Corpse Market

The Corpse Market was the primary marketplace in the city of Evernight in the Shadowfell. It specialized in the sale of all manner of bodies, whether alive, dead, or undead.
==Description==
The Market stretched for multiple city blocks in every direction, and was packed with shops, stalls, and street vendors separated by tattered canvas shrouds. The market was drab and colorless, but illuminated by torchlight. It was a cacophony of merchants hawking their wares and shouting to drown out their competitors, thus making it the noisiest and liveliest part of Evernight. These merchants were predominantly undead beings selling bodies and body parts for consumption by other undead, but they also carried supplies—ranging from mundane tools to everything a necromancer might need—and zombie servants for rent. Customers milled about—mostly ghouls, skeletons, and vampires with the very occasional living person—making transactions with gold as in any other marketplace, although some merchants expected services or flesh as payment instead. Any living merchant wishing to do business and not end up as food had to acquire a special token that served as proof that they were to be left alone (although the tokens were not always necessary as most of the undead assumed that no living person would be foolish enough to visit the Market without such protection).
One corner of the Corpse Market was dominated by a large auction block made of bone and old wood, which was where living humanoids were sold (either as food or as slaves). Vendors had to attract their own crowds and customers if they wished to auction off their captives. Any efforts to disrupt these auctions attracted a hostile reprisal from the entire Market.
==Location==
The Corpse Market filled a walled area in the southern part of Evernight, and abutted the Graveyard to the west. It overlapped the same location as did the Main Graveyard of Neverdeath in Neverwinter on the Material Plane. It was well-known within Evernight that the boundary between the Shadowfell and the Material Plane was full of cracks at the Corpse Market, potentially allowing the undead to reach out and snatch unsuspecting victims from Neverwinter.
Near the Market was a fenced-off area where the merchants' workshops and storehouses were located. Any unauthorized visitor to this area was immediately assumed to be a spy or a thief, and was dealt with violently.
==Services==
===Food===
The Corpse Market specialized in meals for undead creatures who were too lazy or too busy to otherwise catch their food. This included not only living captives but meat and body parts for the city's ghouls as well as blood for the vampires. Ghoulish delicacies included pickled fingers and organs wrapped to go. Blood was kept fresh in jars or enchanted decanters of glass or ceramic, and higher-end merchants offered many types of blood from which to choose (e.g., from victims of any given species, age, sex, social status, or magical aptitude). One such blood shop was Sangora Sanguinaries.
===Grafts===
The Market sold animated body parts for the purpose of being attached to living creatures. These undead grafts ranged from limbs (such as for granting enhanced strength) to organs (such as for granting the limited uncanny abilities of creatures such as liches, mummys, or vampires). For an extra fee, a few merchants would also perform the complex and profane rites to graft these body parts onto their customers. The most famous of these merchants was a mad vampire surgeon named Sanjos Irridan.
===Supplies===
A wide range of mundane equipment, raw materials, tools, and weapons could be found at the Market, most of which were retrieved from the bodies of slain humanoids. In general, these supplies included the things that anymore—namely even the undead—might require, but the Market also sold oddities and luxuries, such as dead flowers, decorative canopic jars, decaying burial finery, and jewelry (often displayed on severed hands).
For necromancers, the Corpse Market carried everything from rare specimens of blood and bone for experimentation to profane holy symbols and fresh grave dust for rituals.
===Undead for Hire===
Zombie laborers and porters could be rented for 10 gp per day, plus a deposit that took the form of a chunk of flesh that was surgically removed from the buyer, alchemically treated to keep it preserved, and then reattached upon safe return of the rented zombies.
Sentient undead would occasionally rent or hire themselves out as guides, sometimes for coin and sometimes for their own amusement. Visitors to Evernight might hire such a guide to show them around or answer questions about the city (although honesty was not guaranteed). Information could cost 20 gp per question, or perhaps would only be provided in exchange for an answer to the guide's own questions. Sangora of Sangora Sanguinaries was known to offer directions and knowledge for such prices. Hiring a guide for a trip outside the city required a fee of at least 100 gp per day, although this increased for longer or more dangerous journeys and did not entail the guide's assistance in combat (nor their loyalty more generally). Certain special undead guides had the uncanny ability to smell different kinds of death or undead, and could be hired for a minimum of 200 gp per day to help an employer find the remains of a specific person, place, or creature.
==History==
As of the late 15 century DR, the Corpse Market was as bustling as any marketplace on Toril. Its most famous patron was a mysterious living man known as the Resurrectionist, who would spend hours each day examining the bodies and body parts as he searched for the remains of a certain long-dead person.
==Appendix==
===See Also===
* Deaders Market
===Appearances===
===References===
Category:Marketplaces
Category:Undead locations
Category:Locations in Evernight
Category:Locations in the Shadowfell
Category:Locations in the Parallel Planes
Category:Locations in the World Axis planes
Category:Locations in the Inner Planes
Category:Year of Metropolises