IKRPG (2d6): Does anyone has any advice on how to generate loot?

Does anyone has any advice on how to generate interesting loot?
I’m not super concerned with it making a lot of sense with the enemy or chest is on. Also, I don’t mind if the players are getting too powerful too quickly.
I just want a quick and dirty way to the generate some valuables the players can find.

Any advice is really appreciated.

1 Like

I’d say in most cases you shouldn’t sweat it too much. Unless you’re going for a monster that still has something interesting lying around in its lair, the most interesting loot that most individuals will have on them is their weapons and armour, and potentially jewelry and money.

What’s probably most interesting and useful for players is ammunition, as even ammunition for the wrong weapons can be repurposed. Also, some guns in particular can be very powerful but also very expensive, and players might be really interested in them (e.g. repeating pistols and rifles, and quad-irons, not to mention magelock guns). Apart from that, mechanika would be the big thing - mechanika is expensive, true, but there’s no reason in the setting why quite a number well-to-do individuals shouldn’t have mechanikal weapons and armour, even if they only use low-grade runes (i.e. up to 2 rune points), or some simple but practical mechanikal items like lanterns. However, I’d not put those items randomly into NPCs’ inventories, even if mechanika isn’t truly rare.

Another piece of loot that could be useful for use or sale would be alchemical compounds. There’s quite a selection out there (and there’s a few hundred more in my Gearbooks PDFs), and some of them are very useful or valuable indeed.

Last but not least, many individuals, especially if they are well-to-do or unscrupulous and vain, could wear some jewelry that could fetch a pretty penny, whether by taking it apart and selling the stones and metal, or by ransoming heirlooms back to their owners’ families. And jewelry is eminently portable, too.

2 Likes

Thx @Morgan_Coalburn! Sure, it does not feel very difficult to come up with some believable loot :thinking:

1 Like

Always remember: because this is not an MMORPG, gnolls always drop 4 paws, and the loot from killing the bad guy is almost always going to be WYSIWYG. :grin:

3 Likes

Very well pointed out @Michael :rofl:
Learned that lesson the hard way! My players are great teachers. It’s really hard to convince them that the enemy’s axe just vanished after he died :sweat_smile:

1 Like

Well, stuff sometimes breaks. :slightly_smiling_face: But, yeah, most stuff is still going to be around, but it might be in bad shape!

Armor is going to be bullet-riddled and bashed and gouged, if not outright flattened when their warjack crushed the guy with a fist the size of his torso. :slightly_smiling_face: Enemy warjacks — especially if they had any cortex quirks — aren’t going to take kindly to new controllers. Mechanika can be delicate and critical bits can get broken during combat.

You don’t have to hand them the keys to that brand-new fresh-off-the-assembly-line jack they just smashed, but it seems fair they could try to salvage the scrap they left once they were finished with it. :slightly_smiling_face: Or maybe they need to acquire a new cortex or have it wiped, or…

2 Likes

Nice advice! I’ll try to tear down a bit of the equipment that was used during combat. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like

The best armour would probably be custom-fitted too… still, I wouldn’t make salvaging a suit too difficult, if a player wanted to do it (though a skilled armourer would definitely need to get to work on fitting the suit to a new owner).

A warjack belonging to a different nation would probably we worthless without a cortex replacement, but some of its equipment - guns, mechanikal systems - would be both portable and fetch a nice sum, and even a foreign cortex could be removed and sold on the black market or to mercenaries.

And I generally wouldn’t make mechanikal equipment break to prevent looting; mechanika is usually sturdier than that. That being said, in our games the group has got the mechanikal items it wants custom-made, so there’s not much of an incentive to use found mechanika, though we have also sold Cryxian mechanika to a collector of strange artifacts.

Now the real treasure would be magical items, which are incredibly rare in the setting (as they are made at cost to the maker’s soul)… and even then such items have come up so rarely they have always been special rather than just “loot” (for example, a magical maul dedicated to Morrow that we found in a game we decided to return to a temple, as we deemed it too important for just a group of adventurers to hold on to).

3 Likes

Thank you all guys for the wonderful input. I’m now just thinking on a easy way to randomize loot. A very simple, roll-a-couple-dice way to decide what Mr. baddy #4 will have in his pockets.

1 Like