Treasure: 5 Tips and Tricks for Making Your Treasure Hoards More Memorable

The Fishpool Hoard: British Museum.  Photo: d20 Despot

Treasure.  It's a big part of playing D&D.  It is often one of the primary motivations for adventuring.  But how often is it truly memorable?  How often are your players as impressed by their haul as their characters should be?

So often, after a big fight, games of D&D turn into games of accounting.  "You find 2,500 gold pieces, 1,000 silver, and two rubies worth 500 gp each.  Also, everyone gets 1,200 XP."  While treasure and experience are both rewards for a job well done, they should not be treated in the same way.  XP is a numerical abstraction of your character's growth and skill - it is intangible to the character.  Treasure, however, is an in-game reward, and is very tangible to the character.  Yet too often, just as XP becomes a number that players use to invests in better powers, gp becomes just a number that players invest in better equipment.  Finding treasure should be a roleplaying opportunity, not a simple exercise in accounting.

Let's take a look at some tips and tricks to making treasure interesting, exciting, believable, and memorable.



1. Do some research.  Make your treasure hoards realistic and flavourful
A treasure hoard is not just a pile of riches - it is an opportunity to expand on your setting and immerse your players in the world.  Real-life hoards found by archaeologists and very lucky farmers usually don't just consist of coins, but also jewelry, gemstones, weapons, and ingots of precious metal.  When it comes to grave goods, you get even more variety: lavish furniture, valuable household items, ceremonial armour, cauldrons, drinking horns, even chariots.  Is your campaign setting - or even the dungeon your players are currently in - based on a real-life culture?  Do some research into that culture's history, especially into related archaeology.  If you're lucky enough to live in that very country, go to a museum.

Are your players breaking into a pyramid or Ancient Egyptian-inspired tomb?  Look into the grave goods typically buried with pharaohs: gilded furniture, statuettes, burial masks, protective amulets... even mummified food.

How about the ancient Persians?  Take a look at these Persian artifacts on display at the British Museum:

Clockwise from top left: golden fish-shaped vessel for expensive oils,
silver griffin wine pourer, tiny golden chariot model

I'm not saying you should convert all of your party's potential loot into shiny furniture and esoteric cups, but throw in the occasional carnelian necklace, lapis lazuli mask, or mammoth-ivory drinking horn and see what the PCs do with them.

At the very least, mix up your coins.  Most treasure hoards should include all sorts of coins from different places, and in all sorts of metals.  Instead of giving out 2,000 gold pieces, 4,000 silver, and 1,000 copper, maybe give out 2,391 gp, 3,960 sp, 1,037 cp, 214 electrum coins, and an ancient IOU note.  Having nice, round numbers makes the math more convenient, but it also mentally turns the treasure into an abstract concept rather than a real material possession.

2. Give out useful items
Not all treasure is gold, silver, and gems.  Your players will appreciate useful mundane items as well, even if they aren't shiny.  And I'm not just talking about healing potions and magic swords.  When 18th century pirates weren't plundering gold-laden Spanish galleons, they were robbing ships of all their most useful treasure: food, rope, extra sailcloth, medicine, gunpowder, and booze.

It's like Christmas shopping: when in doubt, get them something they can use.  I know many characters would be happy to receive a cask of ale or wine as part of their treasure.  How about an alchemist's lab?  A spyglass? Silk rope? Playing cards? New boots? Fresh clothes?  Even a wagon or a siege ballista can be useful treasure given the right circumstances.  And if you are playing a nautical campaign, don't forget to factor in the value of the ships your party will no doubt capture at some point.

Animals are valuable, especially a good horse.  A pig or a sheep can make for a great hot meal that could sate even the hungriest band of adventurers on the road and far from home.  Speaking of food, try to make your party keep track of their rations.  Not only does it add to the realism and the immersion factor, but it will make them so much more appreciative every time they clear out a bandit cave and find a wheel of cheese, a bubbling cauldron of leek and rabbit stew, or a sealed pot of blackberry preserves.  Heck, half the treasure that Galadriel gave to the Fellowship was Elvish poptarts.

3. Give out non-useful items
Ok, definitely don't do this all the time, or your party will mutiny.  But sometimes the most memorable treasures are the most awkward or useless.  What will your party do when they have to deal with a 15x30 ft. wall tapestry woven with real silver thread?  Or a golden clock in the shape of a galleon?

16th century galleon automaton, British Museum. Photo: d20 Despot

Even if you don't go that far, not all treasure has to be, well, treasure.  If your party is going up against the bandits that have been raiding merchant caravans in the area, most of the loot will probably be in the form of wine, spices, bolts of fine cloth, iron ingots, furs, or even sacks of grain.

Again, don't do this constantly, or your players will probably hate you.  But then again, they might like it even better; I occasionally hear stories of campaigns that were derailed when the players decided they wanted to set up shop or become merchants.  It might turn out like every game of Mount and Blade that I've played: running from bandits, raiding villages, killing bandits, fighting a war... ooh, I could get a good price for this silk up in the north... And while I'm up there, I might as well buy some iron to sell down here at a fair profit...

4. Make the party decide how they will divide up the loot
In most groups, the treasure is divided evenly, and coincidentally the amount of coins and the number of gems they find tend to be evenly divisible by the number of adventurers in the party.  But what happens when a party of five finds 9 gp? Or three silver plates?  Vikings - the closest thing history has to D&D adventurers - used to cut up their silver loot (even coins) in order to divide it evenly.  No viking raid was complete without a set of scales and fair weights.  When something in particular caught a viking's eye (because it was gold, or it was of especially fine craftsmanship, or he knew his lady-friend would like it), he would bargain with the others to give up some amount of his portion of the hacksilver in order to obtain that trinket intact.

Some viking did not want this fine cup reduced to hacksilver

What if your group distributes the magic items to those that want them before dividing up the rest of the loot? If one of the players later sells one of those items, must he divide the profits up amongst the group?   If the group has a leader, should the leader get a bigger share of the loot?  In viking raids, the captain and the navigator got the largest shares of the loot, but the captain also maintained the loyalty of his crew by giving much of his own share back to them as gifts.  Centuries later, pirate captains were surprisingly egalitarian and reserved only a double-share of the treasure for themselves.  If one character decides to encumber himself by carrying all the bolts of silk back to town, does he deserve the profits from their sale or should they still be divided amongst the party? If a character with the leadership feat has a cohort, does the cohort's share come out of his share?  If a character dies and is later resurrected, does she get a share of the loot that she died for?

These are the questions that the characters should be asking themselves.  The division of the treasure is an opportunity for roleplaying.  Maybe one character thinks his contributions are greater than the others' and is constantly arguing for a better share.  Maybe the paladin is always giving his treasure away to charity and the other players agree to start giving him a smaller share of the loot.  Maybe the party likes to gamble with their shares of the winnings.

Of course, all of this is enhanced if you...

5. Enforce the weight and encumbrance rules
This is hands down the best way to make the players think about treasure as a physical object rather than a numerical side-effect of victory.  Too often, I see the inventory section of a character sheet filled with things like "7 masterwork halberds," "full plate armour x3," or "51,270 gp."  Or even worse, the whole party writes down their loot on a separate sheet, where it remains until they get back to town, pluck their items out of the aether, and sell it all in one fell swoop.  This is very convenient, but it also destroys the realism and immersion of the treasure-taking experience, not to mention greatly devaluing magical storage items like the Bag of Holding and the Handy Haversack.

Taking treasure is all about choices - what do you take with you, and what do you leave behind?  Remember the part of The Hobbit where the dwarves find a treasure hoard in the troll cave, take a few things, and bury the rest for later?  That's because they can't carry a small fortune with them as they hike halfway across a continent to fight a dragon.  This sort of thing happened a lot in history as well, whether it was hacksilver buried by vikings on Gotland, silver ingots deposited by German knights on the Third Crusade, or coins and jewelry buried by merchants in a besieged town to save it from looting.

This hoard of 160 Roman aurei was found buried under a Roman house in England.
Two bronze coins wedged in the mouth of the jug disguised the treasure hidden within.

According to the rules, 50 coins of any type weigh one pound.  So what happens when a party of four adventurers slays a dragon and recovers a hoard of 45,690 gp, 90,033 sp, 25,572 cp, 108 gemstones, and 230 lbs. of assorted valuable objects?  That's almost 3,500 pounds of treasure.  Some of it they could carry, and some of it they could shove in a bag of holding. The rest they would have to bury or hide in some way.  They could go and buy some wagons to take it back to their hideout, but they would have to leave some of the party behind to defend the hoard.  The wagons would be slow, and they would have to keep a sharp eye out for bandits and worse.  Then, once it is back in their base, they would have to improve their defenses, and even then such a concentration of wealth is sure to attract dragons.  Sometimes keeping the treasure can be just as much of an adventure as getting it.

It is equally important to know which party member is carrying what treasure.  After all, what if the rogue were swallowed whole by a dragon, or if the cleric fell into a lava pit?  If you want to go into a little more detail, the inventory page of my improved character sheet has divisions for loot kept on your person or in various containers.  That way, you can know what exactly you still have and what you are missing if you lose your backpack to bandits or a shipwreck or something.  You could also organize your inventory in such a way that you are carrying up to your maximum capacity, but dropping one of your bags would free you up enough to avoid encumbrance penalties in battle.  Incidentally, my improved character sheets also have a place for you to record the weight of your coins, and a small chart of the encumbrance rules is printed on the bottom.

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I'll leave you with this treasure story from a campaign I ran last year.

The party was exploring a natural stone maze with a river running through it, searching for dragon's blood trees, which produce red berries very valuable to dye-makers.  One of the party members accidentally fell in the river and came up in a secret valley, walled off on all sides by steep cliffs and filled with the trees they were searching for.  Soon, the rest of the party followed - except the bard, Geo, who was bad at swimming but very good at rolling 1s.  The rogue, Hareen, spotted the rotten remains of a leather sack half buried in the dirt, and quickly stooped to investigate.  Conveniently enough, it contained six rubies - one for every member of the party.  Skillfully palming one of the rubies, Hareen turned to the other four who were in the valley and said, "Look, five rubies! Lets split them... but don't tell Geo!"

-your museological d20 despot