Hey TOR-heads! How are y’all handling treasure hoards? Like…where do you put them, how common are they, etc? It looks like stumbling on a hoard here and there, doing the treasure-hunter thing, is how you get your status up sometime before everyone dies of old age. Otherwise you’re getting whatever an NPC gives you, and/or running a holding (per Darkening of Mirkwood).
So what do you say? The barrows seem like obvious places to go treasure hunting. Do your monsters hoard treasure? That seems more like D&D than LOTR, at least as a universal principle.
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I’ve been seriously neglecting this. There are many holdings in play, though, so that offsets it somewhat. I have two big priorities going forward: more treasure and more fatigue. Haven’t leaned hard enough on either.
Last session I did give out a piece of magical gear (a shield) that was near the lair of a wight.
Smaug’s horde made sense since he basically sacked a dwarven city, so yeah, anywhere that there’s ruins or dead rich people to bury cool loot with.
Okay yeah, absolutely. There are big city-sized ruins here and there … but they’re really rare. Like I think you could set up a big monstrous expedition up to Angmar or something. I guess I’m thinking about smaller hoards. LIke Phil mentioned a wight’s hoard. Do wights hoard stuff? I mean I don’t really feel that connected to the Tolkien canon but they really don’t talk about what critters do and do not collect shit.
I guess I can just guess. Wolves no, orcs probably, etc.
I don’t know if they hoard stuff but they get buried with a bunch of treasure and then nobody ever takes it because wights
Yeah, I’m a bad person to talk about canon. The wight was in an old ruin (natch), so I assumed it had some sort of magical treasure in it. I feel like magic in the Tolkien world tends to pull other sorts of creatures to it. Even lots of coins can have an alignment and purpose?
I tend to make treasure the target of a particular quest rather than just popping up (and leave it to chance, also known as the rules in Rivendell, whether anything of note arises, with a couple of rare exceptions which will be the object of a quest).
I don’t worry about having large amounts. The rules for encumbrance will make the journey back nasty if people decide to carry too much. How much to take is by itself an interesting decision.
Yeah, I think I just need to add “is there maybe something valuable here too?” to my thinking, rather than just SPIDERS EAT YOUR FACE.
Dunno if this is relevant, but I’ve really been enjoying Ben Robbins’ advice that players are never as willing to pay attention to GM-provided information as when it’s written on the treasure they’ve just acquired.
“Is it engraved?”
“Of course it’s engraved!”
I find this is a useful way to motivate me to make sure there’s treasure, which otherwise I can’t quite must up a lot of enthusiasm for. (It seems to mostly bring trouble – when you need it there’s never enough, when there’s enough it’s way too much..)
It’s funny I guess but I’ve just never had the…aesthetic, I guess?…of the countryside more or less littered with piles of valuables. So I’m treating my Middle Earth like it’s post-war Westeros or something.
Both The Hobbit and LOTR have small treasure caches, don’t they? Sting and Glamdring are found in the troll hideout, and doesn’t the Fellowship find a bunch of elven blades on Weathertop? Just saying, there’s canonical examples that aren’t gigantic hordes.
Or am I misreading the question?
Mark Delsing you’re totally reading it right! This is a place where me not being a Tolkien fan interferes with the game, and the game doesn’t bring its own Tolkien-ness in to fill that gap. I very much get the vibe from the text that this is something about the ME aesthetic you just “know.”
(I assume this is also where d&d got its treasure-filled dungeons.)