There are over seventy stores in Folderol selling a full range of items, from basic gear to epic equipment. The stores can be very general or very specific such as a potion store. In either case the store is only likely to carry single items of the more costly gear but unlimited stock of the cheaper items. Each store has a base sell price and a base buy price. Some will even buy stolen goods and the majority will identify items for a suitable fee.

The price you see when trading is based on a check between your character’s appraise skill and the storekeeper’s appraise skill. All the storekeepers have some amount of appraise skill so to get a good price you either need to invest skill points in appraise or wear equipment that gives this skill a boost.

Another factor that you need to consider when trading is alignment. A good character trading with an evil store keeper or vice versa is likely to have a small detrimental effect on the price.

Some of the stores will only buy certain types of goods. These stores will give a better buy price than if they would buy anything. Also, if the sell price is high the likelihood is that the store will buy at a higher price too.

The stores now use a persistent gold system. This means if you continually sell items to that store, and no one buys then the store will run out of gold. If they do run out of gold then it is only a temporary matter. Another aspect of persistent gold is that it is used to calculate the maximum buy price. The system also has an extra bonus in that as the stores gold goes up the stores decrease their sell prices and increase their buy prices.

Currently there is one persistent store in Folderol. This is the only place you can have a chance of buying those items that would normally have to be fought long and hard for (well only if someone sells it to the store keeper in the first place).

Gold is freely available within Folderol and it is possible to make more by buying at one store and selling at another. Another way of making money is by brewing and selling potions. To be able to pick the plants you will need some skill in search. Then to brew them you need a reasonable intelligence and lore skill. So by spending skill points on appraise, lore and search it is possible to make money, even at a low level without going into combat.

Another tip is to shop around. There is a slight random factor in the store price, even taking that into account you should be able to wander around the various stores to see who will give the best price for certain types of items.

Just one final word of warning, nobody likes to be hassled, so hassling the store keepers too much will result in them increasing their selling prices for a short while.