D&D Magic Shop Inventory: Three Shops with Prices and Stock

There are three healing potions under the counter, a rope that unties itself, and something in the window the party can’t afford yet. The shopkeeper can tell you where every one of them came from. That’s enough stock to start a conversation, and honestly, it’s about as much as I want in a magic shop.

I learned that the hard way. My first magic shop was a catalog: every uncommon item in the book, in any quantity. The players spent forty minutes hunting for the thing they had decided to buy before they walked in, bought it, and left. Nobody wanted anything new. A small display does the opposite. Three potions means somebody has to decide who gets the third, and a rope that unties itself is something nobody knew they wanted until it was sitting on the counter.

If the town needs more than a magic counter, these eight D&D shop examples give you other shopkeepers, stock lists, and reasons to stop in.

The three shops below serve different customers: travelers on the road, people with awkward practical problems, and buyers planning a serious expedition. Each one comes with a full opening inventory, fixed prices, and its own terms for trading: Tansy and Hobb buy goods back, and Vey sells on consignment. A few notes before we get to the shelves:

• Every item is original homebrew except the Potion of Healing, which uses its 2024 rules: a Bonus Action to drink it or give it to someone within 5 feet, restoring 2d4 + 2 Hit Points. The official item entry has the details.
• Every price is my proposed price for that shop, not an official valuation. Stock is the quantity on hand, and prices are per item.
• None of the original items requires Attunement. Activating one takes a Magic action unless its entry says otherwise, and two copies of the same item don’t stack an ongoing effect.

5e magic item prices by rarity

For a yardstick, the official D&D 2024 rules give these base values by rarity. The homebrew stock below has no assigned rarity; each shop prices for its own customers.

Source: D&D Beyond’s 2024 Free Basic Rules, Magic Items, “Magic Item Rarities and Values.”

The same rules halve the value of consumables other than Spell Scrolls, price a Spell Scroll at twice its scribing cost, and add the cost of any mundane equipment a magic item is built into. Treat all of it as a starting point. No table in a rulebook knows how much gold your party is carrying tonight.

1. Tansy’s Last Light

Tansy’s counter shares a building with the town wheelwright, which is smart business: customers tend to realize they need her goods while somebody else is explaining why their wagon won’t make another mile.

She sells travel supplies, makes the minor charms herself, and buys healing potions from a temple supplier. She can afford to keep three potions on hand. If the party buys all three, the next delivery comes in seven days, and the date is pinned to the wheelwright’s noticeboard for anyone who asks.

Trade-ins: Tansy pays half her listed price for unused goods from her own table, out of a 100 gp buying fund that refills with her next delivery. She turns down other magic items because she can’t appraise them. Consumables are final sale once used, with one exception: she’ll buy back a partly used shelter needle at a price scaled to its remaining uses. She demonstrates every reusable item before you pay.

The shelter needle never gets its uses back. Three tiny marks are etched along its length, and Tansy shows every buyer how one fades with each use; when the last one goes, it’s an ordinary needle. She’ll buy it back at her half price, scaled to whatever is left: 90 gp with all three marks, 60 gp with two, and 30 gp with one, all paid out of that same 100 gp fund. Everything else on the table she buys back only unused.

Now put a party with 140 gp in front of that table. They can buy two potions and two warming tiles for exactly 140 gp, or one potion, the cord, and a tile for 135 gp with 5 gp left over. The shelter needle sits 40 gp out of reach. None of that depends on the characters’ level, which is the quiet strength of a small shop.

Set the prices before the party sees the inventory, and then leave them alone. If the party comes back next week with 180 gp, the needle still costs 180 gp. Bumping it to 240 because they’ve been earning more turns their careful saving into a joke at their expense.

Tansy’s most likely favor to ask is a ride to the temple once the wheelwright’s cart is fixed. She’ll pay 15 gp for the trip, which might be exactly what closes the gap on something in her window. Just don’t make that ride the only way to earn the needle.

If you run your game in ScryRPG, a shop like Tansy’s behaves the way it does on paper: each item carries a stock count that runs out, the shop has its own buying fund and sell-back rate, and it stays hidden from the party until you reveal it.

2. The Mislaid Hour

Every item in Hobb’s shop carries a tag describing the problem it solved for its last owner. “Stopped the servants arguing about whose turn it was.” “Found the leak.” One tag reads only “Divorce.” I have never decided what that item is, and I’d hold off until a player asks.

Hobb deals in narrow solutions and has very little interest in weapons. His regulars are brewers, theater crews, investigators, and people who can’t convince their landlord that the cellar really does make that noise.

Trade-ins: Hobb pays 50 percent of his current listed price for working items from his own catalog. For an unfamiliar magic item, he takes a day to examine it and then names a price; nothing changes hands until you accept. His buying fund is 300 gp. Nothing here runs on charges or needs Attunement.

Hobb will demonstrate anything on the shelf, and the demonstrations do a lot of your work. Watching the listening cup fail against his back wall teaches the players that a two-foot stone wall is still a two-foot stone wall, and you never have to argue about it later. The mirror sees what an ordinary mirror in that spot could reflect. It shows whoever stood in front of it, but a disguise replays as the disguise, and it shows nothing invisible, nothing in darkness, and nothing at all once somebody sensibly throws a cloth over it.

Those limits keep the goods useful without promising answers you’ll have to take back. Still, check your adventure before you put the mirror on sale. In a murder mystery, one well-placed mirror may matter more than every sword in town.

A party with 300 gp can take the ledger and the cup for 280 gp, or the spool and the chalk for 290 gp. Selling Hobb a working spool brings in 110 gp, so buying one and flipping it straight back costs the party 110 gp. Hobb has heard the money-loop idea before.

Then there’s the pewter bird. Its last owner swore it could predict fires. Hobb has only ever seen it chirp when warmed, so he sells it for 5 gp as an ornament and won’t charge for the legend. If the party investigates, tell them the truth: it’s a toy with no divination in it. A curious object doesn’t have to be an artifact to earn a few minutes of attention, and whoever buys it will keep it on their sheet forever anyway.

After a week, fill the empty slots with things brought in by people the party has met. Hobb always asks customers what they hope to find next time. Write their answer down before you invent another shelf of curiosities; it’s often a better hook than anything you’d come up with alone.

3. Vey’s Appointment Book

Vey has a furnished office and no shop floor. Buyers book an appointment, and the owner of each consigned item comes to the demonstration in person. Most of them are raising money for something, like a new roof or a second expedition after the first one went badly, so every sale comes with a person worth knowing.

There are three offers this month. The asking prices are what these particular sellers want, not a rule about rarity.

The key’s two teeth are glass, and one dissolves each time a use is spent, so anyone can see at a glance how much is left. Its owner demonstrates on a mundane teaching lock without spending a use; any magical test costs one. The footbridge weighs 40 pounds folded into a 4-foot bundle, and the pole weighs 10 pounds. The pole’s shelter does nothing against extreme temperatures or magical weather. Every seller allows a full inspection.

Selling through Vey: she takes an item on consignment once she and its owner agree on an asking price. When it sells, the owner receives 80 percent and Vey keeps 20 percent. No sale means no commission and no payment, and she never advances cash or promises a buyer. If the party consigned something at 900 gp and it sold, they would receive 720 gp and Vey would keep 180 gp.

Holds: Vey will hold one offer for three days against a refundable 10 percent deposit, credited toward the price. The seller can’t accept another buyer during the hold, but can once it lapses. On the footbridge, that’s a 90 gp deposit and 810 gp due at pickup.

A party with 1,100 gp can afford the key or the footbridge, but not both. Buying the pair would cost 1,500 gp (600 plus 900), which is 400 gp more than they have. The weatherhouse pole, on its own, also costs 1,500 gp, and that gives them something bigger to save toward if shelter matters in your campaign. If it doesn’t, swap the offer out before the party walks in rather than insisting they ought to want it.

How much magic belongs on the shelf?

Counting rows tells you little about a shop’s power. You could add a dozen moth buttons without changing next week’s adventure. A single glass key can erase an obstacle you spent an hour designing, and the footbridge might let the party return to places they couldn’t reach before.

The three impact bands help here. Be generous with small pleasures, look hard at the real limits on stronger tools, and hand out lasting new capabilities on purpose. A limited-use item can still matter a great deal. Two uses of that key might be exactly enough to get past the two most important locks in your campaign.

Stocking the key doesn’t mean you have to pull it later. Maybe you want those locks opened. Then your job is preparing whatever the party finds on the other side, which beats guarding a door.

Most of the broader shop-design principles come down to one test I run on every shelf: can the party afford some of what they want, but not all of it? Every budget in these three shops is built to land there. If the party can afford everything, you’ve built a catalog again, and nobody ever fell in love with a catalog.

Leave the price tag on the item in the window. The next time the party counts its gold, somebody will remember it.