How much treasure should players be getting?
In Whirlwind, characters don’t need to acquire treasure to be effective. Treasure for the most part does not enhance their abilities or capabilities. And so players should be given treasure according to these two principles:
Players should be given treasure when it makes sense in the story. Campaigns centred around players working as assassins for hire, or raiding ancient tombs, are going to be handing the players a lot more gold and treasures than campaigns about helping peasants protect themselves from bandits or invading armies, or campaigns about surviving in a harsh alien environment.
Players should be given treasure when it would be fun! If the players are really interested in creating and improving a club, they are going to need gold! This is a perfectly valid reason to tone-up how much gold you are handing out to them. Some players are going to get a huge thrill from finding magic artifacts, and likewise, this is a perfectly valid reason to hand more of them out. In Whirlwind, magic artifacts are mostly useless to an adventurer, so you don’t have to worry about payers becoming overpowered because of all the magic stuff they acquire.
How/When to Give Out Treasure (Gold)
Treasure is a fun reward for players that is often an exciting element of the story. Players should/can be rewarded with treasure when they accomplish something meaningful, or when they do something clever, or roll really well in a way that you don’t want to/can’t reward with story progress. If a player rolls to search a room for secret doors and rolls quite well, one thing you can choose do is have them find a closet full of treasure instead of a secret passageway forward.
In terms of how to describe treasure, different methods work for different GMs. You might want to prepare treasure caches to hand out ahead of time, or you may want to make them up on the fly. I find it helpful, whether pre-preparing caches of treasure or improvising them, to use an online treasure generator, and modify the details to suit the environment that the players are in. Make sure, when you do describe treasure, to tell the players its total value in gold. It makes things more convenient for everyone.
When to Give Out Magic Artifacts?
In Whirlwind, there are two fundamentally different types of magic artifacts: story artifacts, and luxury artifacts. Story artifacts are powerful and enhance the player’s capabilities. They should only be given out when the artifacts are important for the direction that the GM and the players want the narrative to take, and they should be highly customized to suit the campaign in which they are being given out.
Luxury artifacts, by contrast, can be handed out just like gold: whenever it would be fun for the players and story appropriate. Luxury artifacts are fun little baubles - things that people living in your fantasy world would be ecstatic to receive because they are quality of life enhancing, but which are fundamentally not very useful to adventurers. Maybe sometimes the players can creatively find ways to make a luxury artifacts they’ve acquired useful to them (and this kind of creativity should be encouraged!), but they are not designed with any adventuring uses in mind.
In the section on story artifacts, example artifacts are provided which GMs should ordinarily modify to suit their specific campaigns. In the section on luxury artifacts, there is a catalogue of things to hand out to players - you should feel free to make your own, but it should be fine to also drop the items listed unmodified into your own game.
How does a player know when an item is a magical artifact?
In Whirlwind when a character is holding a magical artifact, they can innately sense this fact. If they spend an hour investigating a magic artifact in their possession, they’ve scoped out its energy well enough that they know how it works, and as such, you can give them the text of the rules that govern the magic artifact.