Crossfire Playerbook - Chapter 6

# Equipment

## Going to market..

You can find equipment for sale at easily recognizable buildings. To buy an item just pick it up and walk out of the building by stepping on a shop mat . The cost of the item will automatically be deducted from your money . To sell an item, enter the shop and drop the item on the shop floor. Money from the sale will auto-matically be placed in your inventory. Use the `examine` command, or the cursor and left button of the mouse to examine the price of an item before you buy or sell.

### Some notes about shopping

Most items will have a value based on their ``standard'' cost multiplied by a factor based on your charisma (see table primary stat effects). You can never look good enough that you can buy stuff then sell it at a profit.

Some notable exceptions to the above:

- Gems will always be sold or bought 3% more or less their standard value.
- For magic stuff value is 3 *(`magic`)^3 of standard value.
- Unidentified items value is 2/3 of standard.

### Plundering shops

It is not possible to steal from shops (sorry!). If you somehow make it out of a shop with ``unpaid'' items, you will find that they will be unusable until paid for. On another note, if you save yourself with unpaid items in a shop, then crash the game and reload, you will find that the unpaid items will not be saved.

## Items

In this section we detail some interesting properties of various bits of equipment which may be found in Crossfire

Books:

This is how players can obtain magical spells, sometimes a player can learn the spell, other times they cannot. The chance depends on the type of spell, either INT (incantations) or WIS (prayers) is used to help determine the percentage chance that the spell might be learned (see section learning a spell for details).

There are many, many different types of books out there, as well as being spell books (grimores and prayerbooks), the following information can appear in books generated in shops and/or monster treasure hoards:

- Compendiums on monsters. Their powers/abilities are described as in the spoiler.
- Compendiums of incantations/prayers by spell Path. Higher level texts are more complete in their description of available spells.
- ``Bibles'': various aspects, properties, and characteristics of a God/cult are described. Higher level texts have more/better information.
- Compendiums explaining the powers of magic items. Higher level texts have more items detailed.
- Alchemical Formulae.
- Other randomly generated information.

Book level is assigned when the book is generated as treasure. Level is based on the difficulty of the map the book is generated on. All information is server specific.

Scrolls and Potions:

Most of these items provide a one-shot use of a spell without making the user expend either mana or grace. Scroll use depends on the user's `literacy` skill and may fail. Potions always work, but are more expensive to buy. Several kinds of items are classed as "potions": balms, figurines, and dusts. Some potions don't cast spells, but instead raise the drinker's stats. Beware cursed potions. They can lower your stats instead!

Wands(Staves)/Rods/Horns:

These items provide use of spells. Wands have a limited number of charges, while horns and rods will recharge (but don't fire as much damage in a small amount of time). Horns are used at the overall level of ability of the user, while rods and wands cast spells at the item level.

Rings:

Many different types, rings can be worn to add/remove different immunities, gain/lose spell Paths and alter all types of stats.

Food/Flesh:

These items provide sustenance. Food is generally more healthy to eat, while some flesh items can be sold for good cash. Both types may temporarily alter your stats, and/or be poisonous. Many flesh items inherit the properties of the monster they came from. For example, a ``poisonous'' monster will leave behind poisonous flesh. Don't eat it if you know what's good for you!!

Weapons/Armour:

Tons of items, it is up to you as the player to figure out which work better then others. Take a look at weapon/armour weight in the spoiler to get an idea of how enchanted unidentified items are.

Artifacts:

These are the real treasures of the game. There are more than 20 artifacts out there, but they are very hard to come by.

## Encumbrance

Armour, weapons, shields will encumber a wizard and cause spell failure. Light equipment causes no failure at all whereas heavy equipment causes mondo failures.

The reasoning is that the bulkiness of objects, not their weight exactly, is what causes failures. So the basic idea of encumbrance is that items get in the way more than they weigh down. Unfortunately, our only measure of 'getting in the way' was the weight.

### How encumbrance is calculated

Encumbrance points are tallied only from applied objects. Weapons give 3x their weight in kg in encumbrance points. Shields give 1/2 their weight in kg in encumbrance points. Armour gives its weight in encumbrance points.

There's an allowance of encumbrance points which all players get before they start losing incantations, this was about 35-45, not too much.

The formula works like this: You make a roll of 1-200. You compare it to a failure threshold. This threshold is: encumbrance + incantation `level` - caster `level` - 35

For example, lets say a 4th `level` wizard is casting a 5th `level` incantation . The wizard is wearing plate mail (100 kg), a 20 kg shield and wielding a 15 kg weapon. His encumbrance is 100 + 10 + 45 = 155. Thus, his threshold for failure is 155 + 5 - 4 = 156 or just about 3/4 failure rate.

There is no special bonuses for using magical equipment, although, it is clear that magical armour and weapons make things better through their weight.

## Enchantments

Some items will have numerical values such as +1, +2, +3, etc. trailing their names. These magic values indicate that the item is enchanted, and in some way may be better or (if the value is negative) worse than ordinary run of the day items of its kind.

### Enchanting armour

Enchantment of armour is achieved with the enchant armour scrolls. Each time you successfully use a scroll, you will add a plus value, more armour to the piece of equipment and some fractional amount of weight.

You may only add up to 1 + (overall `level`/10) (rounded down like an integer) in pluses to any one piece of armour. How much armour value you add to the item is also dependent on your overall `level`. You may never enchant a piece of armour to have an armour rating greater than their overall `level` or 99.

### Enchanting weapons

This is done via a series of scrolls that you may find or buy in shops. The procedure is done in two steps. Use the prepare weapon scroll to lay a magic matrix on your weapon. Then use any of the other scrolls to add enchantments you want. Note that some of these scrolls will also require a ``sacrifice'' to be made when they are read. To sacrifice an object just stand over it when you read the weapon scroll. Scrolls for weapon enchantment are:

Prepare weapon

Diamonds are required for the sacrifice. The item can be enchanted the square root of the number of diamonds sacrificed. Thus, if 100 diamonds are sacrificed, the weapon can have 10 other enchant scrolls read.

Improve damage

There is no sacrifice. Each scroll read will increase the damage by 5 points, and the weight by 5 kilograms.

Lower (Improve) Weight

There is no sacrifice. Each scroll read will reduce the weight by 20%. The minimum weight a weapon can have is 1 gram.

Enchant weapon

This does not require any sacrifices, and increases the magic by 1.

Improve Stat (ie, Strength, Dexterity, etc)
The sacrifice is the potion of the same type as the ability to be increased (ie, Improve Strength requires strength potions). The number of potions needed is the sum of all the abilities the weapon presently gives multiplied by 2. The ability will then be increased by 1 point. Thus, if a sword is Int +2 and Str +2, then 8 potions would be needed to raise any stat by one point. But if the sword was Int +2, Str +2, and Wis -2, then only 4 potions. A minimum of 2 potions will be needed.

WARNING: something to keep in mind before you start enchanting like crazy - you can only use a weapon that has 5 + 1 enchantments for every 5 levels of `physique` experience you possess. So, a character with 10th level in the `physique` experience category may only be able to use a weapon with a maximum of 7 enchantments!

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