September 2022
Looking for a market setting to add to your next campaign? The Swindle Sister’s Marvelous Magic Market has everything you need to do so including beautiful maps, a new warlock subclass, 11 ready to use shops with NPC portraits, and more! I’ve been excited about this supplement since its release in September 2021 and am so pleased to have had the chance to make use of the setting over the summer.
I was specifically using this book to run its adventure: Marvelous Market Stamp Card. This adventure is meant to take around four hours to complete. While designed with low level characters in mind, adapting it to your party – or system – is quite easy! There’s so much choice going into how you decide to run it, and despite the options available it doesn’t feel overwhelming.
This supplement was released by XhangoGames and BrassikArts, whose work I’ve used previously. I ran the adventure within A Botanical Guide to Barovia late in 2021, and enjoyed it immensely. My review for that one is directly on the product page!
My general disclaimers: I run for this group using play-by-post, using a homebrew system. Much like typical TTRPG sessions, we gather at a set date/time to play, and it just takes us longer because we are typing!
As a note, I did receive this product for free and will always be transparent about times where that happens.
Swindle Sisters retails for $9.99 and can be purchased here.
The Story & Setup
“The Swindle Sisters’ Marvelous Magic Market invites all adventurers, merchants, and bargain-hunters to a shopping experience the likes of which you’ve never seen before, nor will you see again.”
The adventure itself, Marvelous Market Stamp Card, is part of the larger book and lays out what your players will be doing quite clearly. It’s a great way to start off any adventure in the Feywilds and add character connections, Fey bargains, and future potential plot hooks to your ongoing campaign!
With 15 attractions (11 shops, 3 food stalls, a contest and 2 locations of note- even though the Oathbreaker’s Court is not somewhere you want to wind up) to choose from, the Swindle Sisters Market truly does have something for everyone, and includes an additional 9 shops that are given in brief summary. That’s 20 shops, in case you’re counting!
Now, I met the group I was running for through market RP in World of Warcraft. We played the shopkeepers and all had our various wares, while other players attending the market would stop at the stalls that interested them. Think of craft fairs in real life and that was the setting, but written out. It was cool! We all enjoyed it. It also meant I knew this group would absolutely go to every shop if I let them. For the sake of time, I didn’t.
Instead, while preparing to run the adventure, I gave descriptions of each shop and privately asked each player to tell me which their PC would be most interested in. Once everyone had answered, I tallied up the votes, found out which stalls were of most interest to the group, and threw those ones in! It made it much more manageable time wise, and everyone had at least one shop that they were interested in checking out.
I ran Swindle Sisters over the course of four sessions. Each session was about 3 hours long, and the breakdown looked like this:
Session One: Situate everyone in Applevost, bring them together, present the conflict in need of resolution, and make clear that the group needs to decided when they’re going to enter the forest. At this point there are two prompts: enter during the day to search for a missing person, or enter at night to track down the creature stealing people’s belongings.
Session Two: Enter the forest, find their way to the market, and introduce the stamp card! Players found various contextual clues relating to the strange goings-on in Applevost, had to navigate an environmental difficulty and, through a series of bad luck rolls, dealt with a boar! (They got it to run off which was very creative and cool of them, I love non-combat options.)
Session Three: By this point the players have been given three goals: find a missing person, return stolen items, and complete their market stamp card. They dealt with the Items point immediately, and then split up to start working on the stamp card tasks, and look for the missing person. My goal by the end of the session was to have 1.5 stamp card tasks completed, which we did!
Session Four: Wrapping up loose ends, and conclusion! Players finished their stamp card tasks, including casting their vote in a weekly contest, found the missing person and got almost everyone involved back to Applevost where they were rewarded for their help! One party member elected to stayin the Feywild and make their own way back eventually.
The Group
My group had five players for our first two sessions, and four for the back half!
We had an easily peer-pressured potion seller with a soft spot for animals, an occultist and merchant with more experience dealing with Fey-adjacent beings than is healthy for a person, a humble farmer out having a bit of an adventure before returning home for planting season, a doctor by day and monster slayer by night, and Spamtom. Yes, that one.
I’ve known all my players for a while, and trusted that the one bringing Spamtom to the table would do so in a way that was respectful to everyone else. I know some GMs wouldn’t have allowed it! I’ve had people express surprise, and I understand why, but it worked for our table and brought a delightful element of fun and ridiculousness to a game already rife with Fey nonsense.
What was also fun about this adventure is that almost everyone knew someone. The potion-seller and occultist knew each other from previous markets, the potion-seller knew the doctor from Winter’s Folly, an original folk horror adventure I ran earlier this year. The farmer and doctor had seen each other at the Three Swords Inn, the murder mystery I ran earlier this year, and while nobody knew Spamtom, everyone had visceral reactions to him and the farmer’s was “you remind me of my younger brother”. It was fun!
Thoughts
Even if you don’t have a need for the adventure itself which, honestly, if you’re going to include this market why not include it – it’s a lot of fun and great to slip in at any point in the campaign either with or without your full party present – I would still suggest picking up Swindle Sisters! The market itself is a delightful setting which offers a multitude of shopping opportunities that are more interesting and invested than simply buying things for gold.
If you don’t want to prepare each vendor, the included material gives you reasons that other sections could be unavailable at present – maybe there’s reports of Nightmare fruit so vendors have been cleared out of a section until players clear it out, maybe the Sundew Players are setting up a particularly extravagant stage that day/night. Alternatively, maybe some stalls just aren’t open yet! Their owners are sleeping late, or keep unusual hours.
One of the things I most enjoyed was that the places for breaks are quite clear. The included adventure has two parts to it: Applevost and the Market. If running this as a one-shot the stepping into the Feywilds portion is an ideal time to take a quick break, let players swap ideas based on their first look at this new location, and get even more excited before coming back into it! And if, like me, you know it will be divided among a greater number of sessions, the adventure lends itself really well to that.
For my group combat was minimal and came about through a series of unsuccessful rolls when trying to sneak past a boar in the forest. And even then, my group opted to scare it off! That combat wasn’t a central part of this adventure was definitely a selling point for me – the opportunity for it is included, but it isn’t required, which is great! By and large the groups I run for try to resolve challenges without resorting to combat and, if they do, don’t want to kill who/whatever they’re fighting.
That said, if you want to fight? You can. You can fight the Swindle Sisters themselves if you want, and they’ve got some brilliant mechanics. Fighting Archfey in their Domain is… definitely not a choice I would make, but if your group wants to, that information is provided!
Similarly, if there’s a warlock in your party – or someone looking to acquire more power – the Sisters are an option for that! The Warlock subclass is a strong inclusion, and I think the story possibilities of being used as a bargaining chip by your patrons is delightful. You’re off adventuring with your party and get a message that you need to stop in the next town over to help a merchant there who also made a deal with your patron? Brilliant. I don’t lack for Warlocks but would love to have one who made a deal with the Sisters one day!
What I liked most about Swindle Sisters was absolutely the shops, which considering it’s a market supplement is swell! The creativity that went into each, and the associated shopkeepers, was quite fun and I loved that there were relationships between some of the NPCs! Whether you’re looking for teeth, books, a change of identity, potions, or a new animal companion there’s something here for you! There is also an entire section telling you about the market itself, and the rules of the market proper as well as the laws of the fey which means that even if you’re completely new to running anything in a Feywilds setting, you’re given ample guidance!
The adventure itself is quite clearly laid out, and the Sundew Players section allows for PCs to get involved if they want to! Yes, everyone is meant to cast a vote, but I also offered my players the chance to have their PCs take part if they so wished, and you could just as easily see if anyone wants to play one of the performing NPCs so that there’s a bit more interaction than the PCs reacting to the performances.
If possible, I’d suggest having the shop info printed out in front of you, having a cue card, anything like that. Scrolling up and down the .pdf while flipping between shops wasn’t ideal but the document can be searched, and that was incredibly helpful when needing to double-check something I hadn’t taken note of.
I’d be remiss not to specifically mention the art because it is beautiful. There is so much personality in every NPC portrait, and combined with the blurbs offering insight about their personality there is a lot to work with in bringing them to life! The feel of the Feywilds is really well executed in both image and text in a way that is easy to approach, and quite charming.
You can find Swindle Sister’s Marvelous Magic Market for $9.99 on DMsGuild. You can also pick it up as part of the ‘Swindle and Shadow’, and ‘Ultimate Feywild’ bundles if you’re looking to add multiple supplements to your Feywilds collection!
The market can be as robust or contained as you like – this supplement offers a vibrant, bustling setting for you to use as best you see fit. It can easily fit into any Feywilds campaign, or as a one-shot when a player is missing – hooks are provided to give you reasons the party has gotten involved! It’s possible also that a townsperson sees the adventurers and asks them directly for help! Because of how time works in the Feywilds, maybe the party was at the market for hours, but it has only been a few minutes on the material plane, allowing you to pick up next session right where you left off!
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A Final, Personal Note
It has taken me a long time (by my standards) to get this review out, and that’s because it was difficult to write. Not because of anything with the supplement – the supplement is wonderful, light-hearted fun that offers the kind of groundwork for future character relationships that I so adore – but because of the time I was running it.
We’re talking about cancer, palliative care, and death in these last paragraphs so please take care if you decide to proceed. I debated including this at all – it didn’t feel professional, it felt like taking away from the book I’m writing about, but these two things are so tied together for me and it felt disingenuous not to include it.
I ran this across four weekends in June-July. Initially it was meant to be two weekends in June (playing both Saturday and Sunday), but then everything changed for me. I got a call saying my dad was really ill, and I had to go and see him. The next week was a whirlwind of phone calls and errands and meetings as I: a) convinced him to go to the hospital, b) followed up with his case manager to make sure he would be, c) arranged for daily care as he was so weak that he wasn’t even able to get up and go to the washroom.
From emergency he went to Oncology: liver cancer had spread to his pancreas. Within 48 hours he went from Oncology to Palliative care and we were told he had between two and six weeks to live. I discovered his affairs were not at all in order, and the next weeks were a flurry of paperwork, final directives, legal documents, difficult conversations, and organising a final family lunch – all while life just… went on. Nothing else stopped during this time, all my other responsibilities were still there.
But for a few hours every other weekend, I was bringing the Swindle Sister’s Market to life. I got to laugh as the PCs got up to all of their shenanigans, made their fey bargains, wrangled one another, cast their votes for the Sundew players, and then scrambled to get back through the portal they accidentally opened. That levity and laughter was a relief that helped me get through some of the most difficult weeks of my life.
Our final session took place ten days after he died. I didn’t want to run it. I was, and am still, faced with the enormity of everything I need to take care of following his passing, nevermind my own grief, the (then) upcoming funeral, and needing to arrange more legal documents as it falls to me to see to my grandmother’s care. I didn’t want to run it, and my player’s would have been entirely understanding had I canceled. I didn’t. I didn’t because I knew if I did, I wouldn’t run it at all and knew that our last three sessions had been brief moments of light in an otherwise crushingly dark time.
And so I ran it. And for a few hours at least, I was okay. To those of you who have experienced this kind of grief, you know that is everything.
The beautiful art, the compelling adventure, the interesting sub-class and delightfully bargain oriented patrons aside, for me, the Swindle Sisters was a break. It is light, it is low-stakes and while you’re facing an important task – getting out of the Feywilds and not doing something to get yourself trapped there – it doesn’t have that immediate life/death dynamic, or the sort of dark horror vibes I usually lean into in my games. It’s always going to hold a special place for me, because when everything ahead of me was crushing and overwhelming, I had my own bargain with the Sisters to take a break for a few hours, and step into their domain of delight.
– Loira
The Cozy Cauldron 
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