Toying with Fabula Gear

I spent a non-trivial amount of time designing items for Fabula last weekend. Awarding interesting treasure is consistently one of, if not the, most frustrating part of running a Fabula campaign. Each session you are expected to handout a fixed amount of treasure, but the cost for any given item, especially at the start of a campaign, is frequently limited to the point all that treasure feels the same and doesn't excite anyone. I don't think I'm alone in feeling like this, either - the GM for our CERoW game complained about how boring early-game treasure was and skipped ahead to handing out items from the next tier of treasure, and I've commiserated with Scampir in the Table Shapers Discord about how our players consistently ask for higher-damage weapons over every possible reward. Intended or not, only a narrow range of items are valued by players and everything else feels useless or uninteresting. I've tried a few solutions to mixed effect. Crafting materials were a failure - my…