Location Seed: Trivia’s Trinkets.

Trivia’s Trinkets – Google Docs

Trivia’s Trinkets

Description: a slightly cluttered, but scrupulously neat strip retail store (no more than one thousand square feet in size).  The air invariably smells pleasantly of cypress, but since the store sells a wide variety of incenses, oils, and scents, this is rarely particularly noticeable. Other products available: herbs, books on a variety of esoteric subjects, charms, alchemical equipment, magical paraphernalia, raw enchanting materials, rare ingredients, and a variety of dietary supplements for magical familiars.  All of these items are readily available for sale, and are not cloaked in any sort of euphemism or subterfuge. Trivia’s Trinkets takes all major credit cards.

The “Trivia’s Trinkets” occult phenomenon can best be understood as more of an esoteric life-cycle than anything else. When a planetary population gets large enough (over about seven billion or so), it starts to need magical towns; which is to say, places where people can buy and sell magical spellcrafting and items for whatever purpose.  It’s not really part of a Higher Destiny or Dark Fate or anything like that; it’s just a situation. Magic seeks to ground itself in sufficiently-complex civilizations, and magical towns are the most stereotypical way of magic doing that.

A Trivia’s Trinkets is thus best thought of as the seed crystal for a magical town.  It takes over a particular vacant retail space, settles in, and starts selling magic.  Most of its clientele will be non-magicians, of course; and they typically pay well for the minor blessings and charms that Trivia’s Trinkets sells.  But when someone with actual occult power — however untrained — enters the store, they invariably find the sorts of things that will help them develop their particular magical aptitudes further.  Once they develop enough, these people will open their own speciality shops, and the urban conversion process is then well underway.

This would be generally awful if there was any kind of coercion involved, but there isn’t, really: nobody or nothing is really forcing people to start making enchanted T-shirts and brewing magical teas. They just do it. And the universe sort of seems to let them; towns with a Trivia’s Trinkets in them soon get a deserved reputation for being ‘lucky.’  It’s as if there’s a sort of beneficial inevitability to the whole thing; the general feeling throughout the process is not unlike a Hallmark Channel Halloween movie, albeit one with considerably less romance and rather more active supernatural events.

Not every team of adventurers who find themselves caught up in the saga of a Trivia’s Trinkets will find such a situation entirely comfortable, of course.