Leomund's Storage Ring

"Good morning, Marvin, cough cough cough..."

"Good morning, Borey."

The shopkeeper was still bald and shiny, still looking sickly.

But today, besides him, someone else was sitting behind the counter at a desk, leafing through the account books.

"Is she the real owner of this shop?"

Marvin used the pronoun "she" because, although the other person wore a hood and a loose mage's robe, it still could not entirely conceal the heart-stirring curve of her waist and hips.

Of course, what drew the most attention was the obvious magical aura around her.

If Marvin cast a detection spell on her now, the dazzling multicolored magical radiance would probably blind him on the spot.

When dealing with a mage stronger than himself, he had to learn to show respect.

Marvin quickly withdrew his gaze and began examining the goods behind the counter.

Seeing this, the bald shopkeeper stepped out from behind the counter and came over. "Looks like after making so much money off me, you've finally decided to spend some. That's a good thing.

What do you want to buy? I can recommend something, cough cough cough..."

Marvin was genuinely afraid the bald man would cough up a lung.

Only after the man recovered did he say, "I need a bag of holding. Carrying all sorts of odds and ends on my person is really inconvenient."

"I understand. There was once an unfortunate mage who filled the little pockets inside his robe with bottles of strong acid to deal with trolls. On his way to a troll camp, he tripped over a tree root...

When they found him later, all that remained were bones and hair."

As he spoke, the bald shopkeeper chanted a spell, opened the Arcane Lock, and took a silver ring from the glass display case. Set into it was an iridescent tourmaline, gleaming with delicate light beneath the shifting illumination.

"Leomund's Storage Ring. Storage ring for short. Compared to a bag of holding, it has the following advantages..."

The most common storage magic item in Faerûn was the bag of holding. It was about the size of an ordinary backpack, weighed roughly fifteen pounds, and came in silk, cotton, leather, and other materials.

Moderately priced, the most popular model had sixty-four cubic feet of space inside and could carry up to five hundred pounds of items.

Although such a bag of holding could greatly increase the amount of supplies one could carry, it still did not meet Marvin's needs when it came to accessibility.

Whenever he needed to retrieve something, he first had to take the bag of holding off his shoulder.

In an emergency, that extra motion could mean the difference between life and death.

It was not even as convenient as the little pockets inside a mage's robe.

Moreover, if a bag of holding was damaged, the items stored inside would be scattered into the Astral Plane.

That was why Leomund's Storage Ring had been created for customers like Marvin.

Who was Leomund?

Ninety-nine percent of Faerûn's people had never heard the name. Of the few remaining spellcasters, some might have heard of this legendary mage, but no one knew his origins.

Only archmages deeply versed in the School of Conjuration, capable of freely crossing the planes and traveling unimpeded through the Astral Plane, had heard scattered fragments about Leomund from various planar beings.

He came from another universe. Or, in Faerûnian terms—another realm of the heavens.

The death of the goddess of magic triggered the [Spellplague], which not only killed vast numbers of spellcasters but also mutated many creatures and twisted the continent's terrain beyond recognition.

The planet [Toril], where the continent of Faerûn was located, spatially overlapped with its sister mirror world, [Abeir].

During that turbulent age of disaster, Abeir's native inhabitants, such as genasi and dragonborn, began migrating to Toril.

In the end, Ao, the Overgod, could no longer stand the chaos and intervened.

He rewrote the Tablets of Fate stolen by the three gods of death, forcibly separating the two planets, [Toril] and [Abeir], and restoring each to its proper place.

For mortals, this was another great catastrophe that drastically reshaped Faerûn's geography, known in history as the [Second Sundering].

As for the [First Sundering], that was some mess the elves had caused in ancient times, and there was no need to elaborate.

Amid such world-shaking upheaval, many things from other realms of the heavens crossed the weakened crystal sphere and arrived in the world of Toril, in Faerûn, through the Astral Plane.

In any case, starting in 1485, after the end of the [Second Sundering], a series of spells invented by Leomund, the legendary mage from another world, gradually began spreading across Faerûn.

It was said that a powerful mage in Waterdeep had invented the storage ring based on the principles behind Leomund's various spatial spells.

And that mage had principles, naming the ring after "Leomund" rather than claiming the invention for himself.

For the same price, a storage ring had only half the capacity of a traditional bag of holding.

But it was easier to retrieve items from and far smaller. The wearer only needed to speak a command word of their choosing to instantly bring an item from the ring into their hand.

The one the bald shopkeeper showed Marvin cost fifteen hundred gold pieces, yet had only sixteen cubic feet of space and could hold one hundred and fifty pounds of items.

Even with the bald shopkeeper willing to give Marvin a thirty percent discount because of their good business relationship, it would still cost a staggering one thousand and fifty gold pieces!

Marvin could only sigh. In Faerûn, the pricing system for magic items truly operated on another level!

This storage ring was a fine magic item.

Items of this grade sold for anywhere between four hundred and four thousand gold pieces.

The bald shopkeeper's price was reasonable enough, but Marvin was still hesitant about spending more than half his fortune on a storage ring that could not directly improve his combat power.

Perhaps the bald shopkeeper was too eager to get his first sale of the day. He rummaged beneath the counter and pulled out a drab, unremarkable sack.

"This thing is called a Packhorse Sack. It's also a spatial storage magic item. One sack has five hundred cubic feet of space and can hold five thousand pounds of goods.

Of course, there's one small restriction: it can't hold magic items..."

Based on the bald shopkeeper's explanation, Marvin felt that rather than calling it a "Packhorse Sack," it would be more fitting to call it a "Smuggler's Sack."

The people who invented this storage item were the Red Wizards of Thay.

After a brutal civil war, Szass Tam, the former head of Thay's Necromancy school and a legendary lich, successfully seized power. This land of Red Wizards gradually became a nation of the undead.

After learning this history, Marvin, who had been obsessed with Heroes of Might and Magic III as a child, offered this sharp assessment: it was basically a Tower turning into a Necropolis. The power level had gone up a tier, perfectly reasonable.

The old Thay had been a nation where the mage class ruled through brutal methods, used vast numbers of slaves, frequently invaded neighboring countries, and worshipped evil gods, but at least most of its citizens had been alive.

After Thay's civil war ended, most of the living either died or fled. Szass Tam even began implementing a policy of "undead conversion," encouraging living citizens to transform into liches or vampires.

This evil nation, ruled by one legendary lich and a small number of elite mages, which discriminated against the living and enslaved the dead, was intolerable to most political powers in Faerûn.

Leaders of various countries clamored to impose a trade embargo on Thay.

Thay's undead grunts did not need food or drink, but the mages commanding them still needed money to buy all kinds of magic items and enjoy life.

To deal with the trade embargo, Thay's mages developed the Packhorse Sack, intending to use this storage item to smuggle bulk goods such as minerals and grain.

But they later discovered that rather than spending enormous sums to equip every smuggling caravan with dozens or even hundreds of Packhorse Sacks, it was better to spend a little money bribing officials in other countries.

Then Hayek's big hand came into play.

Thay's grain was cheap and plentiful. Anyone who embargoed it was an idiot.

The Packhorse Sack lost its original purpose, and since it could not store magic items, it was extremely useless to Thay's Red Wizards. They dumped vast quantities onto the market, and demand had long since become saturated.

The bald shopkeeper even used them as free gifts with storage rings.