The Goblin Market Truce
Once a decade the goblin market opens inside the city walls under an ancient truce — this year something is buying children's names, and the truce forbids drawn steel. A D&D 5e one-shot for 3–5 characters of levels 3–5.
Free — copies it into your campaigns with your session tools.
Premise
Every ten years, on the three nights of the autumn dark moon, Wardenhall's east plaza becomes the Under-Market: goblin merchants, gnome factors, and stranger sellers trading under a truce sealed four centuries ago. The truce's terms are carved on the plaza arch: no drawn steel, no open spellfire, no theft, all bargains binding. This decade's market opened last night — and this morning, three families found their children cheerful, obedient, and unable to remember their own names. Somewhere among the stalls, something is buying names, paying in exactly what each child wanted most, and the watch cannot draw a blade to stop it.
Stakes
A name bought at the Under-Market is a binding purchase — when the market closes at the third dawn, the buyer keeps what it bought and leaves with it, and the nameless children will follow their names out of the world. The truce cannot be suspended: breaking it doesn't just void protection, it wakes the arch's warden, which last happened in the year 312 and explains why the plaza's flagstones don't match. The party has two nights to out-bargain, out-investigate, or out-lawyer something ancient, patient, and scrupulously honest.
Scenes
- 1
Three Cheerful Children
The Copperlane district — the Fenwick bakery, a cooper's yard, and the watch-house where nobody knows what to write in the report
The children are unharmed, well-fed, and wrong. Tobin Fenwick, eight, answers to anything and nothing, holds a toy sword of real silverwork 'from the nice stall,' and when asked his name says, helpfully, 'sold.' The other two match: each has a treasure (a music box that plays a mother's lost lullaby; a kitten that will visibly never grow old), each went to the market with a copper and came back rich, and each signed the purchase themselves — children CAN, under market law, sell what belongs to them, and nothing belongs to you like your name. A Detect Magic or an Insight on Tobin finds the space where the name was: not erased, TRANSFERRED, with a faint silvery thread trailing east toward the plaza, taut as a leash.
Decision point: The threads are followable — but each parent begs differently: the baker wants his son's name back at any cost, the cooper wants revenge the truce forbids, and the third parent, a watch sergeant, quietly asks the party whether the treasures have to be given back too, because the lullaby box is playing his dead wife's voice and his daughter has stopped crying at night for the first time since the funeral.
If they go sideways: If the party ignores the families and goes straight to the market, the threads are visible there anyway to anyone who saw the children — but they've missed the sergeant's detail, which matters at the end: the buyer pays with things that were LOST, not conjured, and lost things have owners who miss them.
Wisdom (Insight) — DC 13 to notice the children aren't enchanted — they're CONTENT, which is worse; DC 15 Intelligence (Arcana) to identify the name-threads as fey purchase-marks, binding until market close - 2
The Under-Market by Night
East plaza after dusk — four hundred stalls under goblin-lantern light, the truce arch humming overhead
The market is glorious and mostly honest: goblin knife-grinders, moss-wives selling bottled weather, a gnome notary doing brisk trade witnessing bargains. Everyone knows the name-buyer; nobody will point. Market etiquette surfaces fast — pointing at another merchant's stall is 'interference,' information is merchandise, and the party's questions have a price like everything else. Working the stalls assembles the picture: the buyer trades as 'Master Solace,' holds the plaza's oldest stall-charter, sells 'comforts' — and the market's own merchants are afraid of him, because name-buying is legal under the truce but it's bad for business, and this is the third city this century where Solace has worked the children's trade.
Decision point: Information brokers offer the party three prices for Solace's stall location and charter history: a memory of the buyer's choosing, a year of one PC's luck (mechanically real: disadvantage on one d20 per session until repaid), or a favor owed to the goblin merchant council, terms unspecified. Pay, haggle, or find the stall the slow way while night one burns?
If they go sideways: If the party tries intimidation or theft, the market itself responds before any guard does: stalls close like eyes ahead of them, prices triple in a rippling wave they can watch travel, and a polite moss-wife explains that the market has moods, and they are currently IN one.
Charisma (Persuasion) — DC 14 to trade rumor for rumor without overpaying; DC 12 Wisdom (Perception) to notice every stall Solace has ever chartered stands where a plaza drain used to be — he likes doors underneath - 3
The Stall of Master Solace
Market's heart — a modest tent of undyed wool that is much larger inside, shelved floor to unseeable ceiling with small labeled boxes
Solace receives the party like valued customers: tea, chairs, terrible courtesy. He is tall, gray-wrapped, smells of clean linen and church dust, and every box on the shelves holds a purchased name — thousands, from a dozen markets across two centuries, each labeled in perfect script with what was paid. He confirms everything without shame: the children sold willingly, the price was fair by the only measure fey law recognizes (what the seller most wanted), and the goods transfer at market close. He is not a devil and there is no trick clause: he is a collector, the names are FOR something, and he will happily sell any of them back — for what the party most wants, priced per name, and he can see what that is by looking at them, and he tells them, out loud, in front of each other.
Decision point: Three names, three prices, spoken plainly: whatever the GM reads as each character's dearest want (a dead friend returned as a true resurrection; a patron's forgiveness; the location of the thing their backstory is missing). Solace will also accept SUBSTITUTIONS of equal weight — including other names, freely given by adult owners who understand the bargain. The party can pay, refuse, negotiate substitutions... or someone can offer their own name, which Solace wants badly enough to trade all three children for one willing adult, and he says so with terrifying honesty.
If they go sideways: If violence starts inside the stall, the truce arch's hum stops — one full round of total silence across the market, everyone frozen, every goblin looking up — before the warden wakes. Solace, unbothered, uses the round to say: 'The truce does not protect me from you. It protects YOU from what happens now.' GMs: let the party stand down with dignity if they move fast; the warden (use a shield guardian's stats wrapped in flagstone) does not negotiate and does not stop at unconscious.
Wisdom (Insight) — DC 16 to catch the one crack in Solace's composure: he checks a particular high shelf — twice — where a single box sits apart, older than the others, label faded blank - 4
Market Close
The plaza at third dawn — stalls folding, threads shortening, the arch beginning to toll
Everything resolves at close, because that's when purchases perfect. The blank-labeled box, if the party pursued it (theft is forbidden; PURCHASE is not — and the gnome notary, for a fee, will confirm that a box's contents can be bought unseen 'as-is'), holds the market's oldest secret: Solace's OWN name, sold two hundred years ago at this very market, to a buyer long dead whose estate never claimed it. He has been a collector ever since the way a drowning man is a swimmer — buying names because he cannot stop reaching for the shape of the thing he's missing, and he has never once been able to buy back his own, because he no longer owns anything he WANTS enough to pay with. He doesn't know his box survived. It has sat in the market's lost-property trust for two centuries, and the notary holds the trust's ledger.
Decision point: The party can hold Solace's name over him (he will trade all three children instantly, plus his charter, plus anything), give it back freely (fey law makes an unpaid gift of a name a bond of debt no fey-touched thing can ever discharge — Solace, renamed, owes them everything forever and knows it), or keep it and walk away with three children ransomed and a leash on something ancient in their pocket. The children's threads are shortening as they argue. The arch tolls seven times at close.
If they go sideways: If the party never found the box and has no price they'll pay, the honest ending happens: the market closes, Solace begins to fold his tent with the names inside — and the three parents arrive at the plaza edge, having scraped together their own substitution offers, each one worse than anything the party refused. What the party does in THAT auction is the finale, and none of the options are clean.
Charisma (Persuasion or Intimidation) — DC 15 to negotiate with Solace holding leverage — or no roll at all if the gift is freely made; some doors only open without a check
NPCs
Master Solace
Tall as a doorframe and gray all over — wrappings, gloves, eyes like weathered slate. Smells of clean linen and old stone. His stall's tea is always exactly the temperature you like, which is somehow the most frightening thing about him.
Courteous, patient, and honest to the letter and the spirit both — the horror of Solace is that there's no trick. He answers every question truthfully, prices every want fairly, and grieves, visibly and politely, when customers walk away.
Nix Brambleward
Three and a half feet of waistcoat and ink stains, workstation of four stacked crates, spectacles pushed up onto a bald and shining head. Stamps documents with a seal ring the size of her fist.
Ferociously procedural and secretly romantic — treats market law like scripture and bends it like a poet, but only through the proper forms. Charges for everything; undercharges the desperate and pretends it's a rounding error.
Sergeant Davin Hollis
Big, gray-stubbled, uniform pressed by hands that clearly learned to do it recently and alone. Carries the lullaby music box in his coat and doesn't know the party can hear it ticking against his chest.
Duty-bound and quietly breaking. Asks careful, official questions in public and one dishonorable one in private. Cannot look at his daughter's new peacefulness without his face doing something complicated.
Auntie Bracken
Four feet of shawls, walnut-shell face, stall hung with corked bottles of rain, fog, and one violent little thunderstorm she keeps 'for burglars.' Missing two fingers she says she sold, and won't say for what.
Gossip incarnate, kind under six layers of commerce, treats the party like promising apprentices who keep almost failing. Speaks of the market as 'she' and of Solace with the specific pity old merchants keep for bad bargains.
Endings
The Gift
The party buys the blank box unseen and gives it back unpriced. Solace opens it alone, and the market — all four hundred stalls — goes quiet at the sound a two-hundred-year-old bargain makes when it finally unwinds. The children's names come home before the seventh toll as the first installment of a debt fey law says can never be discharged: the party has a creditor's claim on something ancient, honest, and grateful, redeemable at any market, anywhere, forever. Solace's last act under charter is to sell his collection back, name by name, for a copper apiece — market law requires SOME price — and the line stretches out of the plaza and into the next decade.
Fair Trade
Somebody pays. Three names come home for three prices out of the party's own hearts — or one volunteer's name buys all three, and the party leaves the market one true name short, their companion cheerful, obedient, and looking at them like friendly strangers. Solace folds his tent, thanks them for their custom with wrenching sincerity, and the market moves on to its next city. The music box, the silverwork sword, and the ageless kitten all remain — paid for, binding, and playing, glinting, purring in three Copperlane homes like small monuments to what things cost.
The Seventh Toll
No bargain lands before close. The arch tolls seven, purchases perfect, and Solace departs with the children's names — but the Under-Market returns in ten years, the purchase-threads stretch but never snap, and Nix Brambleward, stamping the trust ledger shut, hands the party a document she says fell out of it by accident: the schedule of every market Solace's charter permits him to attend, two centuries forward. Three children will grow up loved, strange, and incomplete in Wardenhall — and somewhere down that schedule, in some other city's plaza, is a rematch with a decade of preparation behind it. Campaign, meet your villain; villain, meet the only people who ever found the high shelf.
Sequel hook for D&D 5e campaigns
The lost-property trust ledger lists four other unclaimed boxes older than living memory — and one of them is labeled in the handwriting of Wardenhall's founding charter, which the city has always claimed was signed by a man.
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