For today’s Random Table Review I’m going to be reviewing a random table for a concept I absolutely love: 1d20 Dungeon Merchants from the Coins & Scrolls blog. One of my least favorite RPG activities is the party goes into town and goes on a big shopping spree, where everyone is just looking over tables of stuff to buy. Bad content that goes on and on. So I generally opt for remote or economically ruinous settings where there isn’t a lot on offer. Maybe a guy with about half a dozen things on offer, take it or leave it. That’s more my speed. So weird guys you meet in the dungeon selling things I am completely on board with. Lets see what we roll up.

Results: 12, 8, 7

Each entry provides a name, appearance, voice, desire, “shrewdness”, and some additional notes. It took me a minute to figure out what was meant by shrewdness. I think this term was used because of its connotations of business deals, but as best I can tell these are really just “traits”. I wish the author had called them that because I kind of stared at the tables for awhile trying to parse the meaning there.

Overall I think these are pretty good. The voice entries are strong, and exactly the sort of detail I want as a GM. For example from one of the entries I rolled, “Voice: cheerful but unconvincing. Buzzes whenever it says a proper noun, as if a different voice took over.” This is a great prompt, I can run with that. The desires and appearances are generally good too, and the additional notes have some fun details. “Only items that fit through the toad’s stretchy mouth can be traded” is fun. On the other hand, some of this stuff does veer too far into gonzo for my tastes like “The market dissolves into violent omnidirectional chaos at the slightest provocation”, or “Parlour Toads contain portals to a mysterious extraplanar city”. Will work for some people, but for many these would be expunged details I imagine. But I absolutely would run a weird toad guy as a dungeon merchant, absolutely.

My one other criticism is I would include some sample items of the sort of things the merchant would sell. Seems like a missed opportunity to me personally. With some of these entries you get a pretty good sense, but it isn’t uniform. Overall though, good table. Probably wouldn’t use this in my own game, but would definitely use it for inspiration, and I like the overall approach to how it succinctly establishes interesting minor NPCs to your game.