The PCs in my Planescape campaign are planning a foray to the Gatehouse Night Market in Sigil's Hive ward. The Market is in operation during the hours of darkness, is located at the heart of the multiverse's worst slum between the madhouse and chaos districts and is reputed to be the best place to purchase stolen and contraband goods well away from the prying eyes of the law.
Sigil has another larger better-known marketplace, the Great Bazaar, which itself is already reputed to provide every imaginable commodity imaginable, so I'm looking to stock the Night Market with merchants, patrons and commodities which aren't appropriate for the larger and more mainstream Market Ward shops. I'd like to be able to do the place justice when I present it to my players.
I imagine the place is populated with the worst scum of the multiverse, including possibly fiendish shoppers and buyers trading in larvae, slaves and other nasty things. What I'd like would be your ideas for some memorable encounters in the Night Market and possibly the kinds of items that'd be for sale in such crazy and wicked place. How's about it? Any ideas?
Shadow fiends and night hags, trading souls.
Prostitutes of all races and genders, including dopplegangers and succubi.
Imps and quasits in the form of malevolent-looking animals, offering themselves as familiars.
Desperate humans selling their own body parts. A starving, middle-aged man is missing an arm, begging anyone who comes by to buy his other one. An almost skeletal woman of similar age, wearing soiled finery, is carrying a crystal box in which can be seen her still-beating heart. She offers to throw in her lungs if you buy it now.
A booth with living heads on shelves. Somehow they remain animate and aware without organs or torsos. They've sold every other part of themselves in order to feed their children or pay their gambling debts. Some beg you to buy their heads all at once, while others plead that you first buy their eyes or tongues. Some ask for help in earning new bodies. Those without tongues can say nothing coherent.
Child slaves, for sex or food, kept in crowded cages, crying and screaming.
Addictive drugs that turn their users temporarily into celestials or fiends, drugs that allow the mundane to temporarily learn simple spells, ashes you can eat that contain the memories of those whose bodies they were made of, drugs that contain the memories of being a tree, or a forest, or a world. Poisons that cause agonizing pain, recreational drugs that blur the line between agony and ecstasy - an elixir that's promised to provide the user with the experience of dwelling in the Abyss or Gehenna, or of being flayed by the Lady of Pain.
Soap made from human, tiefling, or bariaur fat.
Surgeons that will change your species, or splice you with extra limbs, bind you permanently with another into a single being, replace your skin with aboleth slime, or transform you into a horrific work of living abstract art. Screaming things like twisted trees made of muscle and bone are examples of prior clients - the surgeon promises you that they're happy with the result, although it seems surprised you would doubt this.