Let’s All Go To The Market
This article is going to be an account of two evenings: I was overflowing with hope that the group would enjoy an evening of exploration and role playing amongst the Great Bazaar. That overflow may have been due to the fact that doubt was seeping into the bottom of my soul: Could I really get away with an evening of almost all pure roleplaying? As I said, I hoped so, but, I was also going to prepare for the PCs to barrel straight through.
Turns out, I need not have feared. In fact, both me and my players enjoyed the fantastical marketplace so damn much that we didn’t even clear the ridiculous house of wonder that I set up to be a mini-boss fight and shower some answers upon the adventurers.
Night One
Farrow brought the group to a ladder up and out of the sewers of Undersigil and into an alley of stone. The light was near peak (meaning late morning) and the exotic smells and sounds were already overwhelming the party before they turned the corner.
Turns out they came back to the surface behind the Drunken Dabus Bar and Inn, and found a roiling crowd composed of beings of every shape, size, color, delineation, and probably someone that thinks the Disney era Star Wars movies are good, because, you know, almost anything can be found in Sigil… I digress. Giants of several varieties, four-armed thri-kreen insect man as well as a swarm of chittering bugs skittering under a dirty cloak. There was also a stark white dire wolf with some sort of belt around it’s chest talking to a young lady in furs and war paint. Faeries of countless varieties and sun flies flitting about everywhere, filling the air amongst the smells of spices, creatures and unknown wonders.
While my PCs were locked in on my description I had Brickhouse wander off right into the crowd, spurring the party to action as they realized they had lost him amongst the fantastic throng of beings. Before them is the Great Bazaar, to the right is the Gastronome restaurant that looks like a bunch of olives and to the left of the bazaar is the Merchant’s Scale. Should they strain to look, far beyond past some shops and whatnot down some streets past the bazaar they witnessed an impossible edifice rising in the distance, a large stone structure of columns and statues that can only be the Bank of Abbathor that Brick wanted to break into but hadn’t really told the party why.
How Bazaar
Lucky for me, as I began to panic about how I was going to build a marketplace full of magic and wonder on my own, the briefest of effort put into Google gifted me with a website that quite possibly saved my life: Mimir.net. Much like having a published adventure to supply a little structure for an adventure upon which to add my own personal flare, I worshipped at the alter of this Planescape fan site dedicated to collecting the desperate lore of the setting that has been around since the 90s.
A simple search for great bazaar dnd and poof I was there, with all the hard work done, letting me add life to the ideas that were already collated and aligned for needs. I literally showed the pictures on the Great Bazaar page to add to their vision of the crazy market on top of my descriptions, and used the included list of trade Stalls to give my players a sandbox to explore.
With this list in hand, I planned a few of them to have actual information, and then just planned the next scene I hoped they would move onto. That’s it. I planned on winging the personalities and descriptions of the stall owners instead of killing myself to create a bunch of stuff that would never actually matter. Planning to wing it is a plan, right?
To break the ice, I had a twelve-foot demon stomp across their path, literally burning the ground where it walked and approached a kid pushing a cart, and came away with a snow cone. Damn do I know my players: they took the bait, and Q’or was first in line to get a Mount Celestia snow cone that tasted like justice. With that, they were in. I described a few stalls they could see from there and they walked past most of them until they got to the first obvious destination, or at least I had hoped so, because I gave him a quest for the group.
They approached Quixote’s Questables. He was described as Chivalrous but I decided he was going to have to be memorable, and also fun to play. So, I described him in a bucket helm with a visor that he had to hold up as he talked, with his other hand resting on the pommel of his blade.
Every time he did something, I acted out the visor slapping closed and having to open it back up with a creak. The whole interaction was great. They took the job to go un-fuck an abandoned building down the street for 50 gold each. When asked if the he had any other quests for them, I froze for a second realizing that I hadn’t fucking planned anything else. D’oh.
Luckily, the answer quickly came to me. Quixote told them that he had one, but they didn’t want it. They asked why. I told them that he had a quest to walk someone from one part of the city to another for a few gold.
Realizing I was offering them an escort quest, they quickly declined and moved on. Phew. Next they saw a Mimir floating by, with advertisements hanging from it. After a quick and purposefully frustrating conversation, since it was trying to sell Mimir’s and they wanted to ask it questions for free, it floated on it’s way.
They were called over by the halfings at Balderdash and Ballyhoo: Balderdash spoke with a harsh voice whereas Ballyhoo was less agreessive and spoke with a bit of a stutter. The group tried to deny it when they accused them of not belonging here, but, I described their characters being wracked with pain deep in their souls and they each took a few points of psychic damage. Unsure what had happened, Brick arrived out of no where and threw his arms around Q’or’s shoulders: he would have been crying if he had tear ducts. He told the party that they just lost another Marked. Oh crap.
With no further pretense, the team having bought a crappy rumor for two gold, got a discount after they all felt the death of an unknown friend. This time they learned that another one of the beings that’s not supposed to be here is hiding out on the same street they were told the abandoned house was at. Coincidence?
While Q’or and Bitzie tried and failed to get useful information out fo the halfings, followed by a few questions as to where they could find some gear, Hobbler and Z could not help but walk towards the Anubis at Afterlife Essentials. After describing the weird and wares he had on display, the jackal headed being that appeared more statue-like than life-like it was so perfect, told them that they are no longer tethered by fate. The totally-not-a-god godlike being placed his hand on Z’s head, and the group received a vision of their strands, their fate, being torn apart and taken but could not see whom or what had taken possession of their fate.
Q’or had asked the halflings about where he could get a pet and he was sent to Xanadu. I don’t know what he planned to do with it, milk a green dragon for it’s acid, I guess, but the proprietor was fresh out and tried to sell him on a miniature blue dragon after trying to unload a handful of nine inch nightmares. I based the pet peddler of Xanadu’s Exotics on Prepotente from Dungeon Crawler Carl.
Passing on the hand-sized beholder and the tiny unicorn, plus a handful of other silly lil creatures I described, he eventually bought a mini red dragon. After, Xanadu proclaimed: “I should have asked: you’re not going to eat it, right?”
They backtracked a little and Q’or got acid he wanted from a Yuan-ti that assured the group that the scales and venom throughout her tent were ethically attained: he used it to clean the fish head from the Sahuagin Priest that Bitzie had killed. He was making her a trophy, how nice.
Speaking of Bitzie, she wanted a ride on Rip Van Winkle’s hammock, but he sold lost time. I described him as an old man, and again, gave him a visual perk of pretending to swap between a handful of different eyeglasses he had about his head and around his neck. It was fun to perform, memorable. He called Bitzie Lass. It pissed her off. With a performance check and some fun roleplaying Z distracted Van Winkle and Bitzie stole a few tinctures worth a day of lost time from under his nose. Hope they don’t rely on his hammock.
They were on their way out of the Bazaar when they passed a sushi shop. Too bad it was run by a sahuagin. And it knew exactly who they were. It pointed it’s knife at them, Q’or, being unable to back down from the threat, walked towards the fishman chef. Then a handful of sahuagin ran around from behind the lil tent restaurant and shit got real. Before the gith could commit to the fight, Z decided to help out. It was glorious.
We have to take a step back for a second. You see, when we started the campaign, on top of advancing to level three, I also allowed them a single uncommon magic item. Chad chose a cloak of protection for his paladin Q’or. Kera chose a magic pistol, since she couldn’t afford one otherwise and wanted her Swashbuckler Bitzie to have a classic pirate feel. We will get to Bob’s choice later. But, here, right now, we got to witness the fun that Lynn chose. She reached into her magic Bag of Tricks and called a random summon via a die roll for aid.
Here they learned yet another fun tid-bit of useful Sigil information. Summons from outside Sigil don’t work. So, a summon either fails, or calls a being from within the Cage. Guess we’ll see what happens, cause I never divulged that bit of info. Their characters wouldn’t know. What did Lynn roll. A dire wolf. Hey, hadn’t they met one of those recently.
The large white dire wolf they saw earlier appeared right in front of them, facing away and confused as all fuck. I explained then that it’s called the Cage for a reason, only way in or out was through a portal. Any summons inside Sigil pulls that being away from whatever they were doing: fighting, fucking, doing the dishes. Or, in this case, shopping. The beast was facing towards the charging sahuagin. It didn’t ask question.
As Q’or started charging, and Hobbler successfully commanded the chef hat wearing fishman down to the ground, the massive wolf grasped in it’s mouth a short, flat ended dual edge sword: apparently it was magnetized to it’s belt or something.
Anyway, wolfie straight fucking eviscerated the next attacking fish man. Totally unmade him. The other sahuagin fled in terror, and Q’or casually dropped his two-handed sword into the prone chef for a coup de gras. The wolf, still confused, asked about it’s ward, and loped off in a hurry.
The party decided it was time to move on. Let’s go find that house. On their way out, they passed the dire wolf, whom had found the little girl. She had bought a bunch of random arrows, and was hugging them with a thrilled look on her face when they saw her. The wolf told her to come on, and she skipped behind him with a shit-eating grin across her adorable lil kid face.
Good Clean Fun For Everyone?
Having seemingly doddled enough already, the group made for the address for the quest they received from Quixote, which also appeared to be a place of interest mentioned by the halfling rumor mongers. Somewhere within the abandoned, and possibly haunted, building a relic of some sort needed to be located. They got to the location in question. The door was unlocked, so they went in. Within they found a foyer of sorts, and above the door on the opposite side was a sign that said “close outer door before entering”. They closed the door…
With a dramatic whooshing noise the party was sucked through a portal. They landed in another room. Well, Q’or landed on his ass, having failed his dex save. The party found themselves in a dark, dank room of rough stone. Looming above them was a big red painted demon face who’s mouth just so happened to be an entry portal. Above the monstrous face was a messily painted message: Super Happy Blood Wars Funhouse and Execution Parlor. With no other exits, they moved through it.
The portal brought them to a fairly short but ridiculous hallway. On each side of the hallway was a collection of brightly and badly painted paper mache demons on one side and devils on the other, complete with silly music played from a hidden damaged record. Gyrating up and down at alternating intervals, the characters hesitantly walked down the hallway, expecting something bad to happen: I mean, makes sense, I am the DM. When nothing happened, Chad’s paladin cut the head off of one of the devil sculptures. The eyes of the severed head started to glow, and Q’or started to regret his choice. Then every demon and devil started cackling, and the party made haste through the exit portal. Then the real fun began.
Kera’s rogue Bitzie luckily made her save when she took the first step into the next hallway, as her first step made it clear that the hallway was a tilting floor trap, with the pivot at the halfway point of the hallway. After a quick discussion between their characters, Bob proclaimed that his character would use the Immovable Rod he was gifted for starting a 3rd level character.
After a successful Dex save and a cat-scoot over to the center, he placed the magical rod just past the fulcrum. My trap room was almost immediately made moot, and after some quick teamwork, they got everyone across and Q’or used the innate magehand ability of his Githyanki to take the rod back, having swapped it to the other side before they scurried out safely and rather easily. They were far from danger, though.
They next entered a hall of mirrors, cautiously, as if they were expecting me to fuck with them. And why not, I was about to. One at a time, they entered the evil mirror room and got to see themselves reflected back as a lawful evil devil on one side of the hall and as a chaotic demon on the other side.
I won’t bore you with almost a dozen examples of how I described our characters, save that the lawful side was reserved and the chaotic side was represented by sheer bedlam. Except for Bitzie, she’s infernal blooded anyway, so her tiefling reflected back from the devil side perfectly, and even winked at her. It was fun, and lightly unnerving, having implied to the players that they had already met other version of themselves that let to fight against themselves. Eventually they got to the end of the winding hall, where the evil versions of themselves kept inconsistent pace with them while glaring and making inappropriate gestures where they came across a room with two doors. No description, no difference, one on each side. They had to choose a door. They picked the right, which was right, by which I mean correct.
The door opened to reveal a room with red painted dirt, plywood like standies of rocks and blighted twigs stuck into the sand, representing a level of hell. And the actual devil versions of themselves, all but Bitzie. Instead, there was just a gleaming version of the rapier she used stuck point first into the ground. She quickly snagged the sword and I revealed to Kera that it was a +1 version of her sword, implying that each of their copies held similar. Since her evil clone wasn’t there, it was a fairly easy fight as they got to gang up on one mirror form and burn it down, and then do the same to the other In then end, they used some resources and earned magic versions of their own weapons. I let them choose how the magic quality adjusted the look of their weapon and several of them named their new toys right away.
It was getting late, and, having spent more time amongst the Great Bazaar than I had anticipated, it had become clear we would not complete the fun house without pushing too late or rushing. Opting for neither, we called it there for the night:
Keep watch here to see if the part can survive the Super Happy Blood Wars Funhouse and Execution Parlor!
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Tyson
Obsessive and neurotic collector of little plastic men, novels about the same little plastic men and paints to make the little plastic men pretty. Married to Kera, who puts up with him and pretends that she doesn’t hear him speaking to the little plastic men in between making pew pew noises in the hobby room. Requires adult supervision. A menace to himself but rarely to others. More beard than man
