How to run a Goblin Market

[Heliomance]

Is it feasible to have a goblin market as the main source of PCs' magical gubbins? And how do you work out WBL for an economy that requires payment in dreams and figments, favours, or the colour of your eyes?

[Farlion]

We Exchange Aything for Low Tarifs, Honestly! (short: W.E.A.L.T.H.)

"Dreams are but shadows, we give you hard cash for them"


Essentially W.E.A.L.T.H. is like a classical money exchange facility run by goblins. You can either sell your dreams for hard cash or buy dreams for them. Every good goblin market will have a branch office of W.E.A.L.T.H. near them.


Would that solve your problem?

Cheers,
Farlion

[Grimlock]

Well, first you need the sister of a pre-raphaelite, then you need a massive dose of lesbian subtext all mixed together with smattering of incest.
(Just my little Victorian literary joke!)

[Ingus]

I love goblin markets. Stinky, unpleasant and noisy, a goblin market has everything on sale - and I mean everything. What you can do with dragon meat - which flavour is strongly similar to chicken - a marvellous marble or or three plumes pendants is not my business, nor goblins'.

Payment in dreams... You should really find something to balance. You can maybe state that the dreams viable to sell by PCs are tied to their psychological developement and experiencing (=character level), based upon wealth table on DMG.
Or put on stake a major disadvantage. For example, selling dreams empties PCs very soul and the empty is easiest to fill. In terms of game, your PCs would be more and more sensible to illusions, compulsions, charms and other mind effecting abilities, based upon the dreams they've sold.
At higher level, they can't even protect themselves with mind blank or similar effects.
This would be painful enough to avoid easy dream giveaway.

Have you something more specific in mind?

[Heliomance]

Not really. Basically I'm planning to run a game in the modern world, where the supernatural world is very much underground and mortals don't know about it. But that means magic items and such would be spectacularly difficult to get hold of, and as I'm planning on giving the PCs access to Faerie, I thought goblin markets might be able to solve the problem. I'll be cribbing the d20 Modern wealth system to buy mundane goods, but goblins don't take credit cards.

[SlyGuyMcFly]

It might sound like a cheap cop-out, but you could just make it so that each PC just happens to have their WBL in marketable dreams, hopes and other irrelevant traits. Sprinkle RP drawbacks to taste.

If a given tradesman wants a favour as payment, then that's just your regular sidequest.

[Ingus]

Not really. Basically I'm planning to run a game in the modern world, where the supernatural world is very much underground and mortals don't know about it. But that means magic items and such would be spectacularly difficult to get hold of, and as I'm planning on giving the PCs access to Faerie, I thought goblin markets might be able to solve the problem. I'll be cribbing the d20 Modern wealth system to buy mundane goods, but goblins don't take credit cards.

Prereq: your players are more role players than munchkin.
If you meet the prereq, you can use goblin market once (or once in a while), as adventure hook or as in game justification for character equipment.
If properly handled, I guess that in Modern it would not break the game.
Just make clear that selling dreams cost in terms of humanity (roleplaying prereq) and it shouldn't be underestimated.

Just a hint for more taste: make goblin different, maybe just in color. Some green, some brown, some gray... some with earings and piercings everywhere, some other clothed in precious vestments, maybe even one with a bride vest on. And, more of everything, enjoy

[Heliomance]

Oh, I have plans for the look and feel of the place, the atmosphere and suchlike. What I wasn't sure about is how best to charge them.

[JohnnyCancer]

Selling dreams could give the PCs ability damage or negative levels. And you could be cagey and not let them abuse it during downtime by having the market move around and such.

[Mastikator]

Maybe selling a dream may mean that you won't be able to rest for a while. And then whoever bought it may or may not get knowledge of your secrets.
And you don't get to know what the goblin is going to do with it.

[Ravens_cry]

Maybe selling a dream may mean that you won't be able to rest for a while.

OK, so your fatigued. One lesser restoration later and. . .

[Asheram]

Well... Selling dreams sounds quite a lot as selling XP according to this.

You'd have to figure out how much a dream is worth in XP, and then pay (tops)5gp per xp (they are goblins after all).

[Edge]

And if you want to make things a little meaner with the dreams as currency idea, throw a nightmare effect at the PC(s) who bought anything after every purchase.

[Studoku]

Well, first you need the sister of a pre-raphaelite, then you need a massive dose of lesbian subtext all mixed together with smattering of incest.
(Just my little Victorian literary joke!)

Darn, I was going to make that joke.

Have a cookie.

[Mastikator]

OK, so your fatigued. One lesser restoration later and. . .

I meant for several days. Maybe have like a percentage chance every 24 hours to regain ability to rest.
Maybe also an unability to benefit from positive magical effects.

[Dr.Epic]

I'd use the troll market from Hellboy II as a template.

[The Shadowmind]

Here is an idea;
What about the dark sides of dreams? Nightmares, horrors, and fears?
This types of would be something many would want to sell or give away so they don't they have to deal with them So why don't they? Because the selling to them is illegal even in the goblin mart, so there is a black-market on there trade. The reason they are illegal is because nightmares, horrors, and fears can be condensed into a liquid that functions like a poison (Will save instead of Fort.) that could inflict all kinds of nasty things based on the nightmare.

[nedz]

You could always make magical items dream objects.
I'm not entirely sure what that means.

Perhaps they only manifest at certain times ?
Perhaps they are malliable or just virtual ?

Whatever they are: this would explain why you must purchase them with insubstantial means: A thought, a word, a poem, an idea or perhpas a whole dream ?

[Saint GoH]

Well, first you need the sister of a pre-raphaelite, then you need a massive dose of lesbian subtext all mixed together with smattering of incest.
(Just my little Victorian literary joke!)

I double the cookie offer. I assumed most people had never heard of Rosetti...

[Cyrion]

You could add a middleman that converts money to dreams. The item seller, Dogface, only takes dreams, but he doesn't do the dream collecting. That's done by Yarbleck three aisles over- give Yarblek your gold, he'll give you the dream, you give the dream to Dogface in return for the item.

I think you'll still want to throw in some of the RP stuff others have suggested, but this makes it a WBL mechanic. Just be sure you work up a table that tells you "Selling dreams of X value means Y consequence..."

[Yakk]

If I had a goblin market that bought dreams, I'd think that it would be a very bad idea to sell your dreams there.

The general way to profitably trade in such a market is not to sell your own dreams, but rather harvest dreams and sell them there. You can harvest dreams by bringing slaves in (ideally slaves that have had interesting experiences!) and selling them there -- or you could sneak into children's rooms and steal their dreams and leave nothing but nightmares.

Players can still use the goblin market, to sell things they find and exchange them for things that are more suited. The goblins should try to bargain for things like the colour of the characters eyes as "spare change" in a sense in that case.

A way to make selling dreams not immediately dooming is to make the player do a save against a DC determined by how much in the way of dreams they have sold. Passing a certain level makes you go comatose and leak XP (or maybe just never wake up).

In effect, the goblins buy dreams / features / etc off of people who are otherwise dirt poor, then sell them trash. Players who bargain in dreams are selling their soul into slavery for cheap trinkets.

[deuxhero]

Why do dreams have any value to the goblins? Is some government backing it? Do they eat them? Are they just shiny?

[Vitruviansquid]

Losing something like dreams could be crippling for a normal person, but in an RPG, most players would think they can do without those (at least, from the roll-play angle).

So what about having players trade for some other kind of intangible that might have a more direct impact on their game?

What about having people trade their luck for items? For every unit of Luck they spend, skew hidden rolls against their favor a little more.

[Heliomance]

I'm not sure why everyone's focusing on the dreams aspect. In goblin markets, you can pay anything and everything, whether intangible or not. I like the idea of trading in luck, I might use that, among others.

[Yorrin]

The goblins always want something, or know someone who does. Have what the Goblins want be plot relevant- some powerful unseelie force is trying to buy up all the world's cold iron to remove his weakness from the world, and the goblins are his middleman. Or something along those lines, where what the party must acquire to trade to the goblins is plot related.

[mabriss lethe]

well, there are several mechanical effects you could play around with.

dreams as currency. 1. Straight XP. You're transforming your (or someone else's) living memories into tangible items. I think a fair exchange would be 2X the xp cost to create an item in question. the goblins, or their backers, then can use that XP however they wish, either to gain power (levels) by feeding off the dreams or to craft more items. There will always be a decent chance that items crafted from dream XP will carry some sort of curse or drawback.

the color of your eyes, etc: I'm working on an exchange rate, but this would basically give the character some sort of untyped penalty in exchange for loot. Maybe a good gp equivalent would be the price you'd have to pay to get an item that corrected the loss.

[Asheram]

The goblins always want something, or know someone who does.

Agreed. It sort of spoils the fun if you knew what the goblins would use the things for. Say, your ability to say certain words... The clolour of your hair, your dreams, bodyparts, thoughts, pleasure, pain...

(I could imagine a warforged community buying the sense of pleasure and pains and using it like drugs, as well as dreams.)

[Yorrin]

(I could imagine a warforged community buying the sense of pleasure and pains and using it like drugs, as well as dreams.)

This is the greatest economy-based idea I think I may have ever heard. I'm going to have to run this at some point.

[rayne_dragon]

As I recall, the way these things typically work out for heroes is that whatever they sell ends up being more valuable than what they bought, all considered. It's an extension of the classical perversions of the use of the wish spell. The PCs might be able to trade anything, but no matter what they trade at some point it should inconvience them more than just normally obtaining the item they bought would have.

[Heliomance]

The thing is though, the setting I'm planning on running won't have the opportunity to buy them normally. That's why I came up with the idea of goblin markets in the first place.