Ruins and Treasure

Hey all.  I am running a game where the players are exploring a cursed island where everyone died quickly some 100yrs ago.  No one left with anything they owned.  Now the players are the first to every explore these places.  From a treasure standpoint, what seems reasonable for coins inside different types of ruined buildings?

An inn?

A residential home? 

A farmhouse?

 

 

 

A good starting point would be to look at the exected expenses/income of the characters you'd find in those places.

The average ACKS peasant farmer gets by on about 3 gp a month and has belongings (including housing and tools, but not land) worth about 100 gp. Given that 3,600 gp is therefore enough for a sinlge peasant farmer to live in the fashion to which they are accustomed without working for a full century, the amount of coin on any given farm is likely to be significantly less than that. In fact, even having more than 100 gp in unspent coin is probably too much, since that's theoretically enough to invest and recieve 3 gp per month in interest.

That said, the average peasant farmer probably has an unexpected windfall every now and then, and may have some savings, and many farms get their income only at specific times of year... So a peasant farmer proably does have a certain amount of stored fungible wealth stored up. Perhaps a reasonable guide would be about one year's income, ~36 gp? (That's for a single individual, of course. Most farms probably have more than a single person working on them.)

Another way (and one that I’m looking at currently for wilderness stocking tables) is to assume it works like dungeons and give about 4 GP per XP after exploring.

In the same way that dungeon levels have a declared treasure type per level when you find unguarded treasure, I’d start with finding the average XP of the encounter table for the area (whatever encounter table you’re using), then pick a treasure type that averages a GP value approximately four times that of the average XP value and is of a type appropriate for whatever it is (in the case of ruins from intelligent creatures, probably a hoarder).

[quote="Aryxymaraki"] Another way (and one that I'm looking at currently for wilderness stocking tables) is to assume it works like dungeons and give about 4 GP per XP after exploring. [/quote]

This is a very interesting thought.  I have a large city in the campaign which I have decided is a mega-dungeon. Level 1 being the rubbled streets with buildings acting like dungeon rooms.  I have not considered doing the same for wilderness hexes.  Using wilderness exploration as a "dungeon", I can create outdoor "zones" of control. Random monsters, treasure, etc become well defined for the area.  This also helps my concern about using mainly wilderness exploring for 1st level characters. Now, it's easy. The place they land on the island is treated like a 1st lvl dungeon.  The swamp is lvl 2, etc.  Perfect! 

Any thoughts how many 6-mile hexes a "wilderness dungeon" should be?  

I would say it depends on how many things there are to discover in the hex.

If you do what I am currently doing and reverse engineer a stocking table out of the number of lairs in the hex and the average incidence of lairs in the encounter table and the chance of encounters per throw in the hex, the end result is that there is a lot of stuff in a single hex! (Which makes sense, because a hex is a pretty significant land area. Trying to fully explore 32 square miles isn’t something you do in an afternoon.)

(It comes out to about 30-80 rolls on a hypothetical total overall table for a single hex, depending on terrain type. Incidentally, trying to figure out a system that does not involve ‘ok now roll on this table 50+ times’ is what has currently stalled me on wilderness stocking as a unified system.)

One roll on this hypothetical table would be analogous to one room in a dungeon, and so, the result is that if you want a result consistent with the number of lairs in a hex and the chance per encounter of a lair and so on, then even a single 6-mile hex is a good-sized dungeon.