Player Resources

Money and Magic

Forget what it says in the Player's Handbook, forget the asinine amount of wealth characters are supposed to be carting around, forget the crass and short-sighted proliferation of magical items - Iourn is not like that. Every magic item has a reason for existing and they not common. Most adventurers don't see more than one or two enchanted items in their lifetime, and even less manage to hang on to them. The great and the good might have more, but they do not flaunt them. Magic items (of any description) are far too precious to sell. The monetary value placed on magic items in the rulebooks is a nonsense. Armourers do not sell magical chain mail, cobblers don't sell magic boots and jewellers have not got an exclusive line on rings of protection. All these things are items of power, not toys to be bought or sold.

Magic items are either devices and weapons that have been lost by a great ancient culture (such as the Hadradans) or they have been created by the relatively few individuals capable of doing so today. Very few individuals are born sorcerers, and of those that are, even less have the application and the desire to spend vast amounts of time in one place creating a magical device. Wizards are certainly more common, but there are not many who rise to an experience level sufficiently high to create these marvels.

The fact is as plain as a nineteenth century governess: there simply aren't very many individuals who have experience, the power or the skills to create magical artefacts. In plain rulespeak, the item creation feats listed in the PHB require a spellcaster to be of a certain experience level. As already stated, the item creation feats are unlikely to be known by sorcerers, meaning that only wizards (and to a lesser extent) clerics have the time and patience to develop these talents. Any spellcaster can take the Scribe Scroll feat, and even relatively low-level casters (3rd level) can attempt to brew a potion. 3rd level wizards also are able to select the Craft Wondrous Item feat, but they are unlikely to have the skill, the resources or the experience points to create anything more impressive than a pair of self-cleaning socks. After this, wizards cannot attempt to create magic wands, arms and amour until 5th level; rods until 9th and they have to wait until 12th level before they can try their hand at staffs or rings. How many wizards get to these experience levels? To give you a clue - Gaston, archwizard of the Norandon court, is thirteenth level and he is considered the most powerful wizard in the land (after Narramac).

Now pause to think about the possibility of buying spells. Read again the list of how many spellcasters of certain experience levels actually exist. Of all the churches, the Church of Life, the Church of Fortune's Favour and the Arcanum Incognita are the organisations that are most likely to cast spells for money. Most other faiths will consider it. The Church of Fire will resurrect for money, but the number of clerics of ninth level or higher is so small that they are often unavailable or have better things to do with their time. Thanks to the Watchers almost everyone looks on resurrection suspiciously and wouldn't want it. Most high priests of a parish will be sixth level. This means that the highest level priest of Vítaeous in a given area will probably not have access to a restoration spell. The Arcanum Incognita will sell arcane as well as divine magic, but their reputation is such that no-one wants to be in debt to them. Finding a wizard to cast a spell such as identify is easy enough, but finding one to cast analyse dweomer is practically impossible. A wizard would have to be eleventh level, and any character who has got that far really doesn't need the money. Thanks to the Arcanum Incognita there are no guilds of wizardry outside Sorostrae. In short: don't count on being able to buy magic spells when you need them. They aren't that common either.

Technology

The availability of different types of technology varies from country to country. For the most part, Urova is gripped in the equivalent of Europe's dark age. That means that parties shouldn't expect anything too advanced littering the side of major thoroughfares. Anything that takes a great deal of skill to make will be either rare or non-existent. Therefore, two-handed swords, full plate armour and other comparable items are should not be readily available to players. The major exception to this rule is the Kingdom of Norandor. Where everyone else is the in the dark ages, civilised Norandor has dragged itself up into the twelfth century. They are a little more advanced in regard to what they are capable of making and producing. Anything listed in the Player's Handbook is available in Norandor's major cities.

To the best of anyone's knowledge, nowhere on Norandor has developed black-powder weapons or firearms of any sort. This is not to say that some parts of the world aren't technologically advanced enough to have done it, but weapons are created from a need and with the presence of magic and psionics, there has simply been no need to create these things. At its best a musket is a slightly more powerful crossbow; it really has nothing on a magic missile spell. Plus, even if someone had dreamed up smoke powder, guns could not be mass-produced in sufficient quantities to make an enormous impact on warfare.

The Pits of Walhoon is the most technologically advanced country, by several hundred years. Those gnomes do love to tinker. They have developed marvels such as the steam engine, airships, monorails and various other gizmos. The gnomes have been in the grip of an industrial revolution for some time. Occasionally, gnomish devices are found outside the Pits, but this is very rare. In fact, gnomes are particularly fastidious when it comes to keeping their technology to themselves. Some have enough speculated that covert teams of highly trained gnomes are occasionally sent from the Pits to retrieve any items of stolen technology and destroy any evidence that the tech existed in the first place. The gnomes of the Pits don't even share their creations with their brothers in the Five Colour Kingdom.