Treasure is a key ingredient for a successful D&D game, but like the setting in a screenplay, few storytellers (DMs) give it the attention it deserves. If you treat your treasure like another tool on your belt, you can get many benefits with minimal effort, and that's a big win as a time-strapped DM. This article will show you how to get the most out of your treasure by looking at it like a tool, rather than a random result or a gold piece value.

What constitutes cool treasure?

The answer depends on who you are asking, but for U20, cool treasure is the stuff that's different from what you're used to seeing; it’s unique in some way. Cool abilities, interesting backstories, or an unusual look are all ways to make the treasure in your game cooler. A sword is boring. The sword of the nameless assassin, though—a blade that kills every time it is drawn from its jewelled scabbard—now that's cool.

What's in it for the players?

There are many player benefits to having cool treasure in your game.

Vivid Encounters and Cooler Stories

Players with cool treasure will draw attention to their cool items and weapons as they fight and roleplay. Consider the following.

"I draw my weapon as a free action while moving and axe him a question. I can get all the way there thanks to my magic boots."

It's pretty clear what's happening in that scene, but it's boring to listen to. Cool treasure will more likely result in the following.

"I unlimber Foe-Reaver with both hands and charge forward. It's too far, but I whisper the "quickling" command word and my boots carry me right to the dais and the yuan-ti cleric."

While not every action needs to be heroic or painstakingly detailed, it’s easier for a player to paint a scene around themselves if they have a clear picture of who they are and what they wield, and that can only add colour, flavour, and fun to your game.

Greater Motivation to Play

Let's face it; we all like to kick ass and gain power, and other than levelling up, the best way to gain more power is to get more treasure (preferably while kicking ass and gaining experience points). A strong motivation to get into the game is when your character's treasure is cool.

I can remember when I first played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and just the idea of being a flail-wielding elven cleric was awesome to me—I held onto that image for weeks afterwards. Nowadays, I need a bit more personality to get truly excited about a character, but still, little gets me as pumped for a game session as recalling that my monk now wields Elkar the elf-destroyer, a bad-ass super spear. Will I continue its dark legacy, or forge a new destiny from the item's terrible power? That's the kind of choice many players relish.

Customization

A game can sink its hooks deep if it allows character customization, and D&D (and other tabletop RPGs) is the king of character choice. Interesting, unique treasure encourages the players to customize their own weapons, armour, items, and even spells. This process encourages character ownership, investment, and fuller immersion in the game, which can make the whole thing more fun for everyone involved.

But, what's in it for the DM?

The DM stands to gain a lot from inserting cool treasure into his campaign, too.

Happier Players

Players get so much out of cool treasure that it can only make them smile, and that makes it easier for the DM to gather the group for sessions. It grows the "team" mentality at the table, and diminishes the unpleasantness of rules-interpretation arguments. Happy people are fun.

Simple Customization

If you want to give your campaign (or aspects of it) a real personality, look no further than inserting cool, unique treasure into your game. Playing with the statistics and look of items is quicker and easier than creating pantheons, histories for your game world, prestige classes, or original monsters. Plus, players are far more likely to remember the group of baddies that wielded those curved longswords (khopeshes) that kept tripping them, rather than the group of baddies that, apparently, like to eat borscht on Sundays.

Easy-Grab Quest Hooks

If you include unique items in your treasure, it's easy to develop quest hooks. Maybe a unique item in the PCs' care is sought by others? Maybe it needs to be taken somewhere special to be activated? Maybe only certain merchants will deal with the unique item? Maybe the item has a terrible history that is remembered by a village crone? Maybe it is the key to an ancient puzzle? Maybe the PCs want more like it?

The item can be the subject of a few conversations that enrich the game world, or it could be the centre of a quest spanning for sessions. The hooks are easy to generate, and the results are more tools for the DM.

How to include cool treasure in your game

So, that's all well and good, but how do you include it, and what should you look out for?

Design for the Players, but also not

Getting exactly what you want is great, but tastes are fickle. Thus, it can be a little dangerous to provide loot for your PCs that is obviously meant for individual characters, especially if you do it a lot. Many players are hard to please, and designing PC-specific loot should be treated a little like gift-giving in RL; sometimes cash, and the choice that comes with it, is simply better. You want to avoid the feelings of jealousy or even resentment that can come from a given item for one PC being less cool than another, and the lack of choices while dividing loot because they affect specific class features (and are therefore meant for one PC whether he wants it or not) can also be frustrating.

What's meant to be fair can suddenly feel like anything but.

So, design for specific PCs sparingly. If you can, try to make those items quest-related and known to the PCs ahead of time. If you have a duellist in the party, put an exquisite duelling sword in the hands of the antagonist baron. Got an ancient evil? Make it vulnerable only to specific types of weapons forged in specific places. Keeping your cool items rare and quest-related keeps the PCs on track, and provides a greater sense of accomplishment to earning them, while avoiding any of the nastiness that can arise from unintentional favouritism.

Items that do things are cooler than items that do math

While everyone appreciates an extra +1 to hit and to damage, it's boring. When designing unique items, make their uniqueness a factor of what they do by offering new abilities, or by changing old ones. A pair of boots that let you dimension door once per day is cooler than bracers of armour, regardless of the bonuses involved. A warhammer that deals magical force damage (allowing it to strike incorporeal creatures normally) is cooler than a +1 warhammer. A largely valueless, but convincing, sceptre that resembles a royal crest or a noble's seal is cooler than identification papers (okay, that last one doesn’t really fit, but it’s cooler to empower the PCs to use their social skills with a prop than to just flash a badge and walk inside).

A different grip, a coat of paint, and a cool command word go a long way

There are hundreds of ways to customize a piece of treasure to make it unique, many of which need not even affect the item's statistics to make a positive difference in the game. A customized "pistol" style grip for a light blade, a shield styled like a medusa head, or a gnomish wand of magic missiles that only fires when the player says "bugbear soup" can all be used to add style and a splash of colour to your game.

Twist What's Already There

There is a lot of cool treasure in the core books in any edition, and more elsewhere, so it makes sense to start with what you know and build on it, or change it. This technique is rather obvious, so instead of detailing how it's done, we've elected to provide several examples of cool gear, both magical and not, that should work as great jumping-off points for your game.

232 coins of an unknown mint . The coins themselves are at least as valuable as the silver, gold, or platinum they’re made of, but to the right collector they’re worth 10 times that amount. The coins may have runes on them that are the key to a puzzle, or maybe the coins are a clue to the adventurers who entered this dungeon before them. Encourage the players to appraise the coins with their own skills, and feed them the right morsels for their investigation (but don’t be surprised if they just go for the quick cash-in).

A pair of copper daggers are green with age and nearly useless as weapons (1d2 slashing/x2, 5ft. range increment). Detect magic shows them to be faintly magical. The daggers aren’t really worth selling (at first glance), but perhaps they are the mark of a particular house, or maybe the magic remains dormant until certain conditions are met, or maybe they are proof against a rust monster’s antennae.

A battle-worn leather soldier’s bandolier that includes two sheaths and several pouches, complete with a masterwork short sword and four thunderstones. Thunderstones are potentially quite useful against intelligent enemies, but are seldom employed because they don’t deal any direct damage. This bandolier provides the impetus to deafen your opponents, and is a handy container for weapons, tools, and potions. Also, who did it belong to, and what happened to him/her?

One or more bars of rare, smelted ore . They could be cold iron, silver, adamantine, or some other ore that you’ve made up. This allows the PCs to get their hands on a small amount of exactly the equipment they want.

Golem-Cracker , a simply-adorned, magical, adamantine greathammer (1d12/x4/30 lbs.), is non-intelligent but stubbornly insists whenever grasped that he waits for someone worthy to wield him. Golem-Cracker is a martial weapon, but is too heavy to wield normally without a strength score of 19 or higher (-4 to hit and damage). In those hands, however, he functions as a construct-bane weapon, and thanks to his construction he ignores the hardness of everything from solid oak to steel.

As you can see, inspiration for cool treasure can come from anywhere, which is worthy of its own article and has already been well-treated elsewhere. For now, stay sharp, keep a notebook handy, and check out the following articles from roleplayingtips.com (if you play D&D you should subscribe to J4's weekly 'zine).

9 Tips for Enhancing Treasure to Improve your Campaigns

Making Magic Items Interesting Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3

On Magic and Merchant Availability

Many DMs and players prefer a grittier, realistic style of game that often includes little magic, but that need not hamper your efforts to provide cool treasure for your players. In fact, the subtle stylistic changes become that much more interesting in the absence of flaming swords and rainbow-spouting wands.

Other games that include more magic often have a different set of problems; magic becomes boring, or the magic items the PCs have are so valuable that the average merchant would have no way of buying it from the players, making unwanted treasure nothing but extra weight and clutter on the character sheet. It's important to pay special attention to the players and their reaction to treasure so you gauge how well you're using treasure to make the game better. It might sting a little when you provide a custom piece you think is perfect for a given PC and they ignore it, but it's best to let them offload it or trade it for something they really want.

Player happiness is often the key to you enjoying your game, and everyone likes to make their own choices.

So, Don't Overlook Treasure

Hopefully you've learned (if you didn't already know) that with the right, light touch, treasure can be an enriching tool for your game as it adds depth to the story, detail to the world, and customizable fun for the players. Treasure tables and other time-savers can bring forth a host of problems of their own (balance, boredom, and a lack of believability), and customizing your own treasure can be time-consuming.

Ideally, every monster you buy would give treasure the treatment it deserves in your game, rather than suggesting you head to the random treasure tables, or making you build the hoard yourself. If you want to see the U20 take on how treasure should be treated, stay tuned for the critters in our Monster Store; each U20 store monster will include multiple, context-specific, easily-customizable treasure caches that will let you start enjoying the benefits of great treasure in your game with no extra effort.