Entertainment and Trade Goods

Entertainment

Many adventurers like to sit down and play a game now and then to pass the time—or make some easy gold.

Table: Entertainment

Item Cost Weight
Ball (2 in.) 8 cp -
Ball (5 in.) 2 sp -
Ball (10 in.) 6 gp 1 lb.
Billiards gear 5 sp 8 lbs.
Board game 1 sp–10 gp 2 lbs.
Bowling set 5 sp–10 gp 15 lbs.
Cards 1 sp–100 gp 1 lb.
Croquet set 5 sp 10 lbs.
Crossword 1 cp–1 sp -
Dartboard set 5 sp 10 lbs.
Dice 1 sp -
Dominos 1 sp–25 gp 1 lb.
Horseshoes game 5 sp 3 lbs.
Kite 1 sp–2,000 gp 1 lb.–5 lbs.
Loaded dice, average 10 gp -
Loaded dice, superior 50 gp -
Marked cards 1 gp 1 lb.
Polo gear 5 sp 5 lbs.
Puzzle box 1 gp–1,000 gp 1 lb.–5 lbs.
Rounders gear 1 sp 1/2 lb.
Tennis gear 3 sp 3 lbs.

Ball: This ball may be an inflated animal bladder, carved from light wood, fabric stuffed with cloth or plant fiber and sewn shut.

Billiards gear: This set includes a wooden cue, a block of cue chalk, 15 wooden balls, and a triangular wooden ball rack.

Board game: Board games have innumerable types and variations. Siege, a strategy game where players try to surround the other's pieces, is popular with older adults, while more chaotic games like Wyvern's Race and Doppel are tavern favorites.

Bowling set: This simple 10-pins game is often complicated by irregularities in the ball, the pins, and the playing field.

Cards: Playing cards range from block-printed symbols on thick paper to elaborate, hand-painted works of art on waxed vellum, ivory, wood, or even metal.

Croquet set: This set includes four wooden mallets, nine wooden wickets (goals), and four wooden balls.

Crossword: These word puzzles can be found in many languages. A typical one is drawn on leather or wood in a 15-by-15 square grid. Larger grids allow longer words and tend to be more difficult.

Dartboard set: This set includes a multicolored board and six brass-tipped darts. The board usually consists of a layer of soft wood or cork on a hardwood backing.

Dice: Dice can come in many shapes, but the most common are cubes.

Dominos: This wooden box contains 28 tiles with numbers or pips on each end. A common set is made of wood or bone, but more expensive ones may be made of ivory, stone, or metal.

Horseshoes game: This game includes two iron stakes and four iron horseshoes.

Kite: Kites range from canvas toys to ornate, silken works of art.

Loaded dice: Most loaded dice are weighted, with a heavier substance included opposite the desired number. You can spot this tampering with a DC 15 Appraise or Perception check. Superior dice (such as wooden dice carved around a naturally heavy point) have DCs ranging from 20 to 30.

Marked cards: Whether bent, colored, or scratched, marked cards allow an informed user to know what's on the front of the card by viewing the mark on the back. Realizing that the cards are marked requires a DC 25 Perception check or DC 20 Profession (gambler) check. The listed price is for a common paper deck.

Polo gear: This includes a leather helmet, a long-handled mallet, and a wooden ball.

Puzzle box: This box features moving parts, secret panels, or unusual codes and locking mechanisms. Depending on the box, a Disable Device, Knowledge (engineering), Linguistics, or simple Intelligence check might open it. The DC of the check varies with the complexity of the box, but is typically 15 or 20 (retry once per day). Multiple skill checks might be necessary for different stages of the puzzle. If the puzzle box was constructed with the intention that one specific person should be able to open it, that person gets a +5 circumstance bonus on the check.

Rounders gear: Players of this game divide into teams and alternate hitting a small, leather-encased ball with a wooden bat. They run around a field to various safe bases, scoring points when a player completes a circuit through all four bases. The set includes two balls, two bats, and four cloth-stuffed canvas bases.

Tennis gear: This includes a wool-stuffed leather ball and a wooden racket strung with animal gut.

Trade Goods

Merchants commonly exchange trade goods without using currency. Trade goods are the exception to the rule that you can sell an item for half its price; they're valuable enough to be exchanged almost as if they were cash itself. Trade goods are usually transported and sold in larger quantities than the amount listed. A farmer may have 10- and 20-pound sacks of potatoes to sell to a large family or restaurant, and be resistant to tearing open a bag just to sell a few individual potatoes.

Trade goods fall into several categories.

Animals: The listed price is for one live animal. For larger animals such as pigs and cows, the price includes a short length of cheap rope, allowing you to lead the creature away. For smaller animals such as chickens and geese, the purchase might include a bag for carrying them.

Food: Food items includes staples such as wheat, nuts, or cheese, plus more exotic foods or ingredients such as chilies, coffee beans, or honey. Note that some of the food items here have different prices than in the section on food, because purchasing that item as something ready to eat includes the cost (in money or labor) of preparing and cooking the food. For example, turnips as a trade good are 2 cp per pound, but a poor meal (which primarily consists of turnips) is 1 sp per day. You can buy a 10-pound bag of turnips for 2 sp, but you'd have to cut and boil them to turn them into a meal.

Raw Materials: Raw materials have little use as-is but can be made into other useful or valuable items. Iron, stone, darkwood, leather, cloth, and fur pelts are raw materials. Metals are usually sold as ingots or rough nuggets, but can be transported or sold as ore.

The value of metal ore depends on its grade—how much of it is valuable metal out of the total volume of common rock. For a typical fantasy campaign, an ore's grade may be as high as 60% (for some particularly rich iron deposits) or as low as 5% (any less than this and it's not cost-effective to mine it). For convenience, assume that typical ore is 25% grade. Multiply the pure metal's price per pound by this grade percentage to determine the best value of the ore. For example, gold is 50 gp per pound, so a 25% grade ore is worth about 50 gp × 25% = 12-1/2 gp per pound. Given the cost of smelting, ore is usually worth one-half to three-quarters this value (so the 25% grade gold ore is actually bought and sold for about 6 gp to 9 gp per pound).

Spices: Spices such as garlic, cumin, fennel, salt, and ginger are used to flavor other foods. They are usually sold in jars, bottles, or waxed-cloth packets.

Table: Trade Goods

Cost Item
1 cp Guinea pig, rat, wheat (1 lb.)
2 cp Beans (1 lb.), cheese (1 lb.), chicken, flour (1 lb.), potatoes (1 lb.), turnips (1 lb.)
3 cp Charcoal (20 lbs.), citrus (1 lb.), nuts (1 lb.), peat (20 lbs.)
5 cp Coffee beans (1 lb.), coal (20 lbs.), masonry stone (1 lb.), sugar (1 lb.)
1 sp Iron (1 lb.)
5 sp Copper (1 lb.), garlic (1 lb.), mint (1 lb.), mustard (1 lb.), oregano (1 lb.), thin leather (1 sq. yard), tobacco (1 lb.)
1 gp Allspice (1 lb.), basil (1 lb.), cinnamon (1 lb.), cloves (1 lb.), dill (1 lb.), glass (1 lb.), goat, honey (1 lb.), maple syrup (1 lb.), nutmeg (1 lb.), rosemary (1 lb.)
2 gp Beaver pelt, chilies (1 lb.), cardamom (1 lb.), cumin (1 lb.), fennel (1 lb.), ginger (1 lb.), pepper (1 lb.), saffron (1 lb.), sheep, vanilla (1 lb.)
3 gp Fox pelt, mink pelt, pig, thick leather (1 sq. yard)
4 gp Ermine pelt, linen (1 sq. yard)
5 gp Marble (1 lb.), salt (1 lb.), seal pelt, silver (1 lb.)
6 gp Wool (1 lb. or 1 sq. yard)
8 gp Cotton (1 lb. or 1 sq. yard)
10 gp Chocolate (1 lb.), cow, darkwood (1 lb.), silk (1 sq. yard)
15 gp Cloves (1 lb.), ox, saffron (1 lb.)
50 gp Cold iron (1 lb.), gold (1 lb.)
300 gp Adamantine (1 lb.)
500 gp Mithral (1 lb.), platinum (1 lb.)
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