Locked up for a thousand years? Must be a good guy.

On at least three occasions, the party I'm DMing for has released Major Evil into the world just because it said so. I don't know what compels these players to act like they do, but every time something's trapped, someone invariably releases it because it seems "trustworthy" or similar.

You'd think they'd learn.

On Treasures.

This has been said elsewhere, by smarter people than I, but it can be repeated.

Treasure is not always coin. We all know this.

Lately I've been on a kind of virtual tourist spree. I've been looking at museum collections, and you can often lift stuff from them straight into your game. If not that, you can get inspiration. Let's have a look around the world and see what we can find.

In the National Palace Museum of Taiwan, we find a nice selection of curios. A meat-shaped stone, for instance (it's a personal favorite of mine). Apart from food-shaped things, there are also paintings, calligraphy, rare books, documents, ceramics, bronzes and jades. A lot of these things are valuable now but maybe wasn't at the time, but isn't that just like a treasure in a dungeon? Maybe it was valuable then, maybe it wasn't. Maybe you can find a collector, maybe you can't. If we look quickly at "Curious", we get a nice list of stuff:

• a carved inkstone (clouds and dragons) 
• a ch'un-lei zither (a stringed instrument)
• a lacquered peony box
• carved bamboo brush holder
• a carved bamboo brush washer in the shape of a lotus leaf
• a cloisonné box
• a curio box
• an enameled container
• a glass snuff bottle with interior painting
• a painted lacquer container
• a carved olive-stone boat
• two pocket watches with painted enamelware

It's not hard to imagine some of this stuff having magical properties. If nothing else, they're quite fancy and would fetch a nice price to the right person.

Documents, similarly, yields interesting results. Maps are documents. Palace memorials, archives in dead languages, "gold-leaf tributary document from Siam", edicts... A lot of those could be worth something. Land claims could be substantiated or revoked over something like an old map, noble titles could also be in jeopardy.

There is a lot, head over there and check it out. Next time we're visiting some national parks of the US.

(and yes, I'm alive. I struggled a lot with depression last year (and this), but I fully intend to get back to updating this thing.)