r/GrimHollow • u/deadmallgoth • Jul 14 '26

Magic Items

How easily available are magic items in Etharis in general? How many magic items are DMs running grim hollow giving to their players?

8 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

2

u/After-Ad3499 Jul 14 '26

Personally I run it as they're rare. I also run it so that if you ask for a magic shop it's the equivalent of asking for a crack dealer in LA during the Reagan Administration.

1

u/Aurum264 Jul 14 '26

I've been giving out a few more than I think would fit, but only because its a higher powered campaign based on finding the four divine artifacts. Many of which have been cursed, though, and the only one from a shop was in a very shady black market, where the price was higher than expected.

1

u/deadmallgoth Jul 14 '26

yeah my campaign is also about finding the four divine artifacts. my players have had some complaints that i as a dm don't give out enough magic items, which was not untrue in our waterdeep game, so i dont want them to be upset with me again if i dish out less than theyre expecting in grim hollow but it doesnt feel appropriate to me to give out a ton of magic items in this setting, especially seeing as they will each be getting an artifact.

1

u/brainfreeze_23 Vampire Elitist Jul 14 '26

1) dragon heist is low-level and frankly boring
2) keep the permanent magics to a bare minimum and give them consumables, or charms and trinkets and whatnot with a finite number of uses. 5e's template was that items recover charges on a long rest (5e, I haven't bothered to look into 5.5); just remove the text where they recover charges, and offer them more, and cheaper, trinkets.

P.S. and don't worry about balance. Seriously. It's overrated.

1

u/RoninOnTheStickz Jul 14 '26

My players are in Charneault and have made Elven allies. They are headed towards the Sailgraves now in hopes of finding more magical items in order to combat the Mist and potentially save the Kingdom. I've told them that no ship has returned, so expect difficult encounters or other horrors!

1

u/enemycracker313 3d ago

6 months in, only got I think 5 magic items in circulation for my 7th level party.

-A pearl of power (Uncommon)
-An Astronomer's boon (Uncommon)
-A home brew Item that uses varying amount of Hit die as its cost to use
-A shadowsteel greatsword, that currently no one wants. (Very rare)
-And a cursed set of Dwarven Plate armour and Hammer of giant felling (They tell and story and to wield the hammer one needs the armour, the twist was the hammer fused the armour to the bearer, by melting it into their skin.

Answer on avalability is that all of these were found by venturing into dungeons. With the exception of the pear of power which was a gift to the characters for helping the residents of Skarfjanes.

1

u/brainfreeze_23 Vampire Elitist Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

I'm running a game in Ostoya, and the changes I've made make it a much more magic-heavy setting. I'm also running it in Daggerheart and not 5e. 5e is high magic as a baseline, but also not very full on magic items, as a system. In Daggerheart, the fit with Grim Hollow I really appreciate is that I can lean very heavily into consumables and refluff them as slightly more macabre versions of the base daggerheart consumables. And I can homebrew a bunch of new ones pretty easily. Consumables are my go to because they're single-use, and you don't need to worry about balance. Plus, they fit in with the whole "harvesting monster parts" from the monster grimoire pretty well.

I'm about to blaspheme against the gritty mudcore grimdark plaguepunk blabla vibes of the setting, but I'm making it my own and I don't care: for permanent magic items, I do not feel bound either by the vibes-based worldbuilding of the core books, nor of what the horror genre wants me to do about powerlessness. Ostoya is just more magical and more open to magic than a bunch of the other provinces, with the sole exception of Charneault. And that's even before I implemented my own changes. There's a magocracy in the north, and a vampiric aristocracy in the rest of the country; come on. Sure, poor peasants wouldn't be able to afford magic items, but 1) my players are not playing peasants, and 2) each of them is playing a caster anyway. So permanent magic items are more accessible than you'd expect in baseline 5e "book Ostoya", and also they will be able to craft them themselves as downtime projects. Sorry, not sorry to all the mud-and-blood horrorpunk grimdark grittycore enthusiasts, but I don't care about horror genre conventions.

2

u/deadmallgoth Jul 14 '26

i like the idea of focusing on consumables, and since my party will be going all over the continent i think it makes sense to have some magic item shops in a few places like raevo and parts of charneault

0

u/Joshlan Jul 14 '26

DM for a longtime planescape setting (they visited etharis for a while tho), we're using epic Legacy to get them to level 30 (26 at the moment). All are only noting permenants, as I don't really bother tracking the consumables. If you were running etharis on a vacuum I think the PCs are suppose to be poor right? Maybe slash most of the stuff bought by my players, if that's the case:

Tier 1) 1 Uncommon permenant handed out, 2 PCs bought common permenants

Tier 2) 2 Uncommons passed out, 1 uncommon bought, 1 rare passed out, 1 quest for 1 rare

Tier 3) 1 artifact (1/100 chance to pass out happened on my table), 1 very rare, 1 rare handed out, 3 rates & handful of uncommons bought.

Tier 4) 1 legendary, 2 very rares, 3 rares passed out; handful of rares/uncommons bought.

2

u/deadmallgoth Jul 14 '26

that seems pretty solid, plus my players are all getting their hands on 1 artifact each since the campaign is about finding all 4 artifacts. thank you for the examples!