The Midnight Bazaar

The bazaar sets up after dark, sells until the lamps run out, and is gone by morning. Six nights, six towns, one season. You are behind the trestle, not in front of it.

Somebody walks up. You either have what they want or you don't — and you might have it and still decline. Light the hour, roll the Customer Oracle for who is standing there, and check your Wares Tracker: four categories of stock drawn as lanterns, lit when you have them, struck through as they sell. Then take payment, which is where this differs from every shopkeeper game you have played. Coins are only one of the things people put on the trestle here. Rumours and Favours owed spend just as well, and they accumulate into a season's worth of obligations that coins never would.

Contraband pays best and marks Heat, and the Watch is a different animal in every town.

What's in the 27 pages:

• A Customer Oracle spread across the six hours of the night — Lamplighting, First Bell, Deep Market, the Quiet Hour, Last Bell, Packing Down — so when someone arrives decides who arrives
• Four stocked categories with their own colours, prices and behaviour: Charms & Wards, Curios & Oddities, Elixirs & Tonics, Contraband
• A persistent Wares Tracker — six lanterns per category, lit and struck across the whole season, and a cart holds what a cart holds
• Coins, Rumours, Favours and Heat as four separate running tallies, each with its own way of coming back to bite
• Six illustrated town chapters — Ashfall Quay, Thornhallow, Gilderwick, The Drowned Steps, Marrowgate, Lastlight — each wanting one category, mistrusting another, and bending one rule of the night
• A between-markets road: restock two categories, roll for what the road does to you, and pay for it
• Worked examples of the two-line journal entries, and three kinds of entry not to write
• A one-page quick reference, and five write-on play sheets to print again each season

Two ordinary six-sided dice and a pencil. A4 and US Letter, both included. The season ends with "When the Market Moves On" — a closing spread that asks what you are still carrying, and whether you are going out again in spring.

Original work: no licensed setting, no third-party system.