Building 14 – Silk Merchant (Patreon)

Back to the shops along the intersection of Market & Random. Based on a Patreon request from Mark Clover, I’m drawing up individual floor plans for shops, stores, vendors, and businesses along a single market block. This is our fourteenth shop on the street, a silk merchant who deals in raw and finished silks and does a lot of dyeing in the shop to produce the exact items customers are seeking.

Silky Smooth is run by the Thistledowns (Marwen & Derrick), a halfling couple who have run this shop for 30 years or so, along with their adolescent son Tavin, and Pella Venn, an apprentice silk dyer. Marwen is a master of silk with a reputation for impossibly fine threadwork. She is calm, meticulous, and quietly proud of her craft. She has a dry sense of humour that catches people off guard until they get to know her. Her husband, Derrick, was a caravan guard on the silk routes and married into the trade. He handles procurement now, dealing with the other merchants and caravans required to acquire their supplies. He is friendly, loud and effortlessly charming, and is quite adept at maintaining the shop and home. He does harbour a bit of annoyance at the small stature of his family when dealing with clients and merchants, but the only concession he has made to this was building human-scale beds for the family so they sleep like royalty.

Pella Venn is a young and very enthusiastic dwarf from an urban clan who is naturally gifted with colourwork. Her time is split between the front of the shop and the dyeing work during the day. She experiments constantly; sometimes with great success but also occasionally enduring catastrophic failures – her dream is to create a signature dye so she can launch her own silk business.

Finally we have Tavin Thistledown, an adolescent halfling who is restless and seems allergic to the idea of becoming a merchant. He spends most of his time exploring the market area, obsessed with street performances, acrobatics, and of course “hero stuff”. He has recently been contacted by a few members of the local thieves’ guild who see great ‘potential’ in him.

The ground floor is the shop proper – the main entrance leads into the shop where wares are brought out for customers to examine them on the counters, with some smaller samples on the shelves along the entrance wall. The back of the shop is split into two areas. The north side is where raw and finished silk is stored and specific pieces are made during shop hours, and the south side is where silk is dyed and prepared. There are usually several half-completed projects hanging in this area. The south side also has the stairs up to the second floor and the back entrance.

The second floor is the Thistledown home – a small cooking and eating area just at the top of the stairs, two bedrooms and a storage room, and a large room at the end for entertaining guests and for late-night silk work. All three of the Thistledowns live here, with Pella Venn returning to her dwarfhold after work hours.

One oddity about the structure is the small shack built up on the flat roof. This was built by Old Reginald Crufft back when he was just Reginal Crufft. Old Crufft is a fixture around the market, a beggar by trade, but sought out by many for his sharp eyes and ears that miss very little that occurs in the neighbourhood. Old Crufft sneaks up the back wall of the shop every night using a “ladder” of unevenly spaced bricks and then slinks across the roof to his small wooden shack until the first rays of morning.

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 5,400 x 9,300 pixels (18 x 31 squares). To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to 100 pixels (for 5′ squares) – so resizing the image to 1,800 x 3,100 pixels.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/10/13/building-14-silk-merchant/