mangudai. Our success in these tasks had convinced her we were worthy of being given an extra special task, to venture into the dangerous ruin known locally as “Wormwood” and extract a small portion of Cold iron from there. This was a sacred task, and we were granted the title of “Liquidators,” the only ones allowed to perform it, along with the sacred tongs a Liquidator uses to handle cold iron safely (for reasons we’d find out later) and a lead-lined container it could be stored in.
We make our way to Wormwood, and after battling the mutated creatures that had nested in the area, we made our way through a small crack in the seal of the ruins to discover an enormous mass of cold iron, along with several smaller pieces on the ground nearby. Those smaller pieces were just enough to satisfy the Queen’s request, but we started talking amongst ourselves about how we could obtain extra cold iron for our own use. I myself recognized that the holy avenger, a paladin’s dream weapon, needed to be forged from cold iron. But there was no way to crack off chunks of the mother lode, as we hadn’t expected to find that much, and so didn’t bring pickaxes and such. So we shifted to thinking of a spell we could use to break it, and our halfling treehugger got the “brilliant” idea to cast a lightning bolt at it! Almost immediately the DM informed us that the name “Wormwood” was a translation of the site’s ancient name: Chernobyl.
The lightning bolt superheated the metal, releasing radiation that would kill us if we didn’t get away and FAST! We barely escaped with our lives and as we made our way back to the capital, the effects became immediately apparent. Things began dying of radiation poisoning all around, prompting local people to become displaced. We joined some refugees on a makeshift boat to reach the capital more quickly, and even we ourselves began suffering radiation sickness, burning lots of spells to keep it from killing us. Once we gave the queen what she asked, we learned the extent of what our greed had wrought: the hobgoblin Khan and his horde were now suffering as well, breaking and turning back without even a fight, but the kingdom as well as other neighboring lands, would soon become uninhabitable, creating a refugee crisis of unprecedented proportions, even the queen herself now becoming a refugee! She was thankfully too busy with this to question how these events came about, and we weren’t punished (more than we already were by the circumstances at least), and we immediately volunteered to help her with the evacuation to try and make up for the damage we’d stupidly unleashed.
And then the DM informed us that he’d now have to pivot the campaign in a new direction, as he’d meant for us to confront the Khan later in the campaign as a boss fight, and now the campaign setting was changed forever. He wasn’t MAD, he DMed the changes with grace and style, and he followed through on making sure our actions had consequences! We later even had awesome battles against subterranean robots from the distant past, my paladin not only got his holy avenger but a pair of six-shooters owned by Murlynd, and the party got an awesome battle where lured the tarrasque (represented by a Star Wars rancor monster figure) into fighting the most adorable great wyrm red dragon ever (because he was represented with a Beanie Baby)!
But I’ll never forget that when we got greedy and careless with res9urce extraction, we singlehandedly forced a campaign rewrite via the Third Chernobyl Meltdown…
I’ve never done a full-on “Ancient Earth” campaign. It sounds like a blast every time I hear about it though. Kind of makes me want to look at Numenera.
Even if you can’t rework adamantine, an adamantine door should still be valuable. Sure, you can’t melt it down and bond it to a mutant’s skeleton, but there’s a reason someone made the door out of adamantine in the first place (and that reason it to make it hard to break in).
That’s pretty clever. I wish I could pull something like that off.
My players are glad I don’t, of course.
In my head, treasure is best when it leads to new adventure. Sure buying stuff is fun. But making wealth something with heft and presence inside the narrative as its own distinct characteristics That’s where the fun comes in for me.
Not quite the grand adventure, but use of a Portable Hole allowed us to bypass a few ‘door slams shut behind you’ moments in a temple of pure gold by a king midas mummy of sorts. The sliding doors were heavy round discs that required cooperation from the party members to open, and rather than risking we be unable to escape in a pinch (or a pyhrric victory if only one of us was still standing and thus not able to get back to town to revive the others/leave the tomb), we opted to lay out the Portable Hole under the door and let it drop in.
The bugbear wasn’t transportation, being the Portable Hole is 10 ft deep and an ambiguous width (presumably 6 ft by 6 ft to match the maximum opening size, and the DM preferred the idea of it being “as much storage as needed” given the massive price increase over the BoH series). The issue was selling it all. OoC the main concern by party and DM (once she stopped kicking herself for not expecting us to steal the doors, and to be fair we only thought of that side benefit while puzzling out the ‘let’s not get trapped’ workaround) was a balance issue.
Magic items are tied to character progression pretty strongly, so having such a massive jump would put us about, uh, 10 levels ahead in terms of WBL, before accounting for the fact we had people who could craft magic items for half price. The IC issues of selling it all was actually something we came up with collectively- you don’t want to destroy the economy of places you like/want to shop in by devaluing the central currency, so we would sell portions of our ill-gotten gains for effectively exactly enough to be on WBL for the next level each time we hit a town after leveling up, with the implication that some of it was going toward helping folks out with donations between (our party ran the gamut of alignments but were generally nice folks who wanted to help where they could).
The ‘massive structure of gold’ phenomenon is something that comes up a lot in games I’ve been in and usually ends with issues of ‘I’m not sure why you didn’t expect us to take that’. Statues tend to be heavy as heck, and at X gold per pound that’s a LOT of gold, for example. We ran into a hidden dungeon beneath a manor in one Adventure Path (won’t name which to avoid spoilers) and it was at the point that ‘break it up into chunks and sell it for its value in sheer weight’ was going to put us way ahead in power. Apparently the AP had nothing to say on that, and we again basically agreed with the DM that the very poor community around it would benefit from the lion’s share of it being donated to it over the party getting super far ahead of the curve.
I assume in that case it was meant to not be possible to get it out, since without being on the other side of the DM screen I can’t say how they expected characters of the expected level not to TPK against the owner of the place over just using a handy escape route, but we managed to off him and cut a deal with the next in line to our mutual favor with some good diplomacy checks and negotiations.
The last time we ran into this, the old D&D adventure that the DM was drawing from/adapting to Pf2e actually DID account for the issue- a giant statue whose value was more in its craftsmanship than its material, which was a bit on the brittle side. It required flat checks to break bits off without just shattering the thing, and even the broken bits were pretty hefty. We opted just to take the head, as it served as evidence of the cult that made the statue, and it still took the party Barbarian some finagling and careful use of rope and pullies to get it out in one piece due to ladders being the order of the day over proper stairs (this whole place was dug out beneath another building). We’d already taken care to clear the dungeon before trying to run out with stuff- didn’t want to recreate the vase scene at the end of Rush Hour 2 by getting in a brawl with our heavy hitter occupied with a heavy and awkwardly sized object. We then had to stealth our way back to the proper authorities (the ones we knew we could trust at least) to avoid causing a scene with the head, especially since there were cultists hiding in the town who might take violent exception or happily jump on the opportunity to point the finger, which was made easier by already having a few stealthy paths figured out from earlier.
I really do love heist-style events and games, but haven’t had one specifically dedicated to it yet, funny enough. Closest thing was a Starfinder oneshot that was a blast and involved us just making some chaotic neutral mercenaries hired to recover ambiguous stolen property from another ship, which led to some great fun for me by way of abusing Hacker Kits and remote access to said Kits to start screwing with the systems in the ship to our benefit. That’s a story for a different time or subject, though.
Heh. Reminds me of the gold dragon my party had to appease. They needed to access the great seal under his front door as a key to further dungeon depths, but to do that they had to actually open the door. Suddenly all their gaseous form shenanigans wouldn’t cut the mustard anymore.
I’ve run “Wreck of the Marshal” from *Ghosts of Saltmarsh* as a spin on this. The plot hook is a very earnest NPC cleric who believes is her mission to salvage the wrecked ship. She appeals to the PCs because everyone else believes she’s crazy to attempt to retrieve the “treasure”: 15 crates of religious literature, an enchanted naval ram bolted to the prow, the ship’s bell, an intact altar, and a 1,500-lb. statue of St. Cuthbert.
The kicker? The PCs are merely paid a day’s wages (plus any non-religious plunder), since the goal from the beginning was to recover the goods and give them back to the church without any expectation of reward.
Does anyone actually take her up on that quest? Seems… unrewarding.
Our group once came across a minor artifact that could let us do all sorts of neat stuff like astral projection, and predictably our hearts were filled with greed, but there were a few issues. It was a 10 ft diameter marble globe with a volume of 255 cubic feet that weighed 40,000 pounds and was brittle enough that rough handling was out of the question. It was also too big to use any spell we could think of to help us carry it, so no Shrink Object. To make things worse, this was at the bottom of a temple so getting it out with mundane means wasn’t really an option, no matter how strong the barbarian got. We did, however, have a Druid with Craft Wondrous Item, some time, and knowledge of a very particular item.
There’s a magic item called Needles of Fleshgraving. While a Bag of Holding is nice and convenient, just stuff things in and take it out whenever, the needles are much more unwieldy. They let you turn an item into a tattoo, which takes 10 minutes, and you can only use it once per day and it only lasts a week, plus it can be dispelled. Still, there is one massive benefit to using the needles: no weight or size limitations. You can turn any object, no matter how unwieldy, into a nice portable tattoo. So, we turned the globe into a tattoo, walked back through the temple to our home base, and set up our new fancy artifact in the middle, nice and easy.
I would have been terrified of getting dispelled en route, lol.
I feel like a 10 ft. diameter ball is pushing the limits of “object.” I’d probably give it to you too, but I’d make grumble sounds. Especially because I’ve seen forum discussions describing the moon as “an object.”
My favorite inconvenient treasure was the corpse of an Adult Red Dragon in the middle of a mine in a mountain in the middle of a mountain-range. The party had killed the [Volcanic Dragon](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/171480/Catastrophic-Dragons–World-Builder-Blog-Presents) that had killed it, and after looking at the loot I had rolled, I realized it’d be more interesting if a large percentage of the loot was the corpse of an adult Dragon that they would have to figure out a way to sell.
I had no idea how they would accomplish it, I wanted them to surprise me. Their solution was to arrange a deal to sell it to the Church of Bahamaut who would figure out how to get it themselves at a significant pay-cut. They had to escort a representative to it to confirm it, and there were some hijinks, but overall it worked out.
Heh. Dragon became mineral rights. That’s clever stuff!
On a game some peasants tried to buy their own freedom from the party empire with lots of gold and jewels, truly a king’s ransom. Problem was the party race don’t consider gold even valuable. They got plenty of it on the mountain where they live and even gems are used a coins. The gems on the treasure where barely worth a couple of the peasants freedom. Had they offered the party a big chunk of iron they won’t have end up as slaves 😀
I remember reading some fantasy novel back in the day where dragons hoarded gold. The only problem was that “gold” was the chemical reaction sleeping dragons had with their surroundings, sort of like an oyster making pearls. Interesting little extraction industries narrative there.
The manga Dungeon Meshi / Delicious in Dungeon actually plays up this trope – one of the ways adventurers make a profit in the settings dungeon(s) is by scraping gold from the gold-plated walls of the dungeon. So much so that the upper levels have already been ‘scraped clean’, forcing them to go deeper for profit.
> the upper levels have already been ‘scraped clean’, forcing them to go deeper for profit.
That’s every dungeon though, isn’t it? 😛
In one Pathfinder(I recall, might’ve been 3.5) campaing our wizard got an idea to set up a trading post to gather/buy exotic spices, herbs and stuff to sell at larger markets get money flowing. The plan fell apart when he over looked one critical aspect, operating costs. Yeah aparently you have to pay to gatherers, transporters and guards (good thing GM forgot tariffs or he’d have actually started to loose money), who’d have known. Definately not the guy joking about Monster culinary kitchen being more manageable and profitable as we did actively kill non-sentient things… I still say kobolds don’t count as sentient.
My GM tried a “gotcha” once on operating costs. Thanks to the “can make and sell items for half price” math, I almost got fast-talked into becoming a magic item factory for free. It was definitely a case where my wizard was better a simple arithmetic than me.
Absolutely any number of times. Though no specific memories really stick out. I’m pretty sure one game of the Out of the Abyss adventure I was in tried this. Which is *very* funny if you know what the scenario of that adventure is.
On the other hand as a GM, the last few D&D games I was running/going to run my plan was actually to deal in only modest levels of coinage and making “inconvenient wealth” a more major part of the party funds… but also way less inconvenient by one manner of custom magical item or the other.
Coins have real weight, you know? It’s usually academic when you’ve got a big dumb guy in the party, but in those cases where it’s not, that mess suddenly matters A LOT.
pathfinder’s strength->carry capacity scaling is bad enough that I’ve often found difficulties making loot the party CAN’T bring back.
I once had a party who wanted to bring back an entire manticore, so it could be stuffed and used as a display piece.
“So, you’re aware a manticore weighs well over a ton, right?”
“Yeah, I can carry it and I’m not even over carry capacity. It’s fine.”
“What?”
“Yeah, check my sheet. 4200 max carry weight, since I count as large for carrying capacity.”
by the end of the campaign, with magic items included, dude could lift an entire castle overhead.
Relevant Munchausen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9JONJG6KSU
Is the cheer scorpion a valid familiar option? What benefit does it give for the caster?
It’s psychic connection gives you morale bonus. If it senses you succeeding on a skill check you are not trained in, you receive a +2 morale bonus on the next skill check of that type.
This is why “bulk” is generally a better measure than ft. or lbs. Besides not being specific terms, it accounts for how items can be unwieldy to carry and not just generically heavy.
On the point of carrying large things, allow it, but don’t forget that PCs might have better things to do that they need to do.
I always liked those inventory systems where you actually have a grid, and you get to play Tetris with item cards.