d6 Magical Merchants

Each of these merchants sells a specific type of magic item. None of them accept standard currencies, which will hopefully facilitate some adventuring to get what they want to trade. Most of them will only trade for a specific kind of magic item for their own.

None of the example items have been tested or explicitly balanced, they’re just things I thought would be cool.

1. The Vizard Wizard

Sells: Magic Masks

Currency: Faces

He travels around in his snake oil salesman wagon, a rickety purple thing with "The Vizard Wizard!" painted on the sides.

He dresses in exotic clothing and jewelry from across the world. His round, bald head always wears the same expression: a wide closed mouth smile and uncomfortably squinted eyes. He is always careful to only speak when no one is looking at his face.

Buying from the Vizard Wizard is simple: a face for a face. That could mean trading him a well-made mask, or offering your own face (leaving you mute and with a vizard-like black void where your face used to be), or giving him the face of a dead monster, or if you like fairy tale logic, something like a many-faceted gem could suffice.

Another happy customer!

Example Wares:

False Face: Transform into whatever the face belonged to. To change back you must take off the mask by pulling at the back of your head or the base of your neck. (This part can be tricky if you're transformed into something without hands.)

Yellow Beak: Like a plague doctor's mask but canary yellow. You can sense the direction of the nearest exit.

Ghost Hood: You can walk through solid materials, but you can't see where you're going.

2.The Lady of Leaves

Sells: Magic Plants

Currency: Other Magical/Exotic Plants

The keeper of a Mazirian-esque garden of exotic and magical plants.

She can be either beautiful or creepy depending on how you look at her. Most of the time she's both. She is a wispy, hawk-nosed woman draped in the moss-and-leaves dress of a fairy sorceress. Her eyes are crystal blue and a little too wide. Her long gentle fingers end in dirt-caked nails.

She strolls through her garden caressing her plants. Her head twitches like a bird's as she holds a dainty hand to her ear, listening to whispers you cannot hear.

She offers the cuttings and seeds from her plants in exchange for new additions to the garden.

Example wares:

Door Bulb: A tuberous bulb. Looks like a round turnip with thick green roots. The bulb can be planted into any flat surface, where its roots will dig in and carve out a functional doorway (the bulb is the knob). Single use.

Axiomatic Rose: Midnight blue on the outside, pale yellow on the inside. The petals close when someone lies and re-open when someone tells the truth.

Salamander Seeds: Blazing red seeds that, when lit on fire, grow into red creeper vines that can cover an entire room and will climb up any surface.

3. The Beggar

Sells: Lost Things

Currency: Any Magic Items

No-one is sure if he’s a magician, or a small god, or perhaps just a very strange man. Some even think he’s just a myth to promote kindness towards the poor. The Beggar is the platonic ideal of a hobo: five o’clock shadow, fingerless gloves, puffy purple eyes, and a big nose colored alcoholic red. He wears his entire wardrobe of clothes a century out of style all at once. 

He keeps his wares in a dingy old trunk that's much bigger on the inside. The trunk is a doorway to the Underwhere, the place where all lost things end up. If you look around there long enough, you can find anything you’ve ever lost.

With proper directions, you could navigate the endless hills of lonely socks and forgotten toys and climb out from under any bed or through any cluttered closet or crease between the couch cushions.

The Beggar will accept any magic items for his services. However, if he knows that you're not giving up your good stuff, he'll do the same to you.

Example Wares:

Directions through the Underwhere: He knows the way to most cities and popular dungeons, but not *exactly* where you’ll pop out.

Treasure: Something you missed during your last adventure.

Something that you lost: could be anything from a lost sock to a forgotten memory.

Lost Knowledge: A map to buried pirates’ treasure; A rosetta stone for a dead language; A secret history exposing the king as a shapeshifting reptilian.

4. The Masked Thieves

Sells: Wizard Trash

Currency: Magic Foods

A city-spanning colony of raccoons. They can be contacted by performing the secret knock on a sewer grate or trash bin.

The thieves have their specific tastes. After years of digging around wizards' towers they've grown to love the tingly, electrical flavor of magic. Doesn't matter what effect that weird glowing mushroom might have, the taste is more than worth it.

Their constant arcane dumpster diving seems to have granted them both the ability to understand human speech and some business savvy, as they've been known to alter their trades based on the quality and amount of food offered.

They may even be willing to steal directly from the source if you can bring them some of the really good stuff...

Example Wares:

Polymorph Potion (Unstable): A greasy bottle filled with a swig of liquid with a color that strobes through the rainbow. Drink it and you’ll be transformed into a different creature every round for 1d6 rounds.

Philosopher’s Stone (Reversed): An egg-shaped blue gemstone that can transform gold into lead. After 1d6 uses, the stone disintegrates into non-magical jelly.

Magic Wand (Malfunctioned): A wand that looks to be glued back together after a magical mishap and now has a tip that bends 30 degrees to the right. When the wand’s spell is cast, the spell always targets the wand’s wielder.

5. The Toymaker

Sells: Helpful Toys

Currency: Stories

An old man with large calloused hands and a set of spectacles . The toymaker has exiled himself to a lonely cottage in the woods after some great disgrace which he will never willingly reveal to anyone. The only hint as to what might have happened is that he has sworn to never make another weapon.

Due to the lack of social interaction, he made himself a friend. Literally, out of wood. His name is Boggy.

Boggy is a little wooden dummy on the toymaker wears on his hand, and the old hermit speaks to him as if he were real. However, the toymaker is no ventriloquist, and his mouth moves when he talks for Boggy (a fact which angers them both if pointed out). 

Both the Toymaker and Boggy love stories. They will offer one of their toys to anyone who can spin a dramatic tale of adventure, tragedy, romance, and derring-do.

Example Wares

Magic Boxes: A pair of colorfully painted wooden boxes, each about the size of a shoebox. If you place an object inside a box and close the lid, the object is transported to the other box.

Stuffed Bandersnatch: A stuffed animal, about 2 feet long with a long neck and great snapping jaws. Goblinoids are deathly afraid of these creatures, and would surely be fooled by this replica.

Little Bingy: A featureless wooden doll with limp, segmented limbs. If you ask "Bingy, what did you see?" The doll springs to life and pantomimes everything it witnessed in the past 4 hours.

6. The Bottle Witch

Sells: Magic Bottles

Currency: Your Favorite Magic Item

A tiny old woman cocooned in a mound of robes. The only visible parts of her are her tiny wrinkled face poking through strata of scarves and hood. And her rat paw hands.

She can be found shuffling along in any place a tiny old woman shouldn’t be (the monster-infested woods, a dungeon, hell, etc.), heralded by the clinking of the glass bottles that hang from her like ornaments on a Christmas tree. Bottles of all shapes and sizes, filled with tiny animals, miniature storm clouds and rainbows, and colorful bubbling elixirs.

She always needs something. 

“My boots have worn out and my feet are so sore from walking but…my, those lovely elvish boots you have sure look comfortable…”

“I have a long journey through the woods ahead, and the monsters would surely kill a frail old woman like me...but that gleaming sword you have there, now that would surely scare them off! Care to trade?”

Example Wares:

Bottled Rage: This bottle holds a tiny red storm cloud. When the cork is popped, whoever you're pointing the bottle at is overcome with blind rage. Single use.

Bottled Blizzard: A frosty bottle filled with falling snow like the inside of a snow globe. Uncork to loose a blast of icy wind that freezes anything in its path, or if uncorked toward the open sky, conjure a freak blizzard. Single use.

Empty Bottle: Pop off the cork to bottle anything. You could bottle a dragon, a wildfire, a wound, a memory, a feeling, a color, anything. 2 Uses -- 1 to trap something in the bottle, and 1 to release it.