Repleneshing a Hoard

So an interesting thing happened in my game. The players, using cunning and the invisibility spell managed to steal a fairly large chunk of the hoard of a group of stone giants without being detected or fighting them (which would have been a slaughter for the party). Excitement! Ingenious! Truly taken from the pages of The Hobbit.

But then the player who orchestrated the heist said something interesting: how they plan to come back and clean out the giants on the regular. Now, aside from the obvious fact that the giants will very shortly be investing in heavy, giant sized, locked chests and traps, it did bring up an interesting question that doesn’t come up often: how long does it take a monster to accrue the treasure in their hoard? Indeed, how much do they add to it per month?

I posted this in “Ask the Autarchs” but, realizing this is a bizarre corner case that certainly would never need to be addressed directly in the rules, if anyone has experienced this before and would like to share how they handled it (or even how you WOULD handle it if it happened to your group), I’d love to hear it!

You could assume the monster accumulates treasure equal to the monthly wages of a henchman of a level equal to his HD until he has built up savings equal to his treasure type.

I actually had a similar question arise a while back with my group, when someone suggested that monsters who have just moved into a lair/dungeon would not bring much treasure with them, since it’s heavy to carry and so on. Fortunately, Alex’s answer also works for monsters who are flat broke when they move in and need to acquire their initial hoard.

It seems so ingeniously obvious now! I wish I could say I had thought of that already, but I didn’t.

Definitely makes me question if I should have done what nDervish mentioned though. The foes in question were a recent dungeon repopulation, yet I just made them show up with all their treasure in tow. It was a pack of stone giants with a treasure hoard totalling only about 27 stone, though, so i don’t feel too unjustified.

I think using the wages will suffice for most situations, but I’d be lying if I wasn’t expecting some elaborate formula that also accounts for % in lair and the treasure type itself. Not that I in any way expect such work for free! Perhaps something to contemplate squeezing into Lairs & Encounters if inspiration strikes…