Barter marketplace

design parked

repo: land-of-lor · depends on: server-architecture · updated 2026-08-05

What this is

The system by which players trade items and blueprints with each other. Load-bearing design constraint: there is no in-game currency. All exchange is barter — a player can offer N units of a common item for one rare item, or offer a wide bundle of assorted items seeking one specific ingredient they lack. This exists almost independently of the game itself, with both a web interface and an in-game interface to the same underlying marketplace.

Why it exists

Currency-free barter follows directly from settled design pillars, not as an arbitrary constraint:

“Everything is priced — no god-mode” (docs/README.md §4): conservation of matter means nothing is free, but value is expressed as trigram opposing pairs and composition, never a scalar. A single fungible currency would reintroduce exactly the kind of scalar power-ranking the four-axes system is built to prevent.
Blueprints are tradeable by construction — “the pattern works whether or not you own the blueprint, which makes blueprints tradeable and gives an economy for free” (§8, and workspace CLAUDE.md’s settled pillars). The marketplace is where that tradeability actually gets exercised.
Cooperation-over-PvP (a recurring thread across all three LoR attempts, per workspace CLAUDE.md) — trading is one of the explicitly-named cooperative mechanics, alongside joint machines and consensual arena wagers.

Scope

Listing mechanics: offer X of item A for one of item B; offer a bundle for one specific rare ingredient.
Both interfaces to the same marketplace state: an in-game UI (presumably reachable from the Ingredients/Blueprints inventory tabs, per thought-specs/inventory-interface.md) and a standalone web interface — meaning this may need its own client, separate from the game client, talking to the same server-side marketplace data.
Ownership/authority: the server (see server-architecture) is the single source of truth for what any player holds, which this marketplace depends on directly.

Non-goals

Not introducing any currency, exchange rate, or scalar pricing mechanism, even as an internal implementation detail — if a “value score” creeps in to make matching easier, treat that as a design red flag against the no-currency constraint, not a shortcut.
Not the recipe/blueprint system itself (see spell-crafting-interface) — this epic only concerns exchanging what already exists between players.

Key open questions

How offer-matching actually works without a common unit of value — direct 1:1 listings (I have this, I want that) seem straightforward; open-ended “best offer” matching across dissimilar bundles is genuinely harder and undesigned.
Whether the web interface is a full second client or a lightweight read/list/offer view.
Anti-abuse: since there’s no currency to launder, what does scarcity/fraud even look like here (fake listings, duping) — not yet considered in any source doc.
Half-formed, worth carrying forward: if object-system-experiments’ gatherability-tiering idea lands (a small arena-gatherable ingredient core vs. a long tail reached by crafting/trade), does this marketplace end up implicitly specializing around trading for arena-viable ingredients specifically — i.e. does “what’s tradeable” and “what’s arena-legal” collapse into nearly the same question? Or do they stay genuinely separate (the marketplace trades the full 64; arenas just restrict what you can bring in, not what exists)? Nothing decided — flagging so it isn’t lost.

Relevant docs

land-of-lor/docs/README.md §4 (no god-mode, opposing pairs over scalars), §8 (blueprints as tradeable knowledge).
land-of-lor/docs/thought-specs/inventory-interface.md — the Ingredients/Blueprints inventory tabs this likely surfaces from in-game.
land-of-lor/CLAUDE.md — cooperation-over-PvP as a recurring cross-attempt thread.

Status

1 backlog

Next: Parked — nothing to do here until server-architecture's ownership model exists to design against.

Tasks (1)

backlog (1)

barter-marketplace/001 — Spec the listing/offer data model (priority 1, estimate M , blocked by server-architecture/002 )

Ask an agent about this epic

Also available as raw markdown.