Shops Above the Clouds: How Commerce Works in Aether Skies

Shops Above the Clouds: How Commerce Works in Aether Skies

November 28, 2025

Why Shopping in the Floating Cities Is Nothing Like Your Standard Fantasy Marketplace

Shopping in a traditional fantasy game is simple: a merchant stall, some friendly haggling, shiny coins for shiny things.
But in Aether Skies, even buying a coil of wire can feel like espionage.
Supply chains are unstable. Goods drift in on skyships or smuggle in through tunnels. Currency is political. And half of the items you want to buy are illegal, dangerous, cursed by the Curtain… or all three.

Shopping isn’t a break between adventures.
It is the adventure.

🌫️ The Economy of the Floating Cities: Scarcity, Secrecy, Survival

On the surface, markets appear vibrant: glowing lanterns, hawkers shouting prices, shelves stacked with oddities. But the truth is that every city balances on the knife-edge of scarcity.

Food must be grown in fungal towers or shipped from floating farms.
Metals are mined from asteroid fragments or scavenged from derelict skyships.
Aether itself is refined, rationed, and occasionally stolen.

Merchants don’t just sell goods — they sell promises of availability.

Goods Shift With the Wind

If a storm knocks out trade routes, prices spike overnight.
If a new Aether parasite outbreak hits, everyone suddenly needs charms and purging crystals.
If Haven has one of its dream-surges, black-market scribes double their prices.

When everything is unstable, every purchase is meaningful.

⚙️ Shop Types Unique to Aether Skies

🛠️ 1. Aetherwright Workshops

Part artificer lab, part alchemist den. These shops specialize in items that hum when you touch them.

Aether-powered lanterns
Dream filters
Gravity anchors
Stabilized skyfins for gliders

You’re not just buying gear — you’re commissioning brilliance from eccentric, half-mad technicians who may ask for bizarre trade goods: a whisper, a dream, an unbroken memory.

📡 2. Skyship Junkyards

Equal parts market and graveyard, where crews strip fallen ships for parts.

brass plating
coil pistons
cracked navigation stones
experimental tech no one understands

It’s dangerous but cheap — perfect for crews flying on hope and duct tape.
And sometimes the junk stares back.

🧿 3. Dreammongers

Merchants who sell memories, foresights, hallucinations, and visions.
Perfect for seekers, mystics, and anyone looking for answers Haven didn’t mean to give.

Prices often aren’t monetary.
Sometimes they want:

your happiest memory
a night’s worth of sleep
a truth you’ve never told anyone

You leave with what you wanted… but less of yourself.

💀 4. Black Market Aether Dens

Hidden behind taverns, underneath foundries, inside moving cargo lifts.
These shops deal in:

banned Aether injections
corrupted artifacts
pre-Curtain relics
beastkin transformation inhibitors (illegal but in demand)

Every purchase is a crime.
Sometimes, just browsing is too.

🐾 5. Beast-kin Street Booths

Found in Kerfluffle and fringe districts, these vendors craft items filtered through instinct and survival:

scent markers
climbing talons
night-vision goggles
enhanced food pellets (don’t ask what’s in them)

These shops are loud, colorful, and full of life — a vibrant contrast to the cold machinery above.

🎲 Roleplay and Mechanics: Making Shopping Fun

Shopping in Aether Skies isn’t a downtime chore — it’s a chance to deepen the world and challenge the party.

✨ Haggling Is Dangerous

Because merchants don’t haggle over coin.
They haggle over:

favors
information
future loyalties
which faction the party supports
who the party won’t help

🎭 Every Shopkeeper Has an Agenda

No neutral NPCs here — every seller is part of a faction, a guild, a family, or a black-market syndicate.
Their interactions can:

reveal rumors
foreshadow threats
introduce side quests
expose corruption
bring the crew into conflict

⚠️ Some Items Are Alive

Aether tech is unpredictable. Buying something experimental?
Roll on a malfunction or corruption table.
Let the item bond with a PC.
Let it whisper in their ear.

💸 Currency Isn’t Always Coin

People trade in:

Aether scrip
guild tokens
shimmering glass beads charged with memories
safe passage
secrets

Money is rarely enough.

🧭 GM Tips: Turn the Market Into a Story Engine

1. Give each market district its own personality.
Orashul’s is clean and overpriced.
Kerfluffle’s is noisy and oddly brilliant.
Granglehold’s smells like oil and regret.

2. Let the players chase rumors like artifacts.
“Someone’s selling unrefined Haven-mist in Lantern Alley.”
Watch the party run.

3. Use scarcity to heighten tension.
If they need a skyship part now and only one merchant has it, negotiations get… intense.

4. Let merchants remember your players.
When a PC returns, the shopkeeper should know exactly who they are — for good or bad.