RPG Review: Walrock Homebrew Traders & Merchants
Today we’re covering something a little different. It’s a Pay-What-You-Want PDF from Walrock Homebrew, who creates really high quality D&D content.
Traders & Merchants is an expansion to their Fortresses, Temples & Strongholds supplement, but can be used as a standalone, which I’ll definitely be doing for any future games.
In Traders & Merchants, Walrock has a section on merchant personality traits (which you can roll on to get eclectic personalities) and a table allowing you to randomly determine what kinds of merchants are at the location your PCs have arrived at. You can also determine the quality of each merchant, and how much money they have on hand. This can keep your players from trying to sell of thousands and thousands of gold worth of treasure to a small village merchant, who really shouldn’t have those kinds of funds onhand.
They then breaks down a ton of different merchants, with each merchant getting a writeup explaining what you need to know about merchants of that type. As an example, the first merchant presented is the Alcohol and Refreshment merchant. An atrocious merchant will only have inferior ale, non-alcoholic ale, and water, whereas, if you move up the list into excellent merchants will have dwarven ale and coffee, elven wine, and portentious tea (which can give you insight into the future). Each entry on the list prices out how much you’ll spend, as well as how much of each they have on-hand, which can lead to the merchant running out for the night when the players arrive with a whole pirate crew to party into the evening.
The animal merchant, if they’re an atrocious merchant, only has a single dead parrot, which I thought was great.
Players want to decorate their keep? Go visit the furniture merchant! If you’ve got a ton of gems from the nearby dungeon, go to the jewelery and gem merchant to sell them off. Most merchants have magical items listed, but only at the higher quality levels, so it makes it trickier to track down the items you want if you’re in the backwoods, which makes a lot of sense.
Legendary merchants are much more important. You’ll find maybe one of them in a small city, only a few in larger cities. They include Astral Travelers who have all kinds of extradimensional things, enchanters, and sellers of magical animals. There’s also the Fey bargainer, which you can use when the players stumble upon a faun in the forest, or some other fey creature.
My favorite of the legendary merchants is the Time-Lost, who is a time traveller who has flashlights, calculators, jetpacks and grenades. The Tome of Understanding (from DMG 209) is labelled “Farmer’s Almanac.” I love this.
Definitely check this out. Even if you don’t roll on any tables and instead use it as inspiration when your players walk up to a merchant and ask “what can I find here?”, you’ll always have an answer.
You can pick up Traders & Merchants here.