Funday Sunday: The Grand Bazaar

You smell the incense and spices so strong and thick in the air you can taste them on your tongue. You hear the strange call of market barkers advertising their asking prices as they barter back and forth. The tunnels wind, not dis-comfortingly, with another stall, another wondrous trinket, just around the next corner. It is a seduction that lures you in with trade, artifacts, and a sense of the exotic. 

The Grand Bazaar is a completely covered market, packed with people selling, buying, moving good in carts, and even wandering, lost. Goods and stalls cover every surface except for the maze-like thoroughfares that make there way through the market. The market is not limited to a 2D plane either, stairs move up and down and around the corners leading to further parts of the market. The crowd is large but not completely packed; it thins in places and bunches up around interesting areas. 

You might notice something is wrong as you start to see stranger faces in the crowd. It might just be people visiting from lands completely foreign to you. But that lady has four heads and that boy(?) is nothing but shadow. The goods are becoming more exotic as well, still clearly magical, but no longer clear in their function. Now you are in a part of the bazaar where no one speaks your language and everything is strange and otherworldly; it is clearly still a market of some sort. How did you get here? Which corridors and turns did you take?

You are now well and truly trapped in the infinite maze of the Grand Bazaar. Every turn back seems to take you deeper. The problem is the Grand Bazaar is really every market, in every plane, in every reality. It is not malevolent. But it is truly alive, with a beating heart somewhere deep within. Its arteries are the pathways, and its occupants the living cells. It is also incredibly useful: anything you could conceive of ends up here at some point or another, sold off the back of a merchant's cart, proudly on display in a permanent stall, or in some forgotten corner of one of the many interior stores that dot the place. There are many exits from market as well: portals that take you to far flung planes of existence that make little sense or logic or entrances like the one you came in that lead back to a reality not too dissimilar from your own.

Many of the occupants are like you, desperately trying to find their way to their reality. Many will try to help you... for a bartered price. Law is enforced in the Bazaar by the Sultan and his market guards. Where he is located exactly is not sure but his guards are everywhere and sometimes as bewildered and lost as you are. Perhaps you could find employment enforcing the rules of the Bazaar.

To reach the Grand Bazaar you can either let it find you or visit any market of a large enough size and try to become lost there. 

I have been to this place a number of times. When I was young we visited the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul and I got lost at one point. A number of the emotions of this article are derived from that experience. I have visited since a number of times in various market. One time my home bathroom manifested as a bathroom deep within the twisting bowels of the market, that was a harrowing but fascinating experience. 

Author's Note: It should be mentioned that when drawing inspiration from the Middle East and other foreign markets, in invoking the exotic I am also evoking something of Orientalism. Orientalism is wrapped up in ideas of racism, colonialism, and a perspective of writing from the west. I grew up overseas in Europe and for a time Eastern Europe, so often that I visited Turkey many time. I am a third culture kid but I understand that we need to be careful invoking the exotic that we do not other people from other cultures. I would rather celebrate these other fascinating experiences and try to bring some aspect of that to the players at my table. It is a treacherous and hard line to walk and I do not know if I have, especially when talking about how alien the occupants eventually get in the Bazaar. It should be said that the market reaches all markets, though, ones that are more and less familiar.