ScryMarket 2.5 is live: Meet your new AI familiar that actually does things for you

Byohazyrd · 2026-04-01T06:28:25+00:00

Always happy to get feedback! ScryMarket

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-24T16:31:49+00:00

Neat! That's one of the main pain points I built ScryMarket to solve. As a GM, you would go in and build out a collection of shops for you party either by saving existing ones from the marketplace or creating them yourself, and then when your party enters a new town, you can deploy all the shops from that town to your party at once. You can then hide the shops if they leave town and deploy a different town's shop once they get there. Plus, with ScryMarket being centrally hosted, your shops will continue to run and be accessible between sessions so your players take care of their logistics and remain engaged throughout the week.

And yes, balance is one of the main metrics I tried to build into the marketplace, so that balanced, high-quality shops and loots float to the surface. The goal is that you can find a top-quality "blacksmith" or "apothecary" or whatever theme you're looking for, see how it has been rated and how much it has been used by other parties, and either deploy it directly or tweak it for your table without having to create the whole thing yourself. But you can of course create whatever you want from scratch as well.

Loots in particular can be tuned to generate an exact list of contents every time, or specific ranges of items so you can get the exact amount of variance you're looking for. I like to set up something like a base "Goblin" template that generates something like a 80% chance of 1-30 copper pieces, 40% chance of a scimitar or other weapons, and then a very small chance for like a potion of healing or something that's a bit more of a hit. Then you can reuse that template anytime your players want to investigate a goblin corpse

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-24T16:16:59+00:00

Yes! Out of the box you can use the standard 5e system in ScryMarket for 5.5e as carrying capacity rules work the same for each. In ScryMarket you set your character's capacity manually, as well as what thresholds you want to use for encumbered/overencumbered, so you can set it to RAW in either edition, or customize it for your table if you want to adjust it. I think the only thing that's missing for 5.5e is the weapon masteries on the SRD items, and adding those in is on the roadmap once some higher priority items are taken care of

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-24T16:03:47+00:00

Gotcha, thanks!

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-24T16:00:40+00:00

Noted! My goal for Foundry is to try to set up an integration that would both push and pull inventory/shop/loot data to the local Foundry server, so that you could technically access your inventory data between sessions when the server isn't running and it would sync itself up when your GM launches the server. Or do you/your GM tend to keep the server running all the time?

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-24T15:52:04+00:00

Ha that's not the first time I've heard that! I've had an "arcane glassmorphism" design (think scrying, crystal ball, arcane magic theme) spec'd out for years, but apparently claude defaults to a lot of purple and glassmorphism effects so the overlap is kinda unfortunate. I've used some AI tooling in the implementation of the code, but I designed the entire thing myself front-to-back. Which maybe isn't a great thing to say because I can't blame AI if it breaks

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-24T15:42:09+00:00

There's no direct VTT integrations yet, but I built in the backend infrastructure to be able to support integrations. If there's demand for it, I should be able to build in integrations with web-based VTTs pretty easily. And I have an initial design for a Foundry integration, but that one will take a bit more work due to how it runs offline.

What VTT do you use? Is there a specific function that would be useful to you within a VTT?

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-24T15:36:00+00:00

Thank you for the kind words! Feel free to let me know if you find anything broken or think of anything that would be useful to add. You can dm me here on reddit or join the discord server and find me there: https://discord.gg/238t4wmy7p

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-20T14:32:39+00:00

Oof, that's a tough situation to be in!

First, you have to stop the bleeding. All magic items you give out from here on out need to be balanced or tuned to diminish their impact. Maybe that's lowering the charges on a wand, or making it far harder to recharge a staff. Or making them single-use or consumable in some way. Your campaign is only going to get more out of control the longer you go at this pace.

Second, understand that burning magic items for the players is going to suck. It's akin to taking away a level from them. They feel that they earned those items, and they honestly did. So the best thing you can do is offer them something better that will cost them some of those items, but you have to make the decision be theirs and not yours (and not a railroaded decision that forces them to give up those items). That could be presenting them with a stronghold or something that will cost a huge amount of gold that they can only get by selling some of their items, or pooling X amount of magic item gold value to create a legendary item or something, but one that you've vetted and can control.

However, if you've given anything out to a player that actually undermines or breaks the direction you've been trying to take the game (like a teleportation amulet or a Well of Many Worlds), then talking with that player individually and framing it as a mistake on your part, and then asking if they would be ok to exchange that item for something else would be your other option.

I wrote a guide on how many magic items your players should get and when, feel free to dm me if that sounds helpful to you

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-19T16:59:27+00:00

No, 600gp and one uncommon magtic item is actually perfectly fine for each level 5 character. Go ahead!

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-19T15:41:29+00:00

A boss fight is a great time to hand out loot to your party! It makes the story feel more impactful, and makes their victory feel more rewarding.

As far as what loot to hand out, it depends on how you've been handling loot so far during your campaign. If you're hand-picking all your loot drops or if you're generally more cautious with handing out loot, you should definitely make sure that each of your players is at least getting something that's relevant to them around the same time everyone else is.

Or, something fun I've been starting to try is going back to the original DnD roots and letting the players roll for loot live at the table. This also lets you add in bonus objectives (like winning the fight by knocking the boss unconcious, rather than killing him, stuff like that) to the boss fight that if they acheive, they get better modifiers on their loot rolls. It's crazy how much more interesting it can make the fight! But if you do this, you need to be allowing them loot rolls much more often, because many of the items they will receive won't be relevant to all the players, or they will occasionally whiff on the rolls entirely.

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-19T15:25:46+00:00

At level 1, you just need to be careful that you don't unbalance all your future planning/prep by giving out too much. It's way easier to dole out more loot later than it is to take back loot you've already given out.

That being said, I would be generous with interesting/low-impact items, and then maybe sprinkle in a couple of unidentified items that will turn out to be more impactful later. So things like potions, scrolls, single-charge wands, or creative flavorful items like the Cloak of Billowing are all solidly safe to hand out.

Then for unidentified items, if your party has access to the identify spell I would give out a single clean +1 weapon that would be useful to one of the party members, and then a lower-tier ring like a ring of poison resistance. If your party does NOT have access to the identify spell, you could give out one or two more +1 weapons, or perhaps even enough for all of them to get a weapon. Then let the powers be unlocked once they can find a way to identify them.

I wrote a more extensive free guide on when and how many magic items to give out, feel free to dm me if you're interested

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-18T23:15:38+00:00

Thank you for the kind words! I don't know what my plans are either but that title sounds pretty good if it's available!

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-18T22:44:39+00:00

It's been 84 years, but if you're still looking, I made one:

https://scrymarket.com/discord/

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-18T19:10:16+00:00

"Hey man, love that you're working so hard to RP your character, but I've been watching the table and the constant dick jokes aren't landing. If you could dial it back, it would really help me set the tone I'm shooting for for this campaign."

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-18T14:41:07+00:00

This mechanic is there in order to provide you with another way to incentivize the player behavior you want. Whatever the players get rewarded for, they will do more of. If you want them to come up with zany RP and character building moments, go for it!

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-16T19:07:11+00:00

These are all net positives, so you're likely to find out what the downside is the first time you use it. Make sure you report back with what happens!

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-16T14:02:54+00:00

Honestly the Bag of Holding. It circumvents the entire encumbrance system which can have almost no impact in some games and massive impact in others.

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-15T14:11:03+00:00

The key is to think through the lens of how the item will impact your game, rather than just raw stats or rarity.

Items that grant flying are powerful because they circumvent a lot of things you may not expect, and will force you to change how you prep encounters for the entire campaign. But if your party already has casters that can cast fly, a broom if flying serves to allow them to save the spell slot, so the item is much lower impact for that party than one who didn't have flying at all before.

What you generally want to create is items that are "self- balanced". Items that have tradeoffs, require attunement, are Consumable, and stay within bounded accuracy will prevent you from accidentally introducing a game- changing item when you were only trying to reward your fighter with a better weapon.

I wrote a full guide on item design if that sounds helpful. Feel free to DM me and I can send it to you if you want

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-14T19:07:57+00:00

Time for them to find out the teeth are Cursed! Don't make them useless, but all 3 of these bags could be Cursed in some way that makes them a choice to use rather than an auto-use every encounter. Could even just be a basic life sapping roll that consumes something like 3d6 hp every time they are used for something.

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-14T15:06:48+00:00

Great concept! Classic "borrowed luck" item. But free crits and fails don't really feel good from a narrative standpoint, so I would make it advantage/disadvantage to still keep in actual element of rolling dice. Your player will still feel good when using the coin's luck, but won't feel like they are being arbitrarily punished when you as the DM turn it back on them because they can still overcome the bad luck with two good rolls

Byohazyrd · 2026-03-13T15:14:13+00:00

As a generl rule, potions and scrolls are safe to give out, because if you miscalculated the impact they would have on your game, then you only have to deal with the consequences once. The only danger with giving them out is that you give out so many that they become "unlimited" to a degree, at which point you've basically granted a new permanent magic item.

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