Camelia’s Magic Shoppe
I’m playing in a Dungeon Fantasy RPG game run by the author of Hand of Asgard and Norðlondr Folk: Kevin Smyth.
There’s a magic shop in town, run by a woman named Camelia. One of the setting features – which I highly endorse and tried to mechanize a bit in Nordlond/Torengar by having “The Shattering” drastically reduce the availability of made-to-order magic items – is that, well, the number of “can be had right now” or bespoke magic items is limited. You want the cool stuff, you delve for it.
But that’s not the point of the post. The point is that Camelia’s inventory is basically a Google Doc. It has (currently) 15 items in it. Each is unique. At least one came from us: we recovered a flaming broadsword that’s not optimal for use by the party, and so we sold it. There’s some nifty stuff (a fine longbow with Accuracy +3 on it!), and some unusual stuff.
These can be expected to linger for a bit until someone buys them. And it might not be us. So if something’s there, but we can’t afford it right now but want it . . . there’s not a guarantee that it will be there when we can.
I love this. It has absolutely the feel of an art gallery, or super high end consignment shop (which is almost what it is). But it’s a great bit that makes this little piece of town a living world.
Heck, some day, we might go in and find she has 30 items on display. Some other day, maybe only six and she has a smug, self-satisfied air about her.
But it’s a great bit of low-investment world building I wanted to share.
I have a pair of shops in my current campaign that have a similar feel. Zora’s only deals in magic, but mostly in things useful for casting spells and creating magic items. The magic items that pass through her shop are things she takes as payment from folks who need some of her more expensive wares but don’t have the coin to pay for them. So she’s not likely, for example, to ever wind up with anything *really* high value. Noland, on the other hand, is a high-end merchant who has some magic on display (behind the counter, no touching please), but keeps other stuff in the back for the folks in the know who ask him about it. Naturally, none of the display items are something you can just pick up and use to harm him. He keeps the fancy swords in the back for the same reason (and doesn’t have any ugly, utilitarian weapons up front or in back, because he’s “not a [expletive deleted, and that’s the only time you’ll hear him curse] blacksmith, by the hands of the Sister.”
Nice! That sort of characterization and detail makes it more than “I stop in town, swap out my gear, and head out again.”
There was another idea kicking around somewhere to keep the document living. So that other campaigns under the same assumptions (like more than one game played in, say, Golarion) could buy and sell from the same list of items. So you really never know what’s going to be there, since there are two or five or whatever other games pulling and placing from the same place.
that would be harder to arrange, but the fact that it would have multiple needs and creative minds behind it would be fascinating to see in play.
That would be incredibly cool. I’m with you on the harder to arrange, but the idea that a shared world could have things going on that are the result of the actions of people the GM and players don’t even know would be incredible. “Hey, there are PCs in this world other than us!” I’m doing it with two campaigns that I’m running that share the same home area, but given some player overlap, it’s not nearly the same thing.
One thing that would be really good (or maybe even absolutely necessary) would be, when a player bought something from a shop, for that player’s GM to note for the other GMs anything about the player or his/her that the shopkeeper might notice and be willing to share (either because he/she is just naturally loquacious, or because another player in another campaign slipped them some coin). So if Group A had a specific need for an item that Group B had purchased, the GMs could coordinate when Group A went out looking to borrow, buy, steal the item from Group B, because the shopkeeper gave them enough information to try to track them down. “You just had the Backscratcher of Modon Broy when I was in here yesterday. What happened to it?” “I sold it to an adventurer who has been in here a couple of times before. Short guy, usually wears a sky blue cloak – you’ve probably seen him around town.”
Even more interesting and fun (and requiring a lot more GM to GM coordination) would be if several of the places in town that players frequent were actually controlled by the GM who created it. So instead of you GMing when your players walk into The Blue Crab, another GM takes over for the interactions there. I think the timing might prove to be too difficult to arrange, since the players would have to let their GM know ahead of time that they planned to go to Noland’s Emporium, so that you could coordinate with me.
And I hate when I hit send without thinking when I was planning to come back to something and finish it.
I had intended to come back and start my comment by thanking you for posting about this, because it’s given me some ideas for my game – Noland’s hadn’t been fully fleshed out, and the art gallery/high end consignment shop is exactly the vibe I want to convey. I’m also grateful for the mention of the Google doc for inventory, in place of the sheet of paper that I sometimes misplace, and is a chore to find things on because of all the scratching out and adding of items.
For both, every now and then (about once a month, in-game time), I throw some dice and see what has sold, if anything, and what, if any, new inventory has arrived, ignoring results that I don’t think fit the campaign. Or, if the players don’t have enough money for a thing right now, maybe I’ll let it in to spur them toward a money-making adventure I want them to do and that I think they’ll enjoy, and then make sure it’s sold off before they get enough loot. The actions of the players, both buying and selling, naturally affect their inventory as well, along with any back-story ideas I have.
I had an idea that originated in Skyrim (the video game) but I hope to add to future DF games. You don’t get an immediate cash payment, the items you “sold” sit in the shop until someone buys it, then you get your share, minus taxes and the merchants cut. The only offer on some “valuable” but impractical items might be a low-ball from an enchanter who only wants to break it down for raw materials.
That’s a really good idea, especially since the consignment merchants I know by and large simply won’t pay anything until the item is sold. You’re renting a spot in their shop and a consolidated place for customers to come looking for things.