System Saturday: The Grand Bazaar as a System

With my system out there I have shifted gears towards a setting I stumbled on to and am interested in: The Grand Bazaar! https://thelatestenemy.blogspot.com/2020/09/funday-sunday-grand-bazaar.html 

I am going to spend the next couple of weeks expanding it out into a full point crawl ala The Gardens of Ynn or the Stygian Library two point crawls that are incredibly playable.

"Portobello road, Portobello road
Street where the riches of ages are stowed.
Anything and everything a chap can unload
Is sold off the barrow in Portobello road.
You’ll find what you want in the Portobello road." Portobello Road, Bedknobs and Broomsticks


The Grand Bazaar is a place where ANYTHING can be found for a price.

Here is a 1d100 location list that I am going to be fleshing out in detail. 

  1. Tea

  2. Lanterns

  3. Carpets

  4. Furniture

  5. Book

  6. Pawn shop

  7. Oddities

  8. Potions

  9. Clockwork devices

  10. Taxidermy

  11. Statuary

  12. Masks

  13. Ships in Bottles

  14. Maps

  15. Pillows

  16. Weapons

  17. Coffee

  18. Cafe

  19. Peddler of assorted goods

  20. Instruments

  21. Candies

  22. Butchers

  23. Meditation room

  24. Textiles

  25. Hookah bar

  26. Investigator

  27. Armor

  28. Exotic Pets

  29. Costumes

  30. Hats

  31. Glassware

  32. Jewelry

  33. Theater

  34. Restaurant

  35. Bath house

  36. Inn

  37. Brewery

  38. Salt

  39. Spices

  40. Honey and Wax

  41. Oil

  42. Soap

  43. Perfume

  44. Street food

  45. Flowers

  46. Herbs

  47. Fungi

  48. Sand

  49. Wheels

  50. Aquatic Animals

  51. Faeries in cages

  52. Real Estate

  53. De-cursed Items at a Discount

  54. Globes

  55. Exotic foods

  56. Engravings

  57. Ink and stationery tools

  58. Needles

  59. Exotic luxury equipment (massage tables, ski equipment, fancy boats, etc.)

  60. Tubing

  61. Toys

  62. Rope

  63. Blood covered knives

  64. Organs (the instrument)

  65. Boxes

  66. Magic tricks (like our magic tricks)

  67. Scams

  68. Deaths

  69. Faces

  70. Spiders

  71. Dreams

  72. Dungeons

  73. Soil

  74. Smells

  75. Discount Portal Emporium

  76. Time

  77. Worms

  78. Preserved things in viscous jars

  79. Flying things

  80. Ancestry, buy a noble birthright

  81. Blood

  82. Cursed items, friendly owner

  83. Left handed items, The Sinister Shop

  84. Weird alchemical stuff: babies tears, moonbeam, first snow flake of winter, etc.

  85. Spoiling food

  86. Broken objects

  87. Shop of shops

  88. Invisible objects

  89. Organs (from bodies)

  90. Objects that move on their own

  91. Magic Carpets

  92. Djinn

  93. Elements: periodic table

  94. Elements: earth, air, water, fire, death, and life

  95. Monkeys

  96. Memory grocer

  97. Vials and vats of liquids

  98. Divine beings in filigreed bird cages

  99. Crying babies of all species

  100. Fell Contracts


and 1d20 details for those locations:

  1. Fountain

  2. Statue

  3. Information kiosk

  4. Sultan Guards

  5. Food stalls

  6. Lodging area

  7. Reverse monks

  8. Auction

  9. Gambling

  10. Singing

  11. Weirder than normal for its level: mouth for eyes, too many tentacles, etc.

  12. Everyone is disobeying the rules

  13. No people

  14. Funeral procession

  15. Noble procession

  16. Merchants are alien to you

  17. The goods are alien to you

  18. The merchants and goods are alien to you

  19. Everything is alien to you

  20. The Sultan


Will flesh out both of these tables over the coming weeks but my general idea is to create a system of procedurally generated cultural rules that are fun and interactive for the players to work within.


Comments

  1. AnneOctober 3, 2020 at 1:02 PM

    I love this! It's big and ambitious, it hits that Victoriana sweet-spot of both "instantly recognizable" and "specific not generic", and it's putting the procedural generation technology of depthcrawling to a cool new use. Really looking forward to this!

    ReplyDelete

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