đŸ Archived View for idiomdrottning.org âș unique-jewels captured on 2023-01-29 at 03:36:16. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I donât know what edition where the the random jewel and art object table in the 5e DMG (p 134) first appeared, but itâs become my second most used page (after âlingering injuriesâ).
Gems especially.
Have you ever had the problem where the characters find some gems and they donât have a way to appraise âem so they just throw them into a pouch and then three months later when they are in a town and remember those gems and they wanna sell them and theyâre like... âwe have some gems, what are they worth?â and you have no idea? Especially if youâre like me and you run several different modules mashed together.
I mean, these days, my players have learned that theyâd better write down a room number if they pick up weird stuff, but for gems especially, thereâs a different solution.
On page 134 in the 5e DMG, every gem has a name and a description like âPearl (opaque lustrous white, yellow, or pink)â and a value, in the case of a pearl itâs 100 gp . The names arenât repeated and neither are the descriptions. So if they have âopaque lustrous white gemsâ, you can look that up and know that those are pearls and in 5e they are 100 gp.
Well, the descriptions are almost never repeated.
Across 85 different possible gem descriptions (if we parse out all the âorâ and â,â variations), there are four repeated gems.
Jasper has a configuration thatâs easy to confuse with obsidian (opaque black), both garnets and spinels can be transparent red, and both blue quartz and tourmaline can be transparent pale blue, aquamarine and zircons both only have one appearance option (transparent pale blue-green).
Iâve removed these duplicates in my treasure generator, and Iâm thinking of taking a sharpie to my DMG and do the same there. Scratch âblackâ as an option for jasper, âredâ as an option for spinels, âblueâ as an option for tourmaline, and remove zircons entirely, changing the harp with inlaid zircons to use moonstones instead.
Do these values add up with the values listed in spell components? Pearls do match up, which is great, but the âdiamondsâ for revivify and raise dead donât at all (they donât even match each other), nor does the ruby for continual flame. Thatâs too bad, that wouldâve been great.
(Also it wouldâve been great if this page had been in the OGLâd SRD. An open standard for gems & gem values wouldâve been baller!)