Fantasy Shop Generator

Walk into a shop and meet the person behind the counter. Every shop comes with a shopkeeper who has a face, a voice, a motive and a haggling style, wares whose prices move with the place and the day, and a haggle you play out with the oracle.

How haggling works

1. Pick something to buy. Each ware shows what the keeper is asking, as a percentage of the list price in your own game. Type that list price in if you want the sum worked out in your coins.
2. Make an offer and choose how. A plain offer, flattery, pointing out a flaw, offering a favour or trade, or walking towards the door. Some approaches suit this keeper and some annoy them, depending on what they want and how they like to bargain.
3. The oracle decides. Every keeper has a lowest price they will accept, which you never see. Offers near the asking price usually work; offers below their limit rarely do. The chance is shown before you commit, and the roll uses the same rules as our yes/no oracle.
4. Read the answer. Yes is a deal. Yes, and... is a deal with something thrown in. No brings a counter-offer and costs the keeper some patience. No, and... means you have offended them and the price goes up. Doubles on the dice bring an interruption, such as another customer or a guard at the door.
5. Know when to stop. When patience runs out the price is final for the day. Pay it, or come back tomorrow, when the market and the keeper's mood will have moved.

Watch for the keeper's tell. It is listed with their details, and when they show it in your story you will know they are bluffing about how low they can go.

Why prices change

A price here is a story, and every part of it has a reason you can see under Why this price?

• The place. A frontier outpost charges for the long road its stock travelled. A port sells fine imported goods cheaply but bread and rope dearly. In a village, everyday things are cheap and anything fine is scarce. An underground hold has cheap metal and precious food.
• The keeper's motive. Someone deep in debt needs coin and will go low. Someone paying off a gang has raised every price to cover it. A proud artisan will take less from a customer who admires the work, and more from one who sneers at it.
• The day. A caravan brings fresh stock and lower prices; a closed road or a festival pushes them up. Come back another day and the market moves, unbought prices reset, and now and then the keeper's whole situation changes.
• The item itself. Something that has gathered dust for months is cheaper; the keeper's pride and joy costs more.

Price tiers

Because every game has its own money, the generator never names a price in coins. Each ware has a tier instead, measured in wages, so you can match it to your own game's list or simply judge whether your character can afford it.

Running shops in solo play

Shopping can be the dullest part of a game or one of the best scenes. Treat a shop as a scene: who is behind the counter, what do they want, and what do they know? A keeper with a debt, a feud or a secret is a hook as much as a merchant, and the Hook line gives you one ready to follow.

Let your character's nature guide the haggle. A proud knight might refuse to bargain at all; a thief might haggle over everything out of habit. If you are unsure, read about how to think like your character, then pick the approach they would choose rather than the one with the best odds.

Shops you want to return to can be kept on this device with their prices and purchases, and the keeper can be saved as a person in your Campaign Notebook. What you buy can go straight into your notebook inventory. Need a stall rather than a shop? Roll on the merchant wares generator, or build the town around it with the settlement generators.

There are 8 kinds of shop (general store, blacksmith, apothecary, curio dealer, bookseller and mapmaker, outfitter and tailor, pawnbroker, stable and beast trader), 7 kinds of place, 12 motives and 5 haggling styles, with shopkeepers of every people from the NPC generators. Portraits are original ink sketches drawn for this site and assembled to match each keeper.

This shop generator is system-neutral. It uses no rules, prices or names from any published game and keeps everything on your device.