Knowles Gnome Supplies
Hello, and welcome to this week’s issue of LoreMasters - Your regular source of inspirations, ideas, and homebrew for your TTRPG games. In each issue, I'm going to be bringing you a veritable Heroes Feast of items, spells, podcasts, streams, Kickstarters, and STUFF, so if you like this, please subscribe and pass it on to your close friends and distant relatives.
As always, the main chunk of this newsletter is a homebrew for your game and if you have any questions, comments, or thoughts, come find me on the Twitters.
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Knowles Gnome Supplies
Gulga pushed open the flap to the tent, stepping inside. Neatly ordered shelves of items, each with little handwritten signs in from fill the tent. At the back, a bored-looking dwarf rests of the counter, reading a scroll.
“What-ho! Well met shopkeeper! What fine looking wares you have!”
The dwarf doesn’t look from his scroll, but raises a half-hearted thumbs up.
Gulga steps down the aisles, taking rope, ball-bearings, wax, a few torches and a leather satchel to keep it all in. They reach the counter, putting them all down with a clatter. The dwarf looks up.
“Welcome to Knowles Gnome Supplies - Gnome Know How They Make It So Well.” he intones with a practised and bored tone, as he counts up the items, “That’ll 5 gold please. Can I interest you in a half-price bell?”
”Oh no, thank you.” Gulga leans on the table with a smile, “Oh, 5 gold? That does seem to be a bit pricey, I’m sure we can do something about that, can we cut a deal”
“Look, the price is what it is, I just work here”
“What? Really?”
“Yes, we’re a shop. Just buy it, or don’t. Lords above…”
“Oh, ok, yes” and he puts 5 gold on the counter, leaving with his products and deeply confused…
Knowles Gnome Supplies
Knowles Gnome Supplies can be found in every civilised town and city across the world. It will always be a large expansive shop, the smallest will stock everything an adventurer might need, the largest may even include in-house blacksmiths and other craftsman.
And it is always staffed by a bored-looking surly dwarf.
The name is likely to be confusing granted - Knowles Gnome Supplies was started by a family of dwarves many years ago, choosing the name as they felt customers would trust Gnome inventions and crafts more than any. The original shop (in Nook) has gone from strength to strength, and now the original family have franchised the idea all across the known lands. In each city a new family takes up the name, opens a shop and usually makes their kids run the counter, most of which would much rather be off doing other things.
Shopping in RPG is always a divisive thing. Some love it, some deeply hate it. And so I wanted to find a way to balance those two.
The design idea behind this shop is that it offers every mundane item for the players, at the set prices from the books, no haggling, no persuasion check. Just a shop. So the players who want to get in and out, can just load up a basket, pay the dwarf and leave. Job done, without forcing them to get into roleplay or just breaking the immersion of the world.
But if a player wants to get more into the shopping, there are aisle to explore, and a surly dwarven teenager to interact with.
I also love the idea of these real-world trope interacting with fantasy worlds. We all know of the shop chains across the country, almost entirely staffed by teenagers and mostly indistinguishable from each other - and so we have Knowles Gnome Supplies.
Things To Check Out
This is the part of the newsletter where I bring you a few things to check out that inspired me and might inspire you
Gnome Anne
It’s maps all the way down this week, and so meet Anne The Gnome. I love their maps for the amount of detail in them, each one a unfolding box of roleplay ideas and backstory inspiration. Just looking at the Bric-a-Brac Emporium of Arcane Miscellany above, I love the details - the chickens feeding out the back, the small veg patch, the piano - each one sparks ideas on how to run this shop and map.
They are also casing currently for a queer dnd show, if you’d be a good fit, drop them a line!
