Treasure: Thoughts and a Table

1D10 interesting non-weapon treasure items for use in your game...

May 20, 2025

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Introduction

Two weeks till game time! I’ve been spending a large percentage of my free time thinking about and working on two Shadowdark mini-adventures to serve as the combined game I’m running at a getaway weekend with friends. There has also been stealing time to read KNOCK! #1 and the two activities overlapped yesterday in generating treasure tables for both of the mini adventures I’m designing. This week’s blog-letter is regarding Treasure and there’s a 1D10 table at the end for you to use in your games.

The Thing

The KNOCK! piece titled “Better Treasure” by Bryce Lynch with art by Li-An spoke to me. I have struggled with this concept in design and preparation from the beginning of my journey running games. I often feel that what’s being given out is too mundane or too crazy good, and I love using cool magic items to get the players excited. The point of the article is that putting an interesting spin on mundane or lower-power items will translate into excitement from the players and I need practice doing this.

Shadowdark is my current RPG of choice and I love the endless tables provided in the book, but rolling on the level 0-3 treasure table has a lot of ho-hum options. Now, that is likely by design, You want a chance for awesome stuff but don’t want it raining from the sky - and even when you do get something awesome it will likely be a +1 weapon or +1 armor. It may be implied for old-school GMs that have been doing this forever that you’re supposed to spice these things up, but I havn’’t seen it explicitly stated in text like some of the other “known rules” have been translated in my favorite texts. Shadowdark tries to send up a flare to the GM by incorporating benefits and curses that are rolled for on other tables - this is the sign to the GM that even a +1 should have some personality. I’m sure there are GMs who see that and say “OF COURSE! you’re supposed to spice it up, don’t ever just hand out a vanilla +1 item”, but dense folks like myself sometimes learn the hard way over many years of mundane gameplay.

And of course there is danger of going the other way, making everything too powerful. What can we do to increase interest without getting on the power creep escalator?? This problem doesn’t really exist as much in OSR style games is it does in 5E, because the bad guys are ALWAYS dangerous in non-heroic large HP pool games, but you still don’t want to up the ante in too big a jump.

Focusing on once-per-day abilities, curses and drawbacks that are interesting but not also in their own right an unreasonable drain on the excitement. And then there’s the gold value and XP to give out, some games that is one and the same, some games it is separate. This number mostly comes right out of my butt, but again OSR style games to me do a better job of making coin matter.

So anyways, on the other side of this is just the need to practice creating fun and interesting things. I’ve noticed I have to work to keep the whimsey and weird in my fantasy, so let’s see what we can cook up…hope you like it!

Till next time!