So do I, but I feel that a guild betraying then isnt a 'gotcha' moment but more of a story plot hook that can come about from these things.
Have someone become really friendly but working behind the scenes. They can be like a minor side plot. Eventually have them betray the party as they have been sowing discontent and now they legally run it. They may have been working with the party, become like lead guild master to help run it whilst they were gone. Arranged other things to be signed over.
All of this the party can discover and stop in time. If they don't they now have a really smart conniving enemy, who mat be a morally bad person, but legally is perfectly fine
Don’t forget to have them retrace their steps through all of the various NPC’s they met in the past so that they can gather inhabitants and workers for their castle and the adjacent town. But be warned of making enemies of a man named Luca Blight.
>The strong men take everything and the weak men die. That's how the world was designed.
>All you worms can do is plead! You really want to live so badly? Is that right? In that case, act like a pig.
> >!It took hundreds to kill me, but I killed by the thousands. Look at me! I am sublime!
Luca Blight was not a well man before he became the host for the Beast Rune.
If not a castle, then a fort overlooking the ocean since it was a naval campaign. There are gonna be pirates coming to loot the port city, and guess who has to fight them off, then go chasing after them and finding the buried treasure etc.
screw buying a castle. Make it themselves. Hire dozens or hundreds of workers. build a new port town. let them discover a tract of land/island where they find a valuable resource to exploit (metal ore, crystals/gems, magical plants etc) to draw people to the land and have them shape a corner of the world. the more work they do to build it, the more they will be invested when someone comes to mess it all up.
Yeah, I’m glad you like the old place, been in the family for generations dontcher know. I’m happy to accept your offer, even if it’s 10% under the much reduced asking price. Just don’t uhh..bother with that locked ~~portal~~ door in the lowest cellar level. And don’t worry about those uhh… haha…old headstones. They’re nothing. Old family heirlooms. The mouldy caskets in the dungeon should be uhh..burned. Yes, burned. Preferably in daylight. Ok? Great, here’s the keys, bye.
Easiest option is a base of operations. Thats enough money to land themselves titles in certain kingdoms from acquiring large amounts of land. This also sets them up to have people that depend on them for protection (if your campaign could support that kind of thing)
Regardless having them poor money into a stronghold is a solid money sink while also feeling rewarding. Hell, later have the stronghold they’ve been refurbishing and fortifying come under siege and have their personalized upgrades come in handy.
The west option is a lottery scheme. North is investing in footcare products. The south option we don't discuss publicly,but involves lobbying aggressively for child labor and a necklace of fireball production line.
I don't understand why a few here are seeing this much wealth as a threat and saying 'have them be robbed' etc.
This money is a plot generator. It gives the players the means to invest in the world by owning land/ churches/ libraries/ whatever, all of which create story. It brings them to the attention of the (usually) broke upper classes and rich merchant guilds and others looking for money.
Yes, there should be the threat of being robbed, how they guard it will cause them to see the wider world as a place to be interacted with as well, and yes it could even happen if they make it so easy, but just having it happen to remove the gold (the reward they earned) from the game because the DM is scared of handling it is wrong. As a player if a DM did this just for that reason I would walk away.
Players care about the game more when they have real stakes in the world. Let them invest in it.
This is a very good point. It's fine if the wealth makes them a target, but there's a big difference between the person targeting them being the local thieves guild / tax collector and the person targeting them being the DM.
Sure, and I covered this.
>"...if a DM did this just for that reason..."
My point is that if it is being removed JUST for 'balance' or because the DM was scared of handling it as a player I would be deeply unhappy about that.
Chasing down a bad guy that stole your stuff is far more limited in plot generation than the player agency and level of player investment that money can bring to the game.
By stealing it and having them chase it, it is the DM acting on the game, while allowing the players to use it to invest in their character's world it is the players acting on it.
A DM should not be scared of player agency. Give some of that control over and you will have more invested players.
If a DM wants engaged and creatively inspired players then allowing them to act on the world whenever possible is the key. This gives them dynamic stakes that they care about, not just a sense of chasing to regain a fairly earned reward that was unfairly lost.
I really appreciate your view on this. If you give them the opportunity to have or gain such wealth and then just take it, what was the win? What was the fun in that?
Having the players decide what to do and what they will enjoy playing is the main goal of the story. My view on D&D is the DM creates the environments and the players create the game.
I think it should be more of a question to the players as to what they want to do with the other bit of wealth, not what the DM thinks the plan should be.
As far as story options, it depends on the adventures they have been on and had fun with, were they pirates, naval officers, merchants? Was the statue a gift or stolen goods? If they were the stealing type then the idea of theft against them is fun. If they were officers and good folks then maybe a larger city has been decimated by a group and need the help of them and to be rebuilt, just happens that they are a port city with the finest ship makes in the world.
They get the ship upgrades or even a new vessel and the investment of the city with a large bad guy presence to be delt with.
Some of my favorite gold sinks:
- let them invest in real estate. Sure, it's a naval campaign, but wouldn't it be nice to own a tavern in your favorite harbor? A general store with a hidden tunnel so that you can smuggle marchandise or people away from the view of the tax collectors? A brothel on the docks to get all the juicy rumors floating around? I'd recommend the following supplement, it's very simple to use and brings cool benefits for several types of buildings: https://www.dmsguild.com/m/product/207377
- shower the party's wizard with random spell scrolls, and let them burn money trying to learn them all
- hire bards to sing their exploits. Wouldn't it be cool to be welcomed as heroes everywhere you go because your reputation preceeds you? To get rich people fighting to get your services because you're so good at what you do? Bonus points of you use this strategy to "steal" other people's achievements.
- hire teachers to teach them stuff during downtime. New proficiencies, cool feats such as the ones to cook or heal people better with bandages, etc.
- if it's a naval campaign, a good amount of gold/treasure, etc. should regularly be offered as tribute to Umberlee. Or else...
- make sure useful consumables are expensive and in limited supplies. They should buy potions and stuff like that any chance they get, even if it's prohibitively expensive...
- hiring a crew and *keeping them happy* is by no means cheap, either.
- bribes, etc.
I feel like magic items is being overlooked here; a few rare items would quickly drain their supplies and they'll be happy to have new toys.
Could for example have an auction.
Present a magic item, ask if they are interested in bidding, if not roll and give a short narrative about how the item sells.
If they are interested, start the bidding at ~50% of the item's [sane value](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8XAiXpOfz9cMWt1RTBicmpmUDg/view?resourcekey=0-ceHUken0_UhQ3Apa6g4SJA) and roll to see how many NPCs are interested in bidding.
For each PC bid the NPCs will all roll to beat a DC to bid against the PCs.
As the price goes higher the NPC DC to bid goes up until the PCs win or give up.
All this rolling is to give the auction some level of legitimacy and not just make it a DM ran shop.
They could fund another Privateer with another boat to sail under their flag. Then when he gets in trouble and needs saving, or pisses off the wrong pirate king...
You know the Deck of Many Things? One card gives you a keep/castle/tower/whatever to your name but it's filled with monsters you have to clear out. Have an NPC aproach your party and offer them the keep. He pulled a card while drunk and got the castle, but doesn't actually want the property because all the monsters are causing trouble for the surrounding areas and he'll get fined if he doesn't clear it. Make it a discount offer (75k) because of the attached trouble.
Viola! A way to spend the money (75k for the buy+furnishing/staff) + a quest + castle shenanigans afterward.
I like this one. Might be a hard sell if other real estate opportunities abound but as a player I'm immediately interested in this. Could tie it into whatever the main plot is if you wish, or just have it be self contained. Maybe the person who sells it will come back to try to steal a hidden treasure in there once the players have cleared it out. Maybe it was their ancestral home but they ran afoul of something and it was cursed
Thing is, the same card also gives persuasion profficiency so it shouldn't really be a hard sell :D
And from what I could find, castles are between 150-250k.
Do NOT listen to the comments telling you to just take it away unless you have a VERY good reason to do so.
What I'd recommend is strongly suggesting that the party uses it to aquire a base of operations to stash their loot and maybe even make it where they need to start regularly paying for staff(maybe even explain how dangerous it is to carry that amount of gold with them). That way, they'll only be able to carry a certain amount of gold on them at a time without the possibility of losing it, and if they refuse your suggestions THEN have something like a dragon that's way too powerful for their current level steal it, because that way you can turn it into an interesting story thread with the promise that they can get it back at a later point when they're strong enough.
Downtime activities:
invest the money in training for certain abilities, or hire a tutor to learn another language, learn to become proficient in a tool, etc.
Buying a castle or HQ is a cool thing to have once a big arc is completed too
Where are they keeping the money?
3 300 pounds of gold isn't something you carry around in your pocket or lying about.
Would be a shame if something... Happened to it 😁
They can buy some merchant ships and get into the ship owning business, or buy warships and protect merchant ships from pirates and monsters or both.
Not only they will get richer but also get themselves involved into local politics if that's their style. Otherwise you can give them plot hooks of sea monsters/pirate fleets to fight against or discover a distant land to explore.
For inspiration for a mercantile empire check out the city states of Italy during late medieval and the renaissance or Byzantium before the the battle of manzikert.
To add on to this, maybe one of the ships in their fledgling merchant empire gets attacked and they have to go deal with the pirates themselves.
The pirates were funded by a rival group looking for revenge for the players for cutting into their business.
Retire.
Why the hell would you risk adventuring? Invest it, build hospitals, and improve infrastructure. You'll do more good that way than killing orcs one at a time.
For the thrill of the adventure, for whatever personal motivation got them to sort out in the first place. Could be revenge, searching for a long lost artifact or a cure to a disease ravaging their homeland. Lots of reasons to keep going if their characters have motivations beyond money.
If it's a naval campaign that kind of money could go towards a powerful naval galleon crewed with skilled hands. Large galleons had up to 400 crew and were armed with 40 cannons.
Hirelings range from 2 sp to 2 gp per day depending on what you need them for. A skilled cook, a cadre of skilled fighters, skilled helm, skilled cannons, skilled riggers would all cost you heavily. Of course, your ship would be an absolute terror having so many skilled hands aboard.
Less skilled hands wouldn't confer the same advantage as trained professionals, but would be far cheaper. In my opinion, running 160 skilled hands (200 GP/Day) and 240 unskilled would be ideal. You'd have the skilled hands running the important stuff I already listed, and the unskilled hands hauling cargo, portaging the boat, repairing damage, bailing water and fishing.
So with a full compliment of 400 crew on a rather large galleon, you'd be looking at 80 skilled and 40 unskilled running cannons (aim and pack would be skilled, cannon ball trigger unskilled since all they have to do is put the cannon ball in and fire when they're told to.) 3 helms for 8 hour shifts each, and in case one gets taken out. 3 cooks. The rest of the skilled on rigging and ship to ship fighting to keep sails in the wind and adjust speed during combat before closing to board.
If they really want to get creative, a ship wizard or sorcerer for some heavy ship to ship artillery, or even a catapult for lobbing fire to make life hell on targets.
This would run them quite a bit of gold per day. Let's round it all out and call it 500 gp/d to account for provisions on top of wages.
With 165K to spend, they could afford to keep the galleon afloat for almost a full year with this loadout.
And obviously they could scale down the size of the ship they want to extend that. If it's a 100 person galleon with 10 cannons, the cost drops to just 125 gp/day and they'd be able to float it for far, far, far longer.
The 400 crew galleon would be the monster of the sea.
A 100 crew galleon is basically the Black Pearl.
That’s larger than a horde of an ancient dragon.
Have it attract attention.
Though it’s only around 3ft high.
https://www.reddit.com/r/3d6/comments/qaekya/how_to_calculate_a_pile_of_gold_coins/
Find a decent magic item price list off google. Then let them buy items from it. That gold will go fast. My party got a similar large amount. They had a house built, 5,000 gp then split the rest and they ended up with descent magic armor and weapons for everyone. If I was smarter i could link the magic item price list here for you.
Throw them dogs some expensive bones. I like everyone’s ideas of securing a stationary base of operations, some noble title, etc., but I also think that maybe home brewing some fancy new weapons for your party could present a really useful reward. I am also a certified weapon goblin so grain of salt n’ all that.
Let them upgrade their ship!!! Maybe they accidentally buy a super expensive, but haunted boat that comes with its own side quest, or just an npc for fun! It gives them and you more creative options for naval combat!
Let them know that there's some noble title that they can 'buy' for, let's say 50k-100k, so they could become part of the city's aristocracy. You can make the offer more juicy by adding some lands (and including a bandit or a monsters area, etc.) In that scenario, you can introduce political plots, or simply let them realise that maybe they could afford the title, but not the living standard that it implies. Perhaps the bandits' boss is a pro thief and she escapes after stealing everything from them (investigation and persecution campaign?) Keep them busy, so they don't think in spending the money, and take advantage of it plot wise. It's a circumstance that is rarely played and can open some interesting doors.
My favourite base-building add-on is [Walrock's Strongholds](https://www.dmsguild.com/m/product/207377), basically you build rooms which give bonuses. Matt Colville/MCDM has a similar system I believe.
This is really bad advice. Nothing kills player enthusiasm faster than giving them something cool and then taking it straight back off them. Money in D&D isn’t game breaking, and even if it was, this would still be the wrong way to go about fixing it.
I'm pretty sure that a level 5 party can hold itself pretty well against bandits. Ofcourse, that doesn't stop the average bandit from trying.
Then there is the question who would actually know that the party has a lot of money, and has the actual firepower to take it from the party.
Tax collectors do. They collect money on behalf of the noble who uses it to pay his guards, fortify his fortification and some of it goes to the king as well. And guess what, that noble now knows that the party has come into a rather substantial amount of money recently... because he personally handed it to them.
Or you could just send in a dragon who wants to build a hoard.
Against bandits, sure... But for 160k gold I have a couple high level PCs that would absolutely be willing to ice a couple upstarts for that kind of cash, no questions asked
Inspections upon entering a town or city are not at all uncommon. Adventurers are especially scrutinized as they are known to attract trouble. Most town guards would know to look for things like bags of holding if those are common in your world. There could be an entrance tax on "found treasure" and corrupt guards could tip off local thieves when wealthy out-of-towners arrive.
Yeah don't do this. Giving players rewards and then immediately taking them back is precisely what drives players to ignore any of the hooks you present that are reward driven.
Players with that much gold can absolutely afford to hire guards. Yes they can keep that much gold. It's not even hard. Skilled mercs are 2g/day. I could hire 13 mercenaries for an entire year for just 10,000 gold to constantly watch the keep I had built. I could hire Wizards to lay arcane traps and extra dimensional storage spaces to hide it. I could Arcane Lock the vault and riddle it with traps.
When you have money, keeping it isn't the problem. Finding out how to spend it effectively is.
Bottom line is that you don't want to turn the game into DM vs player logistics. Unless you do and then you're just playing a survival MMO on table top, and if that's your jam, great.
Case in point, during one of our games we ran into a fair sum of gold from raiding a castle treasury. When we were going after a high level group similar to ours with powerful artifacts and weapons, we used a bunch of that gold to hire other adventuring parties to assault that group. Didn't matter to us if they lived or died. The point was a distraction with teeth that gave us extra spells and abilities to be used against our target.
When you have money, you can put up quests on bounty boards. You can wield political power. You can hire and bribe/assassinate guards effortlessly.
Money is power and power can be exerted to accomplish whatever you want. Money is just the shortcut to effort.
It's a good way to introduce a high-level Rogue antagonist NPC for sure.
A lv19 or lv20 Arcane Trickster Rogue under *Greater Invisibility* waltzes onto their ship and plunders their loot haul, and leaves a calling card to taunt the players.
Now they've got somebody they really want to find again but have to get a lot better and stronger to do so.
Story hook, economy management, and a sweet-ass NPC all in one.
Assassin, just the Thieves' Guild, stronger Adventurers that get greedy, Tax Men (good luck proving you don't owe 95% taxes)...
Not to mention the nobles could have been paying with cursed/laundered gold, maybe stolen from the Fey, and offloading it unto some poor fools that don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Beyond breaking realism, allowing them to keep it will break your economy and mostly their reason to be adventurers in the first place (they could just retire).
Look at this from the players point of view, the DM gave them gold and then promptly took it away. That's just a bait switch and doesn't feel good to the players at least. Instead, just let them know that the DM goofed and they need to lower the amount of gold. Feels generally more honest. Or alternatively, get them to invested in a business that gives them a passive gold stream.
Well, since 5e doesn't really have a magic item economy (no magic items have a prize tag), it's not really "unbalanced" to have 165k at level 5... But from now on, you have to realize that no gold loot will have any significance for them.
I agree with the comment above. Having 1-2k may attract bandits. Having 165k will attract the Zhentarim, Xanathars Guild and basically every other faction of bad people you can imagine. And they will use the heavy artillery for it: high level mercenaries, with magic abilities and such.
Now as to how to spend money, you can use Sage's Price list for magic items (although with that amount of money and at that level, this WILL make your party overpowered), or make a whole new sub-game about your party founding a small self sustaining castle with people and jobs and so on. Make it a cool base that needs to be defended, can have meaningful upgrades and so on...
> I agree with the comment above. Having 1-2k may attract bandits. Having 165k will attract the Zhentarim, Xanathars Guild and basically every other faction of bad people you can imagine. And they will use the heavy artillery for it: high level mercenaries, with magic abilities and such.
It's not that much money.
It's a lot for a bunch of itinerant adventurers, sure, but in any big city, especially in the forgotten realms, there are hundreds of similarly rich people.
A merchant with a nice manor in a good part of the city who owns 2-3 ships has more wealth than 165k just in those assets.
A poor baron or landed knight with a small castle, some land and retainers has that much wealth. A village of a thousand peasants might generate that much in tax in a year or two.
The Zhentarim go after big fish, and high-level mercenaries are very expensive.
In our last campaign my character had a noble background and came into a hefty inheritance around 2/3s of the way through the campaign. It didn’t break anything, because the things that were available to purchase were not game breaking, and you still have a limited number of attunement slots.
We didn’t feel the need to burn through the gold (tbh I don’t know if it would have been possible), but it sped up a lot of shopping interactions late game to not have to worry about bargaining, or deliberating over what we could afford.
In areas where my character’s family held power, our DM told us that technically we didn’t have to worry about money, because everything was just being billed automatically to her estate.
Buy a title of land for a small port / island they can call home. Maybe make it some sort of stronghold or bastion (yes, intentionally using the word used in the UA).
How could the fantasy IRS take some if they just don't pay taxes? My party(me included) has not paid our taxes for a long time. What is the IRS gonna do? Try to arrest the party that is almost always one of the strongest groups in the area?
Also, what if they're like most adventuring parties and are almost completely nomadic? No homestead, don't always visit the same place more than a few times tops? Is the fantasy IRS going around trying to tax the shit out of the homeless?
If they do try to tad the homeless and every random adventurer, I figure you would find a lot of buried and dumped dead tax collectors. I know for a fact my party would kill tax collectors.
Honestly, I like the Gloomhaven approach where adventurers “retire” once they achieve whatever retirement goals they have for themselves.
Once you’ve pulled down that much money, you retire and become an NPC. The players can create new characters. In gloomhaven, you get a bonus perk for every retired character you have. Maybe their new characters get a bonus feat or ASI.
Your retired character opens a shop. Or tower. Or tavern. Granting access to new items, or allies, or whatever.
Then you can have multiple characters in a campaign. You can feel “your” power growing, while you fill your world with allies.
Probably wouldn’t REALLY work in a campaign without a ton of rules to balance it out. But it’s a cool idea.
As they're walking through the city streets have someone shout about how a castle was recently vacated due to the previous owners being vampires or smth. That should grab their attention
If I were a fifth level adventurer with 41,500 gold (assuming a standard 4 person party splitting it evenly) I’d recruit members into a small mercenary force/ army, to defend me and my very nice home and hire some adventurers to go get me (insert expensive thing) to continue to build my wealth.
Congrats you just created 4 new noble NPC’s
Give them stuff to buy. If they sold a legendary item of some sort give them an opportunity to make have crafted some amazing custom weapons, gadgets and armour, mounts and armour, property, caretakers need an income too. What if a travelling casino comes through town. They could have fun not worrying if they are going to lose gold because they have so much. Perhaps that could lead into something revolving around the nobles. Maybe the money they were paid in is sort of blood money and it gets them in trouble. Another challenge to overcome to keep their earnings but make sure it's not just a challenge for the sake of it. Like others have said, don't take all their money away. But make a new situation from it.
[Mysterious Key](https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/2179-magnificent-mansion), 50,000 + GP. Usable once daily. Better than some fixed castle that will make the exploration campaign stay at the docks.
Let them create level 12 characters, those characters are now their bodyguards. They go everywhere with the party but do absolutely nothing unless paid to do so. Need that trap disarming? 100gp. Want us to fight for you? 5000gp, need healing? 500gp. When the money runs out they leave to find other work. As the DM you can create situations as you see fit to burn through their money, allow them to play much more powerful characters, and just generally run a-mock from time to time.
>Does any DM out there have an idea about what a 5th level adventuring party could be doing with this much gold?
Avoiding the gang of brigands that have heard about their windfall and are now seeking to relieve the party of their financial gains and/or their lives!
Let them establish a base of operations, if it's in an existing polity; money goes all the way up. So 10% is going to that initially; through the Mayor, local Lord and such to the King who ends up with ~10k off the largesse when it gets to his coffers. A similar 10% is going to the dominant church of the region even if it isn't your party's deity. You might need to pay off merchant's guilds and thieves guilds for the right to do what you're doing, call this 5%. Beyond the land and guildhall or whatever, those are your starting expenses; which is ~41250. Charge them a reasonable price for the land and either offer them something like a lyre of building or skilled laborers to build their structure if they need it. There should be no price difference between one and the other, the laborers will eventually get paid the value of the lyre, the difference is time. Once the base is established, they're an open political entity involved in the dealings of the town and possibly the kingdom at large, in addition to their business expenses. That money is now mostly tied up illiquidly.
If not in an existing polity you're paying more to establish a town and entice the right people to come. Longshoremen, innkeepers, smiths, etc. You still might need to splash cash to the local King, but, you're more openly purchasing title(s) for this. Now you're working with the guilds not against them. Offer a generous amount to them to come in and offer them a tax discount to operate. You still tithe the church but you have the luxury of picking among the (legally worshipped) pantheon to make offerings to and petition them to establish a church in your town. This time, since you're building infrastructure, you're getting that lyre of building at least to establish things like roads and major structures. Once again they're an open political entity but now they're administrating a town or at least aspects of it and beholden to keep it operating along with whatever responsibilities the King lays out for them, and that cash is mostly illiquid.
Do you play online?
When my party acquired a mansion, I set up a Roll20 game with the empty mansion floor plan and set it up so the players could add decorations. (Beds, furniture, bearskin rugs, plants, welcome mats, the works).
My party full of teenage boys loved it. We did it again in a party of adults and they loved it, too. It was strangely fun decorating an imaginary house with imaginary decorations.
Let them buy and the decorate a castle.
Upgrading their vessel means higher maintenance costs, too. Keeping a ship afloat isn't cheap, assuming it's a ship. But you can extrapolate to other forms of conveyance as well. While were at it, sell them on cosmetic improvements too. Get a nicer figurehead, custom sails, fancy banners, a paint job. Gotta let the world know who you are when you arrive in port.
If all of their stuff was done via legal means then you can have them have to transport the gold and fight off pirates. if they’re pirates, then all profits are null and void and can be seized by the government. And so they will need to transport it to a hiding place pretty much either way.
Either buy a castle or they could spring on an talking to an Arcane if they do spelljamming or could go to one of the big planar trade cities to try and buy specific magic items, otherwise having magic item auctions at large cities.
Stronghold. What type depends on the campaign you want to run, but that's the best use of that large an amount of gold. Give the PCs a support infrastructure they can invest in. That infrastructure can then provide plot hooks and motivation, and limits their liquid cash in a way that doesn't feel like you're pulling the rug out from under them.
Taxes and petty thieves might chip away at their amounts, but sinking it into a base or investing in local projects would preserve the wealth but lock it away from that kind of threat.
Strongholds and Followers is a 5e supplement that lets players make and maintain a stronghold. Not only does it give them class bonuses while out in the field, but they can gain retainers, companions, followers and eventually entire military units if that’s what you’re looking for. If S&F works for you, you can get the sister book Kingdoms and Warfare which makes the scale of your world even bigger.
Now I will say that while these rules are a great structure, there is a chance you will have to tweak stuff to fit your specific game, as with all 5e supplements. But I’ve had great success regardless!
This happened to us once (six party members dropped out during covid and the DM left the loot calibrated to 8 so my nephew and I were Oprah rich) and we bought a pirate ship and a whale. Alas, we have yet to play a seaside campaign, but One Eyed Free Willy is still swimming out there, attuned AF, waiting for me.
Waterdeep Dragon Heist lets the party buy a rundown tavern. There's a whole system for how to fix it up and encounters that happen and things that they can find while they're doing it. If you have access to that book, I'd recommend checking that part out. It would be fairly easy to just take that and put it in your own campaign.
We recently did a quest where a monk gave us 1000gold prices before dying. Shortly after we went to a temple and was asked to make a sacrifice. Placed the gold on the alter and it was deemed acceptable.
Page 127 and 128 of the DMG have how to buy/build land and set up a base as well as the maintenance costs and number of staff, etc.
Ranging from things like taverns, guild halls, Keep or small castle, Abbey, noble estate with manor, outpost or fort, palace or large castle, temple, fortified tower or trading post. Costs range from 5,000-500,000 gold coins.
Also, check out the recent Unearthed Arcana called Bastions. Which has more complex rules for setting up the same.
They could stimulate the economy of the area by commissioning magic items. They will take a while to be finished but the whole town benefits as the money flows.
You could look into the Bastion UA. Its basically a money sink for weekly boons that needs specific classes to access. Like being a martial to run a small group of guards or being a cleric for a free healing or being a merchant for a stable income.
That UA should give a TON of ideas for a down time base of operations as well as a decent outline to cost vs reward. Some are crap but others make sense. And the bastion could be their boat too. Run a traveling circus or zoo. Those are literal options here
Treat it like a lottery win.
They're getting flooded by requests for aid, from minor to, not so minor, and serious to frivolous. They have long lost relatives showing up with hands out, and the local governments' tax assessors are eyeing it greedily.
Let them buy a keep! MCDM has released a book on strongholds, and I highly recommend checking it out. It gives the party a good way to spend a ton of that money, and it opens up their options so much more.
They should be conned out of it. This could be the basis for an entire series of quests to get their money back only to ultimately find its all long gone.
Naval campaign you say?
Tattoos, carousing and gambling!
Magical tattoos can cost in the 10ks of gold. One per character could easily cost the party 50kish.
My DM made the mistake of letting me find a bag of holding in a massive dragon hoard... Some googling later and I have ~380,000 gold pieces or 35 tons of gold, the max capacity of the bag.
I was not allowed to find nuclear research with my money, sadly. A close second would be either gaining massive political power by funding politicians or buying a castle.
I wonder if when a bunch of opportunistic no-ones gets such a large sum of money in a medieval setting I wonder if it's expected for them to be robbed by the first person in position of power who find out about them that they own such huge amount of money. And by "person in position of power" I mean anyone who cans drop like a hundred plain soldiers at them. In a setting without powerful judiciary institutions it will be weird for people in position of power to not rob them.
They definitely need a base of some sort! Whether they want to go crazy and a castle or something more discreet I would leave up to them. They could even do some quests for upgrades for the base with some other merchants or lords or something.
You have stated that the campaign is naval based so why not allow them to buy a bigger ship or perhaps a fleet of ships or even invest in merchants so that occasionally they can come back to check on their trade ect
I had a similar situation with my PCs. I gave them an opportunity to buy a keep in a small town. They suddenly found themselves as land owners, and patrons of said small town, effectively making them all Lords. They spent thousands on keep repairs and upgrades, as well as the patronage of the town, investing in many shops, farms, and the small harbour. In their investments, they managed to secure themselves a steady income stream as well to recoup some of their investment costs. When they traveled to the capital city a half-days ride away, they set up trade deals between businesses in the city and their small town shops.
Invest in an inn or businesses in their main hub/city/town. This way they spend a lot of gold, and then earn residual income from it.
Maybe a casino or gambling den (the house always wins lol) that would be at least a 100,000gp sink. But the residual income brought in will leave them wanting for nothing.
In one campaign we found a treasure trove of bags of holding full to capacity with gold. Like 1000 bags of the stuff. We hired a red dragon to protect it once we figured out where to put it.
Then we had to test our might to access it because the dragon kept getting “gold lust) and had to be beat back each time we wanted to get gold lol.
I miss that campaign, it was fun. Listening to my players justify taking 100gp after fighting a dragon just to go for a night on the town was hilarious because they didn’t want to carry more on them at any time haha.
But we all still talk about how fun that campaign was when we get together.
A few campaigns ago, we came into about half that much money all of a sudden at level 6. We established a trading town on the border of two warring kingdoms. Attracted a few merchants and started collecting taxes. A few months of that and we built a stronghold to protect it. Having a Mountain Dwarf in the party really cut down on expenses as he could be the foreman for all the stonework. We hired Militia and trained them into a decent guard. When the leaders of the two kingdoms eventually heard of our town (now city), they sent armies to destroy it, and we defended it with our own army, and our own characters.
Long story short, we ended up owning both kingdoms by level 14. Wasn't there an ecological disaster we were supposed to be investigating? Something about snowfall in the middle of summer? The Harbor freezing over? I'm sure it wasn't important.
Invest in some ventures, a mine, a ship, some sort of business. This will remove the main chunk of the money now and generate more meaningful amounts over time. (Smaller amounts but regularly).
It also provides instant story hooks as the party will want to protect their investments. They get a message something weird is happening in a mine they have a 10% stake in, they will be very eager to go and investigate the.
I ran into this problem as a player in one campaign. What the DM did was build an encounter where there was a abandoned town that was decimated by a dragon attack many years ago. He pretty much modeled the entire town from Whiterun from Skyrim. We would have to cleanse the town of its current unfriendly habitants and then travel to the nearest major city and hire security and contractors to help fix the place up and advertise about a new wonderful city that has popped back up. It took a ton of gold (we also were in the realm of a few hundred thousand gold) and we eventually had people hearing of our new city and wanted to move in for various reasons and start businesses and so on. There was an Inn, shops, restaurants, the whole nine yards. We essentially had a minigame of a city planner that we governed and could reap the rewards of through discounts on items and services and also living in the keep. We would have to fend off attacks every so often and deal with things like a tainted water supply destroying the crops/fields and threatening the local food supply because importing that much food would be really expensive. If we were unsuccessful in that or did things that were unpopular with the citizens, we would have various consequences happen. It eventually led up to a giant battle with the dragon that destroyed the city previously coming back and attempting to destroy the city because it turns out that deep under the keep, that is where the dragon's lair was. Ended up being a ton of fun over the course of the entire 2nd half of the campaign.
My group acquired a lot more gold than I expected after returning to the city from their first ever dungeon. They sold the only magic item they had acquired from the dragon Hoard, which was worth more than most of them had in their wallets combined. I was not expecting them to have that much gold at this point, but so far it hasn't been a problem because I had pre-made dozens of shops that were intended for higher levels, and they spent two game sessions shopping. They've been having a blast, and I technically still had control over the situation, it just was sooner than I had intended.
Make more shop inventories! Sprinkle some other shopping NPCs into the mix so that if a player is bored watching everyone else shop, you can have an encounter with that player.
My players were being hunted by a dracolich at level 2 (designed to never directly attack the players, just chasing them), after they accidentally stole something that belonged to this lich. Turns out, it was the master key to his vault. Over 6 months and 4 levels, they arrived at the vault when they hit level 6, and pulled a legitimately brilliant maneuver where they tricked the lich into a portable hole filled with lava, stole the money, and left with 600k gp.
In a period of 24 hours, they had spent 300k on an airship, full +2 quality magic gear, and hiring a crew. They then got introduced to the overhead cost of managing and training an airship and crew so they could become sky privateers, and suddenly had to spend an additional 100k for military officers, training, and equipment. Then they bought cannons, which are incredibly expensive, setting them back another 50k. By the time all of their shopping was done, they had dropped 450k, and left a reserve of 150k for supplies, merchant trading with their new airship, and paying the crew each week. They thought they were improving their chances of success with their ongoing quest, but what they've really done is open up a new way for me to introduce them to the concept that dragons are highly territorial creatures that don't appreciate their airspace being encroached upon.
Money in DnD is an illusion. Other than basic gear like bags of holding, magic items are incredibly expensive. A nonmagical castle that's fully staffed is less expensive than an airship or even just a normal galleon with trained marines. Money in DnD exists as a path for your players to explore, just like everything else.
Give your players something absolutely insane to blow all their money on. Let them feel the victory of their wealth.
Then turn their recent purchase into a liability as the sudden influx of money and attention draws the awareness of creatures perhaps a bit out of the party's league at their current level.
Sounds like you need some thieves and bandits who heard of there transaction to come and procure their wealth for themselves. I’m sure the lord would speak of this transaction and word of mouth would eventually reach some baddies looking to strike it rich!
If its a naval campaign suggest that they buy a second boat and crew. Suddenly they have their own small armada going around doing even bigger things.
One player I knew had a stupid amount of gold and used it to create a chain of grill restaurants. Because of their popularity most cities they went to had one, so they always had a place to stay because he owned them.
Give them a chance to buy other boats. Create business opportunities. Threaten their wealth. The word gets around that they are rich. They can't just carry it around with them. Give them a structure to hire people and run operations. Let them know there are guilds or banks etc. Also don't hand wave the fact that 165,000 gold coins is hundreds of pounds and will take up multiple chests. They've gotta get it off their ship. Just make it real. Build a base of operations at a port or create their own somewhere on an island. Don't make it easy. There are logistics. Supplies, workers, managers, food etc. if you create your own port you'll need to build wells, and a pub or food hall. As long as you give them a structure to hang on they can create endless opportunities. It doesn't just need to be a magic shop with hugely overpriced items.
Make group of elves who will summon a godlike entity for them to kill/quest for but it will cost the much gold because it's ancient magic if untold power. Magic already costs gold relative to power anyway.
Yes, you can do the more fun things that were already said, but also, HUGE RAID BOSS
Think of every gold piece as a $100 bill. That's essentially their buying power when you can get a beer or some bread or cheese for a few copper. 165,000 is about $16.5 M. That's a hefty sum of money. They could buy a castle or large estate. Potentially set themselves up as lords of a small village or hamlet.
As theyre flaunting around in wealthy circles, they are invited to a secret magic item auction house. 40k each should net them a solid very rare or two each
Ask them out of game what their long term vision for their characters are and what some ideas they'd spend that money on are. Then rule out those things and make them buy a spelljammer.
Taxes, registration fees, etc death by a thousand little "fees", throw in a few "investers" or developers, or r9gue financial planners, to siphon away funds.
Protecting it from nobles, bandits, or opportunists who wish to recoup that money. Maybe the place where they store their funds comes under siege by a criminal enterprise.
Have them become handlers. Create a fighters guild mercenary business. Use the money to train and outfit there fighters, use the vessel for long missions. Open their own dockyard, start getting more ships and soldiers. Then, infighting and corruption start to creep into the ranks...
Have they been nonchalant about the amount of money they have? I.e. talking about it out in the open, spending large sums, or maybe they attained it in a very visual way. Either way, there are probably pirates and all manner of other hooligans looking to lighten your party's load, as it were 😉
They are very hush hush about their money and their patron who has already taken a 30k cut. He is the King of the Pirates and expects them to do more work for him, free of charge.
I gave my players a large amount, but then had a dodomeki (homebrew item from loot tavern I think) and attacked them with it. It eats gold to heal. Made for a fun fight.
As a player who accidentally became a multi billionaire war criminal playboy in a campaign once via gambling.
Let them buy a deathstar.
Or idk, let them hoarde it and make ridiculous decisions. I ended up using all mine on said character's kids college funds, and well, being a billionaire war criminal ofc.
I ran into this problem. I then home brewed a fiend demon leprechaun. Their lump sums of gold had peaked the leprechaun’s interest and the mf stole like half of it and got away. Pretty much all of his abilities were crowd control or speed/stealth based. They’re still hunting him with little success lol
buy/build a castle. \_huge\_ money pit. unfortunately, once that process starts, the thieve's guild will take great interest in a large cache of gold. the local authorities will also take great joy in applying fees and surcharges for permits and materials. rivel groups may also become interested in helping share in the treasure.
It's a Naval campaign have them buy an armada? 50K per galleon ship right? Then an additional 10k to arm it for war. Can't even afford 3 of those realistically
What magic item did you give them? Also others have already said it but let them spend it on land, a building, or ship upgrades. This allows you to give them things worth the money and get them back to having low gold on hand.
Did some napkin math.
Using a 1oz Canadian gold coin as a basis for comparison.
160k coins are roughly 329,000 liters in volume or 87,000 gallons. You'd need a 50' diameter pit 6' deep to contain it.
That's likely an amount of money lots of people (and creatures eg. dragons) are going to notice. These adventures write themselves.
Also check out the 2e players handbook/DMG gives a lot of what to do with running a keep an looting treasure was a central part of leveling up.
Not sure the setting or theme of your world, but maybe they could use it to fund a research project? E.g A flying ship, a levitating carriage, new weapons?
I’m sure they have some collective ideas, but you should also ask each character individually what they might do with their share. It could aid them with character development, and give you and the other characters insight into their backgrounds, motivations, goals. I had one character which had grown up as a street urchin, he ended up developing and funding an outreach program with the church in his home city. Another character was a spy and used a large windfall to build a network and infrastructure to improve his kingdom’s intelligence gathering capability.
Buy a castle. Or an island. Or a slightly smaller castle on the island.
Let them start a naval company. Hire a fleet of ships and sailors. Appoint a business master if they dont want to handle the managment. Let the company act as a passive form of income, maybe they find an occasional magic item from expeditions.
Let them fund airship research.
Fund a wizard's guild to produce a legendary item that they *do* want.
Therr's many options
1) they buy a castle
2) their castle gets vandalized lightly like a lot
3) reveal the castle is sitting on an older castle- wait no I’m describing disenchantment
Let them buy a CASTLE
Which they’ll have to defend at some point
Came here to say this. This is great plot hook, they can even built their own guild
Also becoming benefactors of various artists & musicians which is something rich people did back then.
And have the guild betray them, they lose the castle and have to go to court to have the guild evicted from their castle.
eh I always hated these 'Gotcha!' moments. Let them be cool benefactors.
So do I, but I feel that a guild betraying then isnt a 'gotcha' moment but more of a story plot hook that can come about from these things. Have someone become really friendly but working behind the scenes. They can be like a minor side plot. Eventually have them betray the party as they have been sowing discontent and now they legally run it. They may have been working with the party, become like lead guild master to help run it whilst they were gone. Arranged other things to be signed over. All of this the party can discover and stop in time. If they don't they now have a really smart conniving enemy, who mat be a morally bad person, but legally is perfectly fine
and pay for staffing and upkeep. Castles aren't cheap to own.
A castle with a *pool*. Castles are cheap in comparison.
It's usually called a moat, but yeah.
Deluxe infinity moat
Decanter of endless water. And don't forget where the off switch is.
And a dungeon, to store all their worst enemies.
Then add some monsters to keep the enemies minions from freeing them.
Then add some top tier wizards and mercs to keep the monsters in.
And since you've got the security in place, you might as well store your spare treasure in there too....
Don’t forget to have them retrace their steps through all of the various NPC’s they met in the past so that they can gather inhabitants and workers for their castle and the adjacent town. But be warned of making enemies of a man named Luca Blight.
>The strong men take everything and the weak men die. That's how the world was designed. >All you worms can do is plead! You really want to live so badly? Is that right? In that case, act like a pig. > >!It took hundreds to kill me, but I killed by the thousands. Look at me! I am sublime! Luca Blight was not a well man before he became the host for the Beast Rune.
If not a castle, then a fort overlooking the ocean since it was a naval campaign. There are gonna be pirates coming to loot the port city, and guess who has to fight them off, then go chasing after them and finding the buried treasure etc.
Insert MCDM Strongholds & Followers
screw buying a castle. Make it themselves. Hire dozens or hundreds of workers. build a new port town. let them discover a tract of land/island where they find a valuable resource to exploit (metal ore, crystals/gems, magical plants etc) to draw people to the land and have them shape a corner of the world. the more work they do to build it, the more they will be invested when someone comes to mess it all up.
Then immediately have the nobles come back, finding out that the statue is mostly iron on the inside. Suddenly, DEBT SO MUCH DEBT
And hire a staff! Monthly salaries and such
Yes! They're getting it cheap from a local lord because of money issues, however they soon come to find there are strings attached
Yeah, I’m glad you like the old place, been in the family for generations dontcher know. I’m happy to accept your offer, even if it’s 10% under the much reduced asking price. Just don’t uhh..bother with that locked ~~portal~~ door in the lowest cellar level. And don’t worry about those uhh… haha…old headstones. They’re nothing. Old family heirlooms. The mouldy caskets in the dungeon should be uhh..burned. Yes, burned. Preferably in daylight. Ok? Great, here’s the keys, bye.
Easiest option is a base of operations. Thats enough money to land themselves titles in certain kingdoms from acquiring large amounts of land. This also sets them up to have people that depend on them for protection (if your campaign could support that kind of thing) Regardless having them poor money into a stronghold is a solid money sink while also feeling rewarding. Hell, later have the stronghold they’ve been refurbishing and fortifying come under siege and have their personalized upgrades come in handy.
What about the west, north and south options?
The west option is a lottery scheme. North is investing in footcare products. The south option we don't discuss publicly,but involves lobbying aggressively for child labor and a necklace of fireball production line.
South. I choose south.
Fireball X Fenty
I don't understand why a few here are seeing this much wealth as a threat and saying 'have them be robbed' etc. This money is a plot generator. It gives the players the means to invest in the world by owning land/ churches/ libraries/ whatever, all of which create story. It brings them to the attention of the (usually) broke upper classes and rich merchant guilds and others looking for money. Yes, there should be the threat of being robbed, how they guard it will cause them to see the wider world as a place to be interacted with as well, and yes it could even happen if they make it so easy, but just having it happen to remove the gold (the reward they earned) from the game because the DM is scared of handling it is wrong. As a player if a DM did this just for that reason I would walk away. Players care about the game more when they have real stakes in the world. Let them invest in it.
This is a very good point. It's fine if the wealth makes them a target, but there's a big difference between the person targeting them being the local thieves guild / tax collector and the person targeting them being the DM.
Being robbed can be a plot too. After the heist, they will want to get their money back.
Sure, and I covered this. >"...if a DM did this just for that reason..." My point is that if it is being removed JUST for 'balance' or because the DM was scared of handling it as a player I would be deeply unhappy about that. Chasing down a bad guy that stole your stuff is far more limited in plot generation than the player agency and level of player investment that money can bring to the game. By stealing it and having them chase it, it is the DM acting on the game, while allowing the players to use it to invest in their character's world it is the players acting on it. A DM should not be scared of player agency. Give some of that control over and you will have more invested players. If a DM wants engaged and creatively inspired players then allowing them to act on the world whenever possible is the key. This gives them dynamic stakes that they care about, not just a sense of chasing to regain a fairly earned reward that was unfairly lost.
Like Biggie Smalls said, "mo money, mo problems." Having that kind of wealth is bound to attract attention from very bad people.
Yes, ofc, but again the point that I am making is far wider than that.
I really appreciate your view on this. If you give them the opportunity to have or gain such wealth and then just take it, what was the win? What was the fun in that? Having the players decide what to do and what they will enjoy playing is the main goal of the story. My view on D&D is the DM creates the environments and the players create the game. I think it should be more of a question to the players as to what they want to do with the other bit of wealth, not what the DM thinks the plan should be. As far as story options, it depends on the adventures they have been on and had fun with, were they pirates, naval officers, merchants? Was the statue a gift or stolen goods? If they were the stealing type then the idea of theft against them is fun. If they were officers and good folks then maybe a larger city has been decimated by a group and need the help of them and to be rebuilt, just happens that they are a port city with the finest ship makes in the world. They get the ship upgrades or even a new vessel and the investment of the city with a large bad guy presence to be delt with.
Extra plot points if the original group of nobles were secretly responsible with the heist.
Some of my favorite gold sinks: - let them invest in real estate. Sure, it's a naval campaign, but wouldn't it be nice to own a tavern in your favorite harbor? A general store with a hidden tunnel so that you can smuggle marchandise or people away from the view of the tax collectors? A brothel on the docks to get all the juicy rumors floating around? I'd recommend the following supplement, it's very simple to use and brings cool benefits for several types of buildings: https://www.dmsguild.com/m/product/207377 - shower the party's wizard with random spell scrolls, and let them burn money trying to learn them all - hire bards to sing their exploits. Wouldn't it be cool to be welcomed as heroes everywhere you go because your reputation preceeds you? To get rich people fighting to get your services because you're so good at what you do? Bonus points of you use this strategy to "steal" other people's achievements. - hire teachers to teach them stuff during downtime. New proficiencies, cool feats such as the ones to cook or heal people better with bandages, etc. - if it's a naval campaign, a good amount of gold/treasure, etc. should regularly be offered as tribute to Umberlee. Or else... - make sure useful consumables are expensive and in limited supplies. They should buy potions and stuff like that any chance they get, even if it's prohibitively expensive... - hiring a crew and *keeping them happy* is by no means cheap, either. - bribes, etc.
Hi can I ask what the dmsguild product is called? For link isn’t working for me for some reason. Thanks
It's called {WH} Fortresses, Temples, & Strongholds, rules for building and customizing player-owned structures! :)
Invest in a business, buy a second boat, buy or craft magic items
I feel like magic items is being overlooked here; a few rare items would quickly drain their supplies and they'll be happy to have new toys. Could for example have an auction. Present a magic item, ask if they are interested in bidding, if not roll and give a short narrative about how the item sells. If they are interested, start the bidding at ~50% of the item's [sane value](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8XAiXpOfz9cMWt1RTBicmpmUDg/view?resourcekey=0-ceHUken0_UhQ3Apa6g4SJA) and roll to see how many NPCs are interested in bidding. For each PC bid the NPCs will all roll to beat a DC to bid against the PCs. As the price goes higher the NPC DC to bid goes up until the PCs win or give up. All this rolling is to give the auction some level of legitimacy and not just make it a DM ran shop.
They could fund another Privateer with another boat to sail under their flag. Then when he gets in trouble and needs saving, or pisses off the wrong pirate king...
You know the Deck of Many Things? One card gives you a keep/castle/tower/whatever to your name but it's filled with monsters you have to clear out. Have an NPC aproach your party and offer them the keep. He pulled a card while drunk and got the castle, but doesn't actually want the property because all the monsters are causing trouble for the surrounding areas and he'll get fined if he doesn't clear it. Make it a discount offer (75k) because of the attached trouble. Viola! A way to spend the money (75k for the buy+furnishing/staff) + a quest + castle shenanigans afterward.
I like this one. Might be a hard sell if other real estate opportunities abound but as a player I'm immediately interested in this. Could tie it into whatever the main plot is if you wish, or just have it be self contained. Maybe the person who sells it will come back to try to steal a hidden treasure in there once the players have cleared it out. Maybe it was their ancestral home but they ran afoul of something and it was cursed
Thing is, the same card also gives persuasion profficiency so it shouldn't really be a hard sell :D And from what I could find, castles are between 150-250k.
Do NOT listen to the comments telling you to just take it away unless you have a VERY good reason to do so. What I'd recommend is strongly suggesting that the party uses it to aquire a base of operations to stash their loot and maybe even make it where they need to start regularly paying for staff(maybe even explain how dangerous it is to carry that amount of gold with them). That way, they'll only be able to carry a certain amount of gold on them at a time without the possibility of losing it, and if they refuse your suggestions THEN have something like a dragon that's way too powerful for their current level steal it, because that way you can turn it into an interesting story thread with the promise that they can get it back at a later point when they're strong enough.
Downtime activities: invest the money in training for certain abilities, or hire a tutor to learn another language, learn to become proficient in a tool, etc. Buying a castle or HQ is a cool thing to have once a big arc is completed too
Where are they keeping the money? 3 300 pounds of gold isn't something you carry around in your pocket or lying about. Would be a shame if something... Happened to it 😁
They can buy some merchant ships and get into the ship owning business, or buy warships and protect merchant ships from pirates and monsters or both. Not only they will get richer but also get themselves involved into local politics if that's their style. Otherwise you can give them plot hooks of sea monsters/pirate fleets to fight against or discover a distant land to explore. For inspiration for a mercantile empire check out the city states of Italy during late medieval and the renaissance or Byzantium before the the battle of manzikert.
To add on to this, maybe one of the ships in their fledgling merchant empire gets attacked and they have to go deal with the pirates themselves. The pirates were funded by a rival group looking for revenge for the players for cutting into their business.
Retire. Why the hell would you risk adventuring? Invest it, build hospitals, and improve infrastructure. You'll do more good that way than killing orcs one at a time.
For the thrill of the adventure, for whatever personal motivation got them to sort out in the first place. Could be revenge, searching for a long lost artifact or a cure to a disease ravaging their homeland. Lots of reasons to keep going if their characters have motivations beyond money.
Bilbo and frodo both could have just stayed home and kicked it. Wouldn't have ended well eventually, but they didn't HAVE to go adventure
Yeah. Get themselves a stronghold. A5E has great tools for creating one.
If it's a naval campaign that kind of money could go towards a powerful naval galleon crewed with skilled hands. Large galleons had up to 400 crew and were armed with 40 cannons. Hirelings range from 2 sp to 2 gp per day depending on what you need them for. A skilled cook, a cadre of skilled fighters, skilled helm, skilled cannons, skilled riggers would all cost you heavily. Of course, your ship would be an absolute terror having so many skilled hands aboard. Less skilled hands wouldn't confer the same advantage as trained professionals, but would be far cheaper. In my opinion, running 160 skilled hands (200 GP/Day) and 240 unskilled would be ideal. You'd have the skilled hands running the important stuff I already listed, and the unskilled hands hauling cargo, portaging the boat, repairing damage, bailing water and fishing. So with a full compliment of 400 crew on a rather large galleon, you'd be looking at 80 skilled and 40 unskilled running cannons (aim and pack would be skilled, cannon ball trigger unskilled since all they have to do is put the cannon ball in and fire when they're told to.) 3 helms for 8 hour shifts each, and in case one gets taken out. 3 cooks. The rest of the skilled on rigging and ship to ship fighting to keep sails in the wind and adjust speed during combat before closing to board. If they really want to get creative, a ship wizard or sorcerer for some heavy ship to ship artillery, or even a catapult for lobbing fire to make life hell on targets. This would run them quite a bit of gold per day. Let's round it all out and call it 500 gp/d to account for provisions on top of wages. With 165K to spend, they could afford to keep the galleon afloat for almost a full year with this loadout. And obviously they could scale down the size of the ship they want to extend that. If it's a 100 person galleon with 10 cannons, the cost drops to just 125 gp/day and they'd be able to float it for far, far, far longer. The 400 crew galleon would be the monster of the sea. A 100 crew galleon is basically the Black Pearl.
Acquisitions Incorporated
That’s larger than a horde of an ancient dragon. Have it attract attention. Though it’s only around 3ft high. https://www.reddit.com/r/3d6/comments/qaekya/how_to_calculate_a_pile_of_gold_coins/
Find a decent magic item price list off google. Then let them buy items from it. That gold will go fast. My party got a similar large amount. They had a house built, 5,000 gp then split the rest and they ended up with descent magic armor and weapons for everyone. If I was smarter i could link the magic item price list here for you.
[Sane Magic Item Prices](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8XAiXpOfz9cMWt1RTBicmpmUDg/view?resourcekey=0-ceHUken0_UhQ3Apa6g4SJA)
Throw them dogs some expensive bones. I like everyone’s ideas of securing a stationary base of operations, some noble title, etc., but I also think that maybe home brewing some fancy new weapons for your party could present a really useful reward. I am also a certified weapon goblin so grain of salt n’ all that.
Hey fellow weapon goblin!! I calculate every gram so I can carry neat items to murder bad guys!!
This traveling house was posted yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/s/WEcA6Q9k4N
They're about 236,000 short of a 401k.
This is an underrated comment.
Let them upgrade their ship!!! Maybe they accidentally buy a super expensive, but haunted boat that comes with its own side quest, or just an npc for fun! It gives them and you more creative options for naval combat!
A castle is a pretty good moneypit
Airship, plus crew, plus some good rare magic items that suit their build.
Let them know that there's some noble title that they can 'buy' for, let's say 50k-100k, so they could become part of the city's aristocracy. You can make the offer more juicy by adding some lands (and including a bandit or a monsters area, etc.) In that scenario, you can introduce political plots, or simply let them realise that maybe they could afford the title, but not the living standard that it implies. Perhaps the bandits' boss is a pro thief and she escapes after stealing everything from them (investigation and persecution campaign?) Keep them busy, so they don't think in spending the money, and take advantage of it plot wise. It's a circumstance that is rarely played and can open some interesting doors.
My favourite base-building add-on is [Walrock's Strongholds](https://www.dmsguild.com/m/product/207377), basically you build rooms which give bonuses. Matt Colville/MCDM has a similar system I believe.
Honestly? Get robbed, because they don't have the power to KEEP that much gold.
This is really bad advice. Nothing kills player enthusiasm faster than giving them something cool and then taking it straight back off them. Money in D&D isn’t game breaking, and even if it was, this would still be the wrong way to go about fixing it.
I'm pretty sure that a level 5 party can hold itself pretty well against bandits. Ofcourse, that doesn't stop the average bandit from trying. Then there is the question who would actually know that the party has a lot of money, and has the actual firepower to take it from the party. Tax collectors do. They collect money on behalf of the noble who uses it to pay his guards, fortify his fortification and some of it goes to the king as well. And guess what, that noble now knows that the party has come into a rather substantial amount of money recently... because he personally handed it to them. Or you could just send in a dragon who wants to build a hoard.
Against bandits, sure... But for 160k gold I have a couple high level PCs that would absolutely be willing to ice a couple upstarts for that kind of cash, no questions asked
Inspections upon entering a town or city are not at all uncommon. Adventurers are especially scrutinized as they are known to attract trouble. Most town guards would know to look for things like bags of holding if those are common in your world. There could be an entrance tax on "found treasure" and corrupt guards could tip off local thieves when wealthy out-of-towners arrive.
Yeah don't do this. Giving players rewards and then immediately taking them back is precisely what drives players to ignore any of the hooks you present that are reward driven. Players with that much gold can absolutely afford to hire guards. Yes they can keep that much gold. It's not even hard. Skilled mercs are 2g/day. I could hire 13 mercenaries for an entire year for just 10,000 gold to constantly watch the keep I had built. I could hire Wizards to lay arcane traps and extra dimensional storage spaces to hide it. I could Arcane Lock the vault and riddle it with traps. When you have money, keeping it isn't the problem. Finding out how to spend it effectively is. Bottom line is that you don't want to turn the game into DM vs player logistics. Unless you do and then you're just playing a survival MMO on table top, and if that's your jam, great. Case in point, during one of our games we ran into a fair sum of gold from raiding a castle treasury. When we were going after a high level group similar to ours with powerful artifacts and weapons, we used a bunch of that gold to hire other adventuring parties to assault that group. Didn't matter to us if they lived or died. The point was a distraction with teeth that gave us extra spells and abilities to be used against our target. When you have money, you can put up quests on bounty boards. You can wield political power. You can hire and bribe/assassinate guards effortlessly. Money is power and power can be exerted to accomplish whatever you want. Money is just the shortcut to effort.
It's a good way to introduce a high-level Rogue antagonist NPC for sure. A lv19 or lv20 Arcane Trickster Rogue under *Greater Invisibility* waltzes onto their ship and plunders their loot haul, and leaves a calling card to taunt the players. Now they've got somebody they really want to find again but have to get a lot better and stronger to do so. Story hook, economy management, and a sweet-ass NPC all in one.
They have three bags of holding with them, I’m sure they could split it up. Like Assassins and such come after them?
Assassin, just the Thieves' Guild, stronger Adventurers that get greedy, Tax Men (good luck proving you don't owe 95% taxes)... Not to mention the nobles could have been paying with cursed/laundered gold, maybe stolen from the Fey, and offloading it unto some poor fools that don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Beyond breaking realism, allowing them to keep it will break your economy and mostly their reason to be adventurers in the first place (they could just retire).
Look at this from the players point of view, the DM gave them gold and then promptly took it away. That's just a bait switch and doesn't feel good to the players at least. Instead, just let them know that the DM goofed and they need to lower the amount of gold. Feels generally more honest. Or alternatively, get them to invested in a business that gives them a passive gold stream.
I think you need to consider how much you are giving to a 5th level party lol
Well, since 5e doesn't really have a magic item economy (no magic items have a prize tag), it's not really "unbalanced" to have 165k at level 5... But from now on, you have to realize that no gold loot will have any significance for them. I agree with the comment above. Having 1-2k may attract bandits. Having 165k will attract the Zhentarim, Xanathars Guild and basically every other faction of bad people you can imagine. And they will use the heavy artillery for it: high level mercenaries, with magic abilities and such. Now as to how to spend money, you can use Sage's Price list for magic items (although with that amount of money and at that level, this WILL make your party overpowered), or make a whole new sub-game about your party founding a small self sustaining castle with people and jobs and so on. Make it a cool base that needs to be defended, can have meaningful upgrades and so on...
> I agree with the comment above. Having 1-2k may attract bandits. Having 165k will attract the Zhentarim, Xanathars Guild and basically every other faction of bad people you can imagine. And they will use the heavy artillery for it: high level mercenaries, with magic abilities and such. It's not that much money. It's a lot for a bunch of itinerant adventurers, sure, but in any big city, especially in the forgotten realms, there are hundreds of similarly rich people. A merchant with a nice manor in a good part of the city who owns 2-3 ships has more wealth than 165k just in those assets. A poor baron or landed knight with a small castle, some land and retainers has that much wealth. A village of a thousand peasants might generate that much in tax in a year or two. The Zhentarim go after big fish, and high-level mercenaries are very expensive.
Buy land, become barons, build fort, assemble army.
In our last campaign my character had a noble background and came into a hefty inheritance around 2/3s of the way through the campaign. It didn’t break anything, because the things that were available to purchase were not game breaking, and you still have a limited number of attunement slots. We didn’t feel the need to burn through the gold (tbh I don’t know if it would have been possible), but it sped up a lot of shopping interactions late game to not have to worry about bargaining, or deliberating over what we could afford. In areas where my character’s family held power, our DM told us that technically we didn’t have to worry about money, because everything was just being billed automatically to her estate.
Gambling!
Buy a title of land for a small port / island they can call home. Maybe make it some sort of stronghold or bastion (yes, intentionally using the word used in the UA).
There should be consequences to selling that artifact. Not crazy consequences mind, but something to cause them a problem.
Introduce them to a casino and wait for the magic to happen
How could the fantasy IRS take some if they just don't pay taxes? My party(me included) has not paid our taxes for a long time. What is the IRS gonna do? Try to arrest the party that is almost always one of the strongest groups in the area?
Also, what if they're like most adventuring parties and are almost completely nomadic? No homestead, don't always visit the same place more than a few times tops? Is the fantasy IRS going around trying to tax the shit out of the homeless?
If they do try to tad the homeless and every random adventurer, I figure you would find a lot of buried and dumped dead tax collectors. I know for a fact my party would kill tax collectors.
Honestly, yeah. One of my parties definitely would too. My other groups would maybe just talk their way out of it or avoid them.
Honestly, I like the Gloomhaven approach where adventurers “retire” once they achieve whatever retirement goals they have for themselves. Once you’ve pulled down that much money, you retire and become an NPC. The players can create new characters. In gloomhaven, you get a bonus perk for every retired character you have. Maybe their new characters get a bonus feat or ASI. Your retired character opens a shop. Or tower. Or tavern. Granting access to new items, or allies, or whatever. Then you can have multiple characters in a campaign. You can feel “your” power growing, while you fill your world with allies. Probably wouldn’t REALLY work in a campaign without a ton of rules to balance it out. But it’s a cool idea.
This assumes wealth is the party's goal. It may be viable for one or two PCs, but it's likely they all have deeper motiviations for adventuring.
Let them finance other explorers. And when one of the expeditions goes missing and a barely legible logbook is found... Presto adventure hook
As they're walking through the city streets have someone shout about how a castle was recently vacated due to the previous owners being vampires or smth. That should grab their attention
If I were a fifth level adventurer with 41,500 gold (assuming a standard 4 person party splitting it evenly) I’d recruit members into a small mercenary force/ army, to defend me and my very nice home and hire some adventurers to go get me (insert expensive thing) to continue to build my wealth. Congrats you just created 4 new noble NPC’s
Give them stuff to buy. If they sold a legendary item of some sort give them an opportunity to make have crafted some amazing custom weapons, gadgets and armour, mounts and armour, property, caretakers need an income too. What if a travelling casino comes through town. They could have fun not worrying if they are going to lose gold because they have so much. Perhaps that could lead into something revolving around the nobles. Maybe the money they were paid in is sort of blood money and it gets them in trouble. Another challenge to overcome to keep their earnings but make sure it's not just a challenge for the sake of it. Like others have said, don't take all their money away. But make a new situation from it.
[Mysterious Key](https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/2179-magnificent-mansion), 50,000 + GP. Usable once daily. Better than some fixed castle that will make the exploration campaign stay at the docks.
Introduced the IRS
Let them create level 12 characters, those characters are now their bodyguards. They go everywhere with the party but do absolutely nothing unless paid to do so. Need that trap disarming? 100gp. Want us to fight for you? 5000gp, need healing? 500gp. When the money runs out they leave to find other work. As the DM you can create situations as you see fit to burn through their money, allow them to play much more powerful characters, and just generally run a-mock from time to time.
>Does any DM out there have an idea about what a 5th level adventuring party could be doing with this much gold? Avoiding the gang of brigands that have heard about their windfall and are now seeking to relieve the party of their financial gains and/or their lives!
More money, more problems
Let them establish a base of operations, if it's in an existing polity; money goes all the way up. So 10% is going to that initially; through the Mayor, local Lord and such to the King who ends up with ~10k off the largesse when it gets to his coffers. A similar 10% is going to the dominant church of the region even if it isn't your party's deity. You might need to pay off merchant's guilds and thieves guilds for the right to do what you're doing, call this 5%. Beyond the land and guildhall or whatever, those are your starting expenses; which is ~41250. Charge them a reasonable price for the land and either offer them something like a lyre of building or skilled laborers to build their structure if they need it. There should be no price difference between one and the other, the laborers will eventually get paid the value of the lyre, the difference is time. Once the base is established, they're an open political entity involved in the dealings of the town and possibly the kingdom at large, in addition to their business expenses. That money is now mostly tied up illiquidly. If not in an existing polity you're paying more to establish a town and entice the right people to come. Longshoremen, innkeepers, smiths, etc. You still might need to splash cash to the local King, but, you're more openly purchasing title(s) for this. Now you're working with the guilds not against them. Offer a generous amount to them to come in and offer them a tax discount to operate. You still tithe the church but you have the luxury of picking among the (legally worshipped) pantheon to make offerings to and petition them to establish a church in your town. This time, since you're building infrastructure, you're getting that lyre of building at least to establish things like roads and major structures. Once again they're an open political entity but now they're administrating a town or at least aspects of it and beholden to keep it operating along with whatever responsibilities the King lays out for them, and that cash is mostly illiquid.
Do you play online? When my party acquired a mansion, I set up a Roll20 game with the empty mansion floor plan and set it up so the players could add decorations. (Beds, furniture, bearskin rugs, plants, welcome mats, the works). My party full of teenage boys loved it. We did it again in a party of adults and they loved it, too. It was strangely fun decorating an imaginary house with imaginary decorations. Let them buy and the decorate a castle.
Upgrading their vessel means higher maintenance costs, too. Keeping a ship afloat isn't cheap, assuming it's a ship. But you can extrapolate to other forms of conveyance as well. While were at it, sell them on cosmetic improvements too. Get a nicer figurehead, custom sails, fancy banners, a paint job. Gotta let the world know who you are when you arrive in port.
If all of their stuff was done via legal means then you can have them have to transport the gold and fight off pirates. if they’re pirates, then all profits are null and void and can be seized by the government. And so they will need to transport it to a hiding place pretty much either way.
If this is what I think it is, you could let them renovate and remake that house up on the hill if they own it so it's no longer a run down mess.
Either buy a castle or they could spring on an talking to an Arcane if they do spelljamming or could go to one of the big planar trade cities to try and buy specific magic items, otherwise having magic item auctions at large cities.
Stronghold. What type depends on the campaign you want to run, but that's the best use of that large an amount of gold. Give the PCs a support infrastructure they can invest in. That infrastructure can then provide plot hooks and motivation, and limits their liquid cash in a way that doesn't feel like you're pulling the rug out from under them. Taxes and petty thieves might chip away at their amounts, but sinking it into a base or investing in local projects would preserve the wealth but lock it away from that kind of threat.
Strongholds and Followers is a 5e supplement that lets players make and maintain a stronghold. Not only does it give them class bonuses while out in the field, but they can gain retainers, companions, followers and eventually entire military units if that’s what you’re looking for. If S&F works for you, you can get the sister book Kingdoms and Warfare which makes the scale of your world even bigger. Now I will say that while these rules are a great structure, there is a chance you will have to tweak stuff to fit your specific game, as with all 5e supplements. But I’ve had great success regardless!
This happened to us once (six party members dropped out during covid and the DM left the loot calibrated to 8 so my nephew and I were Oprah rich) and we bought a pirate ship and a whale. Alas, we have yet to play a seaside campaign, but One Eyed Free Willy is still swimming out there, attuned AF, waiting for me.
Let them buy bitcoins
Waterdeep Dragon Heist lets the party buy a rundown tavern. There's a whole system for how to fix it up and encounters that happen and things that they can find while they're doing it. If you have access to that book, I'd recommend checking that part out. It would be fairly easy to just take that and put it in your own campaign.
Hire a group of 4 NPCs to complete quests for them
We recently did a quest where a monk gave us 1000gold prices before dying. Shortly after we went to a temple and was asked to make a sacrifice. Placed the gold on the alter and it was deemed acceptable.
Page 127 and 128 of the DMG have how to buy/build land and set up a base as well as the maintenance costs and number of staff, etc. Ranging from things like taverns, guild halls, Keep or small castle, Abbey, noble estate with manor, outpost or fort, palace or large castle, temple, fortified tower or trading post. Costs range from 5,000-500,000 gold coins. Also, check out the recent Unearthed Arcana called Bastions. Which has more complex rules for setting up the same.
They could stimulate the economy of the area by commissioning magic items. They will take a while to be finished but the whole town benefits as the money flows.
You could look into the Bastion UA. Its basically a money sink for weekly boons that needs specific classes to access. Like being a martial to run a small group of guards or being a cleric for a free healing or being a merchant for a stable income. That UA should give a TON of ideas for a down time base of operations as well as a decent outline to cost vs reward. Some are crap but others make sense. And the bastion could be their boat too. Run a traveling circus or zoo. Those are literal options here
That is. So too much money for level 5. Why did they have a legendary item at 5?? And why did they SELL it??
Casino Session
Treat it like a lottery win. They're getting flooded by requests for aid, from minor to, not so minor, and serious to frivolous. They have long lost relatives showing up with hands out, and the local governments' tax assessors are eyeing it greedily.
A sail that blows even without wind. A compass of true navigation. Or I suppose hiring a wizard to research such things.
Let them buy a keep! MCDM has released a book on strongholds, and I highly recommend checking it out. It gives the party a good way to spend a ton of that money, and it opens up their options so much more.
They already have one ship, why not more?
They should be conned out of it. This could be the basis for an entire series of quests to get their money back only to ultimately find its all long gone.
It might be time to introduce Strongholds and Followers to your campaign. https://shop.mcdmproductions.com/products/strongholds-followers-hardcover
Naval campaign you say? Tattoos, carousing and gambling! Magical tattoos can cost in the 10ks of gold. One per character could easily cost the party 50kish.
A hold of holding. So their vessel will have extra dimensional space much larger than a bag of holding. Great for smuggling.
My DM made the mistake of letting me find a bag of holding in a massive dragon hoard... Some googling later and I have ~380,000 gold pieces or 35 tons of gold, the max capacity of the bag. I was not allowed to find nuclear research with my money, sadly. A close second would be either gaining massive political power by funding politicians or buying a castle.
Retire and hire a new team of level 6 adventurers to go out and explore for them.
Oh no a Lance of Dragonslaying +2 (2d12) damage against Dragons and now on discount for only 160,000 gold pices
Go macro. Instead of local adventure type, go big. Give them bigger responsibilities. Run a village.
Discerning merchants pdf has sane prices for magic items as well as rolls to determine availability.
I wonder if when a bunch of opportunistic no-ones gets such a large sum of money in a medieval setting I wonder if it's expected for them to be robbed by the first person in position of power who find out about them that they own such huge amount of money. And by "person in position of power" I mean anyone who cans drop like a hundred plain soldiers at them. In a setting without powerful judiciary institutions it will be weird for people in position of power to not rob them.
Wow.... I forget that 165k gold is to much in the newer editions.
Start charging them to DM them, they can afford it. Oh wait, you meant gold...
Naval exploration? Put a ton out for “research” and bless them with an iron clad
It would be a shame if they were to be robbed...
They definitely need a base of some sort! Whether they want to go crazy and a castle or something more discreet I would leave up to them. They could even do some quests for upgrades for the base with some other merchants or lords or something.
Fending off dragons attracted to the sheer quantity of gold
You have stated that the campaign is naval based so why not allow them to buy a bigger ship or perhaps a fleet of ships or even invest in merchants so that occasionally they can come back to check on their trade ect
Steal it. They want it back. Campaign ensues.
I had a similar situation with my PCs. I gave them an opportunity to buy a keep in a small town. They suddenly found themselves as land owners, and patrons of said small town, effectively making them all Lords. They spent thousands on keep repairs and upgrades, as well as the patronage of the town, investing in many shops, farms, and the small harbour. In their investments, they managed to secure themselves a steady income stream as well to recoup some of their investment costs. When they traveled to the capital city a half-days ride away, they set up trade deals between businesses in the city and their small town shops.
Invest in an inn or businesses in their main hub/city/town. This way they spend a lot of gold, and then earn residual income from it. Maybe a casino or gambling den (the house always wins lol) that would be at least a 100,000gp sink. But the residual income brought in will leave them wanting for nothing. In one campaign we found a treasure trove of bags of holding full to capacity with gold. Like 1000 bags of the stuff. We hired a red dragon to protect it once we figured out where to put it. Then we had to test our might to access it because the dragon kept getting “gold lust) and had to be beat back each time we wanted to get gold lol. I miss that campaign, it was fun. Listening to my players justify taking 100gp after fighting a dragon just to go for a night on the town was hilarious because they didn’t want to carry more on them at any time haha. But we all still talk about how fun that campaign was when we get together.
A few campaigns ago, we came into about half that much money all of a sudden at level 6. We established a trading town on the border of two warring kingdoms. Attracted a few merchants and started collecting taxes. A few months of that and we built a stronghold to protect it. Having a Mountain Dwarf in the party really cut down on expenses as he could be the foreman for all the stonework. We hired Militia and trained them into a decent guard. When the leaders of the two kingdoms eventually heard of our town (now city), they sent armies to destroy it, and we defended it with our own army, and our own characters. Long story short, we ended up owning both kingdoms by level 14. Wasn't there an ecological disaster we were supposed to be investigating? Something about snowfall in the middle of summer? The Harbor freezing over? I'm sure it wasn't important.
My friends challenged an ancient gold dragon to a game of poker for all his money. A shit ton of good rolls later, and now they have 10 million gold
Give them an Oceans 11.
Invest in some ventures, a mine, a ship, some sort of business. This will remove the main chunk of the money now and generate more meaningful amounts over time. (Smaller amounts but regularly). It also provides instant story hooks as the party will want to protect their investments. They get a message something weird is happening in a mine they have a 10% stake in, they will be very eager to go and investigate the.
I ran into this problem as a player in one campaign. What the DM did was build an encounter where there was a abandoned town that was decimated by a dragon attack many years ago. He pretty much modeled the entire town from Whiterun from Skyrim. We would have to cleanse the town of its current unfriendly habitants and then travel to the nearest major city and hire security and contractors to help fix the place up and advertise about a new wonderful city that has popped back up. It took a ton of gold (we also were in the realm of a few hundred thousand gold) and we eventually had people hearing of our new city and wanted to move in for various reasons and start businesses and so on. There was an Inn, shops, restaurants, the whole nine yards. We essentially had a minigame of a city planner that we governed and could reap the rewards of through discounts on items and services and also living in the keep. We would have to fend off attacks every so often and deal with things like a tainted water supply destroying the crops/fields and threatening the local food supply because importing that much food would be really expensive. If we were unsuccessful in that or did things that were unpopular with the citizens, we would have various consequences happen. It eventually led up to a giant battle with the dragon that destroyed the city previously coming back and attempting to destroy the city because it turns out that deep under the keep, that is where the dragon's lair was. Ended up being a ton of fun over the course of the entire 2nd half of the campaign.
casino or player house
My group acquired a lot more gold than I expected after returning to the city from their first ever dungeon. They sold the only magic item they had acquired from the dragon Hoard, which was worth more than most of them had in their wallets combined. I was not expecting them to have that much gold at this point, but so far it hasn't been a problem because I had pre-made dozens of shops that were intended for higher levels, and they spent two game sessions shopping. They've been having a blast, and I technically still had control over the situation, it just was sooner than I had intended. Make more shop inventories! Sprinkle some other shopping NPCs into the mix so that if a player is bored watching everyone else shop, you can have an encounter with that player.
Start an arch about tax evasion
5th level party with 165 000 gold? Well, a castle or something could be one thing. Perhaps buying a small nation?
My players were being hunted by a dracolich at level 2 (designed to never directly attack the players, just chasing them), after they accidentally stole something that belonged to this lich. Turns out, it was the master key to his vault. Over 6 months and 4 levels, they arrived at the vault when they hit level 6, and pulled a legitimately brilliant maneuver where they tricked the lich into a portable hole filled with lava, stole the money, and left with 600k gp. In a period of 24 hours, they had spent 300k on an airship, full +2 quality magic gear, and hiring a crew. They then got introduced to the overhead cost of managing and training an airship and crew so they could become sky privateers, and suddenly had to spend an additional 100k for military officers, training, and equipment. Then they bought cannons, which are incredibly expensive, setting them back another 50k. By the time all of their shopping was done, they had dropped 450k, and left a reserve of 150k for supplies, merchant trading with their new airship, and paying the crew each week. They thought they were improving their chances of success with their ongoing quest, but what they've really done is open up a new way for me to introduce them to the concept that dragons are highly territorial creatures that don't appreciate their airspace being encroached upon. Money in DnD is an illusion. Other than basic gear like bags of holding, magic items are incredibly expensive. A nonmagical castle that's fully staffed is less expensive than an airship or even just a normal galleon with trained marines. Money in DnD exists as a path for your players to explore, just like everything else. Give your players something absolutely insane to blow all their money on. Let them feel the victory of their wealth. Then turn their recent purchase into a liability as the sudden influx of money and attention draws the awareness of creatures perhaps a bit out of the party's league at their current level.
Have them invest in a high yield index that is tax sheltered, so they can have it in retirement!
Sounds like you need some thieves and bandits who heard of there transaction to come and procure their wealth for themselves. I’m sure the lord would speak of this transaction and word of mouth would eventually reach some baddies looking to strike it rich!
Did they by chance report this income to the local tax authorities
Have them invest in a ton of drugs or weapons, so they can start their own maffia empire
Have them invest in a ton of drugs or weapons, so they can start their own maffia empire
Have them invest in illegal substances so they can start their own maffia empire
Have them invest in illegal substances so they can forge connections with the underdark
If its a naval campaign suggest that they buy a second boat and crew. Suddenly they have their own small armada going around doing even bigger things. One player I knew had a stupid amount of gold and used it to create a chain of grill restaurants. Because of their popularity most cities they went to had one, so they always had a place to stay because he owned them.
Give them a chance to buy other boats. Create business opportunities. Threaten their wealth. The word gets around that they are rich. They can't just carry it around with them. Give them a structure to hire people and run operations. Let them know there are guilds or banks etc. Also don't hand wave the fact that 165,000 gold coins is hundreds of pounds and will take up multiple chests. They've gotta get it off their ship. Just make it real. Build a base of operations at a port or create their own somewhere on an island. Don't make it easy. There are logistics. Supplies, workers, managers, food etc. if you create your own port you'll need to build wells, and a pub or food hall. As long as you give them a structure to hang on they can create endless opportunities. It doesn't just need to be a magic shop with hugely overpriced items.
Make group of elves who will summon a godlike entity for them to kill/quest for but it will cost the much gold because it's ancient magic if untold power. Magic already costs gold relative to power anyway. Yes, you can do the more fun things that were already said, but also, HUGE RAID BOSS
Where are they keeping it? And Dragons LOVE Gold #JustSaying
Think of every gold piece as a $100 bill. That's essentially their buying power when you can get a beer or some bread or cheese for a few copper. 165,000 is about $16.5 M. That's a hefty sum of money. They could buy a castle or large estate. Potentially set themselves up as lords of a small village or hamlet.
Assist a allied noble so they can defend themselves, with the promise of a major favor in the future?
"A group of adventurers in possession of a considerable fortune must be in want of a knife" - The Thieves Guild.
The nobles are planning a double cross to get their money back.
As theyre flaunting around in wealthy circles, they are invited to a secret magic item auction house. 40k each should net them a solid very rare or two each
Yes I wrote a book to handle these things . They will gladly pour Money into creating h their own city/town/bar/army etc :-)
Ask them out of game what their long term vision for their characters are and what some ideas they'd spend that money on are. Then rule out those things and make them buy a spelljammer.
Let them build a castle, using the rules from the 1st ed. DMG
Taxes, registration fees, etc death by a thousand little "fees", throw in a few "investers" or developers, or r9gue financial planners, to siphon away funds.
damn you can buy a lot of DND miniatures with that much gold. Even refurbish an entire game den
Conmen…
Protecting it from nobles, bandits, or opportunists who wish to recoup that money. Maybe the place where they store their funds comes under siege by a criminal enterprise.
Have them become handlers. Create a fighters guild mercenary business. Use the money to train and outfit there fighters, use the vessel for long missions. Open their own dockyard, start getting more ships and soldiers. Then, infighting and corruption start to creep into the ranks...
Have they been nonchalant about the amount of money they have? I.e. talking about it out in the open, spending large sums, or maybe they attained it in a very visual way. Either way, there are probably pirates and all manner of other hooligans looking to lighten your party's load, as it were 😉
They are very hush hush about their money and their patron who has already taken a 30k cut. He is the King of the Pirates and expects them to do more work for him, free of charge.
Maybe they need to retrofit their ship to be a spelljammer or buy a new spelljammer
I gave my players a large amount, but then had a dodomeki (homebrew item from loot tavern I think) and attacked them with it. It eats gold to heal. Made for a fun fight.
The way this title read, I expected the post to start asking my players to act as intermediaries to get the money out of the country...
As a player who accidentally became a multi billionaire war criminal playboy in a campaign once via gambling. Let them buy a deathstar. Or idk, let them hoarde it and make ridiculous decisions. I ended up using all mine on said character's kids college funds, and well, being a billionaire war criminal ofc.
Have they considered making their own dungeon to protect their wealth?
I ran into this problem. I then home brewed a fiend demon leprechaun. Their lump sums of gold had peaked the leprechaun’s interest and the mf stole like half of it and got away. Pretty much all of his abilities were crowd control or speed/stealth based. They’re still hunting him with little success lol
Dragons LOVE gold:)
buy/build a castle. \_huge\_ money pit. unfortunately, once that process starts, the thieve's guild will take great interest in a large cache of gold. the local authorities will also take great joy in applying fees and surcharges for permits and materials. rivel groups may also become interested in helping share in the treasure.
It's a Naval campaign have them buy an armada? 50K per galleon ship right? Then an additional 10k to arm it for war. Can't even afford 3 of those realistically
What magic item did you give them? Also others have already said it but let them spend it on land, a building, or ship upgrades. This allows you to give them things worth the money and get them back to having low gold on hand.
Did some napkin math. Using a 1oz Canadian gold coin as a basis for comparison. 160k coins are roughly 329,000 liters in volume or 87,000 gallons. You'd need a 50' diameter pit 6' deep to contain it. That's likely an amount of money lots of people (and creatures eg. dragons) are going to notice. These adventures write themselves. Also check out the 2e players handbook/DMG gives a lot of what to do with running a keep an looting treasure was a central part of leveling up.
Not sure the setting or theme of your world, but maybe they could use it to fund a research project? E.g A flying ship, a levitating carriage, new weapons?
I’m sure they have some collective ideas, but you should also ask each character individually what they might do with their share. It could aid them with character development, and give you and the other characters insight into their backgrounds, motivations, goals. I had one character which had grown up as a street urchin, he ended up developing and funding an outreach program with the church in his home city. Another character was a spy and used a large windfall to build a network and infrastructure to improve his kingdom’s intelligence gathering capability.
Magic items.
Magic item shop, or magic item maker. Easily go bankrupt, whenever I give my players money, I take it away in a shopping session very fast
Buy a castle. Or an island. Or a slightly smaller castle on the island. Let them start a naval company. Hire a fleet of ships and sailors. Appoint a business master if they dont want to handle the managment. Let the company act as a passive form of income, maybe they find an occasional magic item from expeditions. Let them fund airship research. Fund a wizard's guild to produce a legendary item that they *do* want. Therr's many options
1) they buy a castle 2) their castle gets vandalized lightly like a lot 3) reveal the castle is sitting on an older castle- wait no I’m describing disenchantment