Retail Magic

Pastoria is a peaceful and prosperous land, situated in a fantasy world like you people from Earth see in video games and anime. There are dragons and demons and the occasional Dark Lord, but in everyday life there are basically people. In this world magic isn’t just something wizards toss around when they’re feeling less subtle and quicker to anger; it’s a commodity, an important part of the economy. The sale of magical items, ranging from simple agricultural charms to world-shaking artifacts, is an everyday occurrence. There are magic peddlers who wander from village to village in worrisome carts, but every town of any size has at least one magic item shop.

To adventurers a magic shop is a place of routine, a place to trade in treasure and stock up on healing potions. However, there are those to whom a magic shop is a workplace, where every ring of the bell above the door brings a customer looking to buy some trinket or other. This game is about these retail workers. Society tends to look right through them, and they don’t have an easy life. This has a lot to do with the history of Pastoria and the nature of the magic trade. The region where Pastoria now stands was home to countless battles fought with ludicrously powerful magic. There are pockets of magical distortions and potentially dangerous artifacts all over the place. Magic items are plentiful, though it takes a certain amount of filtering to find the useful ones. Pastoria also has many more outworlders—visitors from other dimensions—than more distant lands. Society often shuns such people (and other things), but due to the dangers of working near a high concentration of magical items, item store owners can’t afford to be too picky about who they hire. Thus, the magic retail trade is something of a haven for those who for whatever reason don’t quite fit into normal society.

Based on the random insanity of Maid: The Role-Playing Game, Retail Magic is an RPG about retail employees in the magic item trade. It blends satire of retail work with ludicrous anime comedy action. Roll the dice and find out that your half-centaur half-pixie paladin started working at a magic shop because of unrequited love, and that when stressed out she tries to hide in a box. Roll for random events, and see a stray cat come to the store, or a ninja attack, or an invasion of angels!

The Golden Friday Edition is a special discount pre-release version of Retail Magic. It includes the full rules needed to play, including employee, boss, and store generation, six random event tables, and two introductory scenarios. Oh, and a spell component table just for the hell of it.

To play you will need a few friends (sorry, we can’t do much about that for you), a pencil, paper, some six-sided dice, and the energy to keep up with the random insanity the game will provide.