Various notes on the day-to-day economics of purchasing goods and services throughout the ages, including availability, black market smuggling, barter economies, and more.

You are usually able to buy what you want, within the limits of your starting wealth and your society’s laws. But sometimes, the GM or the adventure may specify some or all of your equipment. For instance, if you’re a soldier on a military mission, you’ll be issued your gear; you don’t have to pay for it, but you can’t choose it yourself. If the adventure calls for it, the GM might impose more severe restrictions – your choices will be extremely limited if you are supposed to be a castaway on an uninhabited island! The GM is the final judge of what you can buy in all cases.

However you acquire your equipment, you should list it on your character sheet. If you accumulate a lot of gear, consider keeping it on a separate sheet. In all cases, you should list possessions you leave at home separately from those you carry in order to keep track of encumbrance (see Encumbrance and Move).

Each game world has one or more equipment lists that give cost, weight, and other statistics for important items. You can buy items that aren’t on the list, provided the GM agrees; the GM sets the price. The GM should be open-minded! In high-tech settings, especially, hundreds of common items are unlikely to be listed… items you could go into any department store and pick up. If somebody really wants a vegetable dicer or a talking baby doll, let him buy one.

The Equipment section includes lists of weapons, armor, and general equipment for campaigns at a variety of tech levels. In most cases, equipment listings use some or all of the following notation.

Each item of equipment has a tech level. This is the earliest TL at which you can find the item as described. Many items will remain in use, with few or no changes, at later TLs. The notation “^” means the item requires “superscience” that rewrites the laws of physics; required TL is up to the GM.

Some equipment has a “Legality Class” (LC). LC rates how likely an item is to be legally or socially acceptable to own and carry. The availability of a given item in a particular society depends on the interaction between the item’s LC and the society’s “Control Rating”; see Control Rating and Legality Class. An item has a LC only if it is likely to be controlled. Ordinary clothing and tools normally do not require a LC. Of course, every society will have exceptions; for instance, revealing clothing might be LC4 in a puritanical society.

LC4 – Open. The item is openly available in most societies, but tightly controlled societies might restrict access or use. Examples: Computer; sword; shotgun; motor scooter.

LC3 – Licensed. The item requires registration with the authorities in most societies. Registration might involve a fee or examination, and might be denied to criminals, minors, etc. Examples: Automobile; handgun; hunting rifle.

LC2 – Restricted. Only military, police, or intelligence agencies may possess the item in most societies – although some licensed civilians might be permitted to keep it on their own property. Examples: Assault rifle; armored vehicles.

LC1 – Military. The item is available only to armed forces or secret spy agencies in most societies. Examples: Anti-tank weapons; fighting vehicles.

LC0 – Banned. The item is restricted to the armed forces of certain governments, who will go to extremes to keep it out of the hands of individuals and “have-not” governments. Examples: nuclear and biological weapons.

The legal codes and technologies of low-tech societies developed along distinct paths; cultural factors can influence how strictly different technologies are regulated by law. Tribal societies often don’t even have laws, although customs or religious taboos may control their people’s actions just as strictly. Within a civilized society, the same possessions – not just weapons and armor, but luxury goods – may be forbidden to some social classes, but permitted or even mandatory for others. Rather than trying to define an exact LC for each item, low-tech societies tend to give ratings to broad classes of items, occasionally noting special exceptions for particular devices. The GM should feel free to adjust these for particular cultures and for different social classes within a culture.

Low-tech economies don’t work like industrial ones! There are no assembly lines and there’s little standardization. Transportation is slow and imported goods are expensive; thus, most equipment is locally made. Adventurers who want to acquire new gear or keep their old stuff working have to deal with the consequences.

Buying gear in low-tech societies can be a challenge. Most objects are made one at a time by craftsmen, or by the people who will actually use them. There are exceptions – a wealthy ruler may be able to pay for his army’s gear, and even set up workshops to turn out standard models – but such equipment isn’t usually intended for sale and isn’t easy to buy, unless you’re a wealthy ruler yourself. Thus, each item is unique. While there are standard categories in GURPS equipment lists, such as “shortsword” and “medium shield,” and it’s convenient for game purposes to assume that everything in each category is identical, in reality there’s a lot of variation and few if any standard models. These differences are part of the justification for Equipment Bond.

Because of this, prices are less standardized. For a merchant who sells a lot of the same item to a large pool of customers, supply and demand narrow the price range. If there’s one item and one customer, narrowing is done by bargaining; for instance, if the merchant would sell for any offer of at least $100, and the customer would be willing to pay as much as $200, the price could end up anywhere in that range – and both buyer and seller will try to get as close as possible to the other’s limit. Listed prices are convenient for game purposes, but low-tech buyers – and even sellers – might have only a vague idea of what an item should sell for.

Rulers sometimes decree standard prices, but more often for necessities such as bread, wine, or salt than for adventuring gear or luxury goods. If you can’t find what you want locally, don’t expect to have it shipped. Not only are shipping costs high, but it’s expensive to send messages between cities – and even more costly, not to mention time-consuming, to go there yourself. Mostly, what’s available is what’s in stock where you are. In a village or a town, this might not be much! Transportation limits the seller, too; if he can’t sell something to locals, he may wait a long time for an out-of-town customer. Anything that isn’t in steady demand will sit on his shelves, tying up his wealth without earning anything. To avoid this, a lot of goods aren’t made in advance; they’re created by a craftsman, from raw materials, when someone promises to buy them, and probably makes a down payment. Getting a new suit of clothes may mean waiting a week or a month.

In a city, there’s room for storekeepers, who hold goods until someone asks to buy them. An armorer may have a display of swords or pistols, for example. But buyers have to look for the kind of thing they want, judge its quality, and haggle over the price.

In a metropolis, such as Rome or Edo, the economy will work more like that of a modern society. Commonly used goods may be sold in large, well-stocked shops, for established prices, and even made in large quantities.

The GM who wants to keep things simple can bypass the bargaining and shopping, and just ask for rolls to locate a seller who has the equipment the adventurers want – or, if those fail, to locate a craftsman who can make it. Use Finding a Hireling (pp. B517-518) for this. If that doesn’t work, though, the would-be customers can’t just go down the street to the next shop and try again.

Most legal equipment is available from shops or catalogs, but getting hold of expensive items (in general, articles that cost more than the campaign’s average starting wealth) or those that require licenses may involve dealing directly with a manufacturer, authorized dealer, or other specialist. This may be a fast and simple process for expensive but commonplace civilian items (e.g., automobiles), but it can take longer to find a specialized item and arrange for its sale – especially if it is valuable to collectors, requires a direct order from the manufacturer, or calls for special paperwork.

The GM may require Area Knowledge or Research rolls to find exotic equipment, and/or Administration or Streetwise rolls to acquire it without bureaucratic headaches or shipping delays.

In real life, people pay exorbitant sums for gear that may or may not offer an advantage. Fads, fashion, peer pressure, and poor research can all steer a shopper down the wrong aisle. In GURPS, however, the transparent nature of equipment ratings means that the players know which items give the best performance – even if their characters wouldn’t. Players who abuse this knowledge can challenge the GM’s efforts to prevent the proliferation of powerful hardware in the campaign.

Luckily, the GM has a number of methods to control vantage shoppers. As in real life, the GM may force buyers to seek high-quality equipment by two equally valid routes: expert knowledge and ludicrous prices.

Expert Knowledge: An equipment hunter might roll against appropriate skills (e.g., Connoisseur or Expert Skills) or seek guidance from Allies, Contacts, or Patrons. This is similar to using the black market, below, but the potential consequences are less severe. Instead of being jailed or kidnapped, the unfortunate buyer is subjected to opinionated windbags, harassed by so-called “experts,” or swindled by dishonest shysters. If the required roll fails, assume that the gear is located but is only of normal quality… regardless of the actual price paid.

Ludicrous Prices: A shopper with more money than good sense can simply buy the experience and contacts necessary to assemble superior kit. He might hire the world’s foremost experts (“I retained three Nobel Prize-winning scientists to solve this little problem for me.”), pay for extensive tests (“I want the entire shield inspected with an atomic force microscope!”), or at TL6+, simply take the brute-force approach (“Hire 100 Indian laborers to hand-make 10 a day apiece until we get a suppressor that rates -22 dB. Junk the rest.”). The result is the “best-quality” gear discussed in Equipment Quality.

The GM should allow a multi-millionaire who buys the company and has it customize his gear to acquire such equipment with cash alone!

Optionally, the GM may allow Equipment Bond or Weapon Bond to stand in for “quality” gear for character concepts that don’t involve great wealth. This can represent extreme-sports athletes, special-operations soldiers, and others who constantly modify and tinker with gear they’ve assembled from off-the-shelf components.

An item that’s illegal to own – or stolen – may be available from one or more outlets in the underground economy. This is the black market.

Acquiring black-market goods usually requires a Contact who knows how to get in touch with the local underground. To do so, the Contact rolls against his effective Streetwise skill. A PC without a Contact can use his own Streetwise skill to locate new connections. The players specify what they’re looking for, and then the GM decides on the item’s local availability, applies any modifiers, and rolls in secret.

Modifiers: A penalty equal to the local Control Rating; any Cultural Familiarity modifier; +1 if the area includes a major shipping port, borders a low-CR country, or has ineffectual (corrupt, undermanned, etc.) law enforcement; -3 in an unfamiliar area (Contacts seldom have this penalty, but PCs often do!).

Failure may result in unwanted attention from local cops or criminal syndicates. Critical failure means the buyers walk into a police “sting” operation, are ambushed by other criminals, or acquire dangerously defective goods!

The term “black market” describes all businesses that operate illegally. They might sell proscribed goods and services, deal in forgeries (“Don’t mind the wet ink, officer.”), or simply circumvent tax or safety laws to undercut their legitimate competitors. The GM may set up various niches within the black market that cater to specific customers and that require specialized Contacts or skill penalties (see above) to deal with. Examples of specialized black markets include:

Electronics: Supercomputers (prototype or custommade) and banned software (“Guaranteed to break the intrusion countermeasures on that military mainframe… but owning it will get you 20. Still want it?”). Failure means that the product you bought doesn’t work as advertised or is a fake. Critical failure means that very angry people know exactly where you are (“Who’s knocking at the door?”).

Medical: Cut-rate surgical procedures (“Dr. Pain will see you now…”), unlicensed (but cheap!) clinics, stolen organs (with the previous owner still attached), and prescriptions and permits for drugs (“Works just like Viagra, except that it causes cancer in lab mice.”). Failure means you don’t find what you’re looking for, or the seller can’t provide the amount requested. Critical failure means you leave with scars, placebos, or an angry amputee on your trail.

Combat Gear: Military vehicles (“Chinese copy of the T-55 tank, fresh from the factory.”), undocumented firearms (the fall from the truck erased their serial numbers), and body armor (with a minimum of unpatched bullet holes). Failure means you can only get an inferior version of what you’re looking for. Critical failure means hardware that blows up in your face on first use or that’s being tracked.

The black market operates in competition with the legitimate market for many goods. To sell items that are readily available through legal channels, it can only compete by making them easier to acquire (which is rare) or by selling them at lower prices (by not charging taxes, unloading cheap copies, or fencing stolen goods). Easily copied media and textiles can sell for as little as 5% of the usual price. Almost everything else sells for around 60% of full price.

The black market is opportunistic. If an item is hard to acquire legally, dealers will ruthlessly exploit their edge over the legitimate market. Successful haggling with the Merchant skill can bring the price down – but black-market dealers rarely have any incentive to offer discounts!

Local availability and demand are major factors in the final price. A war-torn country may have an abundance of LC1 military weapons that desperate locals will happily sell for a huge discount to anyone with hard currency… while electronics and food have outrageous markups. A rich, peaceful country may have a thriving black market in cheap alcohol and pirated movies, but LC0-3 weapons might not be available at any price.

“Gray markets” are pseudo-legal means of acquiring controlled – or at least questionable – goods. Private citizens who sell one another legal weapons for cash can create a steady gray market in unregistered weapons. A legally prescribed drug can generate a gray market if resold without a prescription. A thriving gray market in body armor may exist because a company refuses to sell its product to civilians, even though they may legally possess it, but does business with police and security personnel without a rigorous ID check.

Gray-market goods are easier to find. Roll as above, but at +3 to skill. As well, the GM should assess far less severe penalties for failure.

Outlawed (LC0) goods are those banned by governments that are willing and able to enforce a strict ban. Historically, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons have been outlawed. A civilian looking to purchase a nerve-gas shell, a tactical nuke, or a weaponized strain of Ebola virus probably won’t have much luck.

Locating outlawed goods is best handled as an adventure. Failure can mean anything from kidnapped loved ones (“Deliver the package or we kill the girl.”) to imprisonment (“Two men were arrested today in a police raid on a warehouse in . . .”) or death (“The Solsnetskaya do not appreciate your incompetent business practices.”).

The GM may choose to make obsolete weapons – and, optionally, other antiques – available as if they had an increased Legality Class. For every two full tech levels by which a device is obsolete, increase its LC by one, to a maximum of two over its starting LC. On reaching LC4, there are no controls at all on the item. Of course, the LC of some things won’t rise with TL; in particular, chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons are always likely to be tightly controlled.

Example: Deputy Marshal Rufus Kingsland, banestorm victim, grinned as he rubbed the gleaming brass of the Gatling Model 1874 displayed in the gunshop window. Despite the motorized carriages that clogged the streets of a strangely unfamiliar Amarillo, Texas, he found himself still wishing that his battery had gone up the Rosebud with Custer instead of being left in the rear with Terry. No matter now. He had a score to settle with a Cheyenne devil. He sidled up to the counter, tipped his hat to the youngster with the spiky blue hair, and said, “How much for that there coffee mill gun?”

At Kingsland’s original TL5, a Gatling gun is LC2. But in 1985, three TLs later, it has been obsolete for well over a century! As such, the weapon – or an exact replica, even if made at TL8 – has its LC increased by 1, making it LC3.

After signing some papers and parting with a pocketful of gold Double Eagles to grease the transaction, Kingsland managed to get gun, tripod, and ammunition strapped onto the mules he’d bought at that new-fangled stockyard. He saddled his old roan and led the mule train down 6th Street, passing by lines of beeping carriages. It was time to break out into the badlands and track down that brujo…

Want to invent a device featuring a GPS, a PDA, and a thermograph in one handy unit? Here’s how.

Cost and Weight: Starting with the costs and weights of the component gadgets, do the following:

* If all of the gadgets can be used at once, weight is that of the heaviest gadget plus 80% of the weight of the others (weight savings being due primarily to shared housing). Cost is that of the costliest gadget plus 80% of the cost of the others.

* If only one gadget works at a time, weight is that of the heaviest gadget plus 50% of the weight of the others (due to shared electronics and mechanical parts). Cost is that of the costliest gadget plus 50% of the cost of the others.

Weight calculations use the gadgets’ empty weight, after subtracting the weight of batteries and/or ammunition.

Power: Combination gadgets often end up using several different batteries. To make them all run off the same size of battery, adjust endurance in proportion to the relative weight of battery sizes; e.g., an S battery is 3.3 times as heavy as an XS battery, so a gadget that switched from the latter to the former would operate for 3.3 times as long. Remember that changing battery type will modify final weight: subtract the weight of the old battery and add the weight of the new one.

LC: A combination gadget shares the LC of the component with the lowest LC.

Clothing, life-support gear, and similar personal items assume a user the size of a normal, adult human (SM 0). When buying equipment for larger or smaller individuals, multiply cost, weight, and power requirement by a factor that depends on the user’s Size Modifier: