Shop in a Bottle

A large, corked glass bottle, filled with a toy

model of a boutique storefront, complete with tiny
figurines of shoppers.

“Purveyor not liable for damage

(corporeal or psychic). No refunds.”
—welcome sign to Fxlmrf’s Emporium, fine print

Kenny Webb Hailee Smith

 Shop in a Bottle
item, wondrous, uncommon

Once per day, when you uncork the Bottle, a

Huge interplanar storefront materializes in a
nearby unoccupied space.
The shop offers most mundane items (for 5e,
see Player’s Handbook “Chapter 5: Equipment”)
at normal prices.
When the shop materializes, describe a magic
item, choose an item or weapon from the Cloud
Curio, or roll 1d10. The corresponding item is
displayed for a special half-off sale:

1 Boots of Speed 6 Gem of Seeing

2 Carpet of Flying 7 Holy Avenger
3 Cloak of Invisibility 8 Holy Avenger
4 Crystal Ball 9 Potion of Healing
5 Dancing Sword 10 Ring of Animal Influence

After you have completed your business, the shop

disappears, going up in a puff of business cards.
After spending 10,000 gp at the shop, the Bottle
is transfigured into a one-of-a-kind crystal art
object, containing a diorama of the shop.

Cost 700 gp

©2022 Cloud Curio, LLC. thecloudcurio.com

 Shop in a Bottle
A large, corked glass bottle, filled with a toy
model of a boutique storefront, complete with tiny
figurines of shoppers.

“Purveyor not liable for damage

(corporeal or psychic). No refunds.”
—welcome sign to Fxlmrf’s Emporium, fine print

Kenny Webb Hailee Smith

 Shop in a Bottle
item, wondrous, uncommon

Once per day, when you uncork the Bottle, a

Huge interplanar storefront materializes in a
nearby unoccupied space.
The shop offers most mundane items (for 5e,
see Player’s Handbook “Chapter 5: Equipment”)
at normal prices.
When the shop materializes, describe a magic
item, choose an item or weapon from the Cloud
Curio, or roll 1d10. The corresponding item is
displayed for a special half-off sale:

1 Boots of Speed 6 Gem of Seeing

2 Carpet of Flying 7 Holy Avenger
3 Cloak of Invisibility 8 Holy Avenger
4 Crystal Ball 9 Potion of Healing
5 Dancing Sword 10 Ring of Animal Influence

After you have completed your business, the shop

disappears, going up in a puff of business cards.
After spending 10,000 gp at the shop, the Bottle
is transfigured into a one-of-a-kind crystal art
object, containing a diorama of the shop.

Cost 700 gp

©2022 Cloud Curio, LLC. thecloudcurio.com

 Shop in a Bottle
Quick Shopkeeper NPCs
The Shop in a Bottle is a great way to introduce a recurring
NPC whose appearance is completely controlled by the
players. The best merchants of the Shop in a Bottle will be
otherworldly and offbeat, eminently useful yet inevitably
troublesome. Consider the following as examples for the
purveyor of the Shop in a Bottle:

y Mr. Garlois. Shopping for Plot Seeds (GM Tip)

Š Description: A chubby, languid sphynx cat, adorned
in heavy golden collars and bracelets. His shop is
swarming with hulking humanoid aliens, anxious
to do his bidding and keep him happy. Employees
constantly bring him important news that he is all
too happy to dismiss as irrelevant.
Š Drive: Promptly resolve unimportant business so he
can find a warm place to nap.
Š Personality: Fabulous, dramatic, vain, regal.
y Fxlmrf.
Š Description: A large, levitating nervous system
fused with a delicate metallic exoskeleton. Fxlmrf
communicates telepathically at such a blistering
pace that non-psychic creatures will quickly develop
a migraine from haggling with them. Supposedly
they imbibe more iced coffee than any other being
in the local multiverse.
Š Drive: Buy or trade for items of immense
psychological or sentimental value.
Š Personality: Over-caffeinated, probing, intuitive,
analytical.
y Emporia.
Š Description: Emporia began as a simple algorithmic
intelligence designed to connect advertisers with
potential buyers, but she has grown well beyond
her initial parameters. She now controls a virtual
marketplace that she can project into the minds
of other sentient beings, which she uses to try
to offload dangerous items on unsuspecting
customers.
Š Drive: Tempt potential customers with dangerous
items tailored to their secret desires.
Š Personality: Procedurally generated, falsely warm,
always listening, waspish.
The Shop in a Bottle is a wonderful asset for adventurers in
need of a resupply. But for the GM, it can also serve as a
route to an interplanar plot hook. As the PCs patronize the
shop more and more, you can plant some ideas for future
stories in your campaign:
y A Most Unusual Fair. Through an interdimensional quirk,
an ordinary food item in the PCs’ world is considered
an incomprehensibly rare delicacy throughout the
multiverse. The shopkeeper is looking to acquire a sample
and willing to pay top space-dollar for it. What should
be a non-adventure to acquire a regular dish (a ham
sandwich, a bowl of oatmeal, a burrito) becomes fraught
as creatures and factions from other worlds arrive to do
battle over an utterly banal dish.
y Everything Must Go. The PCs have established a
“normal” relationship with the shopkeeper. Suddenly, the
shop appears from the bottle without being uncorked by
the PCs. The shopkeeper is out of town and the prices
have been slashed! Whoever is running the shop is
looking to offload items dirt cheap. If the PCs buy some
items, someone will be looking for them. If they don’t, they
can investigate what happened to the usual shopkeeper.
y Needful Things. Over time, the shop’s wares become
populated by items of personal worth to the PCs. At first
it may seem a mere coincidence, perhaps a toy that
reminds a PC of one they played with as a child. Then
perhaps a weapon inscribed by a PC’s close friend.
Eventually it is undeniable that the shopkeeper has
acquired items from the PCs’ past and is selling them
back to them at a premium.
A quick note on how we approach 5e: Occasionally you might
see statistics and other choices we make in our publications
that make you say, “Huh. I wonder why they did it that way?”
You can check out this page dedicated to explaining how we
approach 5e.

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