The Wagon Train of Values is a Hobgoblin Merchant that can be summoned by those who inadvertently vocalize their need aloud within the Hedge.
Overview[]
Changelings will hear it coming long before they see it — the squeak of the wheels, the clop-clop of bony horse hooves, the rattle of wagons as they bound out of potholes and ditches. It’s a wagon train, the wagons themselves looking like prairie schooners (though sometimes the fabric covering them is a net of pale leaves or a fine mesh of spun worm’s silk). It’s a seemingly endless parade, with wagon following wagon following wagon, each bumbling along slowly with a different hob or hob family at the helm.
This is the trick to the Wagon Train of Values: they only sell what the characters need. They can smell the need carried on the wind, like a drizzle of blood calling a school of sharks in the ocean current. A changeling breaks his only weapon, and finds himself without a way to defend himself? A lost soul is dizzy and starved, unable to find palatable food along the switchbacks and serpentine trods? A True Fae requires the broken heart of a spurned teenage girl to thrust into the chest of an as-yet-lifeless fetch? Along rumbles the Wagon Train of Values, ready to make an offer. It’s funny; they only sell what their target needs. If the target needs a weapon, all the wagons play host to weapons, and weapons alone...
- Changelings may only inadvertently call the Wagon Train of Values by vocalizing their need aloud; if they seek to consciously summon the merchants, though, they cannot. It must be born out of true desperation and desire. The hobs’ prices are steep (and they never ask for favors, instead only asking for something the character possesses), but they rarely entangle the changeling in some accursed deal.
References[]
- Dancers in the Dusk, p. 88