Dungeon Shop

Seems like a bit of a niche market.

Screw the guy who blasts through the undead scourge and penetrates the deepest levels of the sewers to save the president's daughter. We want to know about the guy who's so badass he beat us there and set up an item shop and shooting gallery. And hey, if he's so good at getting around, why doesn't he save the president's goddamn daughter, huh? And, couldn't he find an area with a wider customer base?

— Cracked.com's 6 Video Game Gimmicks That Need To Die on Resident Evil 4 's gun merchant

In videogame dungeons, in the midst of Everything Trying to Kill You, one may find shops selling all sorts of items, varying from not actually useful to somewhat useful to absolutely necessary. If the shopkeepers are standard NPC types, there is the Fridge Logic question of how they made their way down there in the first place without getting slaughtered, and what shortcuts they are using to bring supplies in (as they often will restock after a while). The shopkeepers need not be Muggles, though; they might be friendly versions of the local monsters. In modern or futuristic settings it may be an automated vending machine, which alleviates the logistic issues, and may plausibly not tell between friend or foe. See Intrepid Merchant.

Shoplift and Die, naturally. Could be a Secret Shop if well-hidden. Compare Rather Inn-Accessible for Trauma Inns in the middle of dungeons.

For the inverse, see Dungeon Town.

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Examples:

Action-Adventure

• ANNO: Mutationem: Jos van Corn and occasionally his brother will show up in each area to provide their corn juice and weapons creation.
• Distorted Travesty: The Convenient Store Yoshi runs one in the Black Rock Fortress.
• Devil May Cry: The series has Divinity Statues, each depicting the mysterious God of Time and Space holding up a glowing hourglass. They are used by the half-demon protagonists of the series to gain new skill and abilities and have a habit of being found in the serendipitous of places. They get partially replaced by Nico in Devil May Cry 5 (whose van has the inexplicable ability to go almost anywhere given time and a phone call) though they still appear in the few spots Nico can't get to, with Nico even having a scaled-down Statue in the van (mostly used by V).
• EXTRAPOWER: Giant Fist has two, Johnny and Eighty, either of whom appears in every level. They manage to find themselves everywhere from the open savannahs to private dig sites and mercenary camps, to heavily guarded ancient pyramids and partway up active volcanoes, to the underground inner sanctum of a secretive cult leader and even America.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time features business-minded Deku Scrubs who appear in certain dungeons. Once you deflect their shots back at them, they offer to sell you a certain item or replenishable as a form of surrender, often at a ludicrously inflated price.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker features these being run by rats, of all creatures. You can entice them to speak to you by throwing some bait down near their nests, for which they'll offer you anything from potions, to bombs and arrows, to even more bait. They tend not to charge more than any other shop would.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has a shop run by a friendly NPC in one of the last dungeons in the game. The existence of the shop is also justified, in this case, as said dungeon happens to be an actual city that is overrun by monsters, with the shop being located near the beginning where they haven't managed to spread to yet.
• Let It Die:
  • Gyaku-Funsha has a chance to show up in certain rooms of the tower, selling R&D materials for massive amounts of cash. Finding him is annoying, but he can easily sell the player rare materials that almost never drop as loot due to tower constraints.
  • Choku-Funsha occasionally shows up during the 41-50 Hater-Run section, selling the player weapons, armor, and potions to resupply their deteriorating gear. He doesn't even mark up anything! As a downside, you can only purchase up to three weapons and/or armor pieces per visit.
  • Choku-Funsha shows up after the boss battle on every 'divisible-by-5'th floor after 50.
• Ōkami: There are Imp vendors that will sell to Amaterasu despite being her enemy. They're far too weak to handle an Amaterasu who's recovered a decent amount of new items and long-lost powers, they justify their sales as a form of "stealing" Amaterasu's valuable money.

Fighting Games

• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: In the "World of Light" mode, there are 24 Master Spirits on the map that you can find and battle. Once you defeat them, they don't join your party like every other Spirit; instead, they promptly set up a business in the area you defeated them in (either a gym, a dojo, a treasure-hunting service, or an item shop).

First-Person Shooters

• Resident Evil Village: The Duke inexplicably shows up around the village to give Ethan any wares he requires.

MMORPGs

• Tarmunn Sursa, a good-aligned settlement in The Lord of the Rings Online is located within the outer reaches of Carn Dum itself. How Mordirith never noticed the Trev Gallorg operating within his walls is a mystery.
• Dungeons and Dragons Online has Marraenoloth, a skeleton living in The Shroud. He repairs equipment and sells a few things about halfway through one of the raids.

Platform Games

• Afterimage:
  • After you give a way out for Tark, who was previously trapped in the Field of Geo, he will offer to sell you some goods right then and there. He'll move to the Resting Town afterwards, however.
  • Town of the Exiled is not a safe place as it's teeming with hostile ghosts everywhere. However, Stanley has occupied a building there for his own services, and you can buy items from him.
• In Black Tiger, some of the old men will set up shop and offer to sell something as soon as they are rescued.
• Castlevania:
  • Hammer sets up shops like this in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. Seeing as how he's a former military man and is seen with a bazooka at one point, it's fair to assume he can take care of himself. That doesn't stop Soma and Mina from questioning his sanity, though.
  • In Castlevania 64 the "shop" is actually a service provided by a demon named Renon who can be summoned through scrolls found in certain areas. Just be careful, because if the player uses his services a bit too much, he invokes the fine print in the contract and tries to claim their soul.
  • Justified in Symphony of the Night. The shopkeeper is Dracula's librarian and an old friend to Alucard. Although he's initially reluctant to help, Alucard is able to play to his greedy nature in order to buy things from him. However, the Librarian won't help Richter or Maria at all; estranged or not, Alucard is still Dracula's son, but aiding the Belmonts would be outright treason.
  • In Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, a wandering merchant got lost in the castle, and so he set up shop there. No idea who the rest of his customer base is, though.
• Many of the shops hidden in the ruins of La-Mulana are hidden behind walls. Some just sell ammo, but others (including one Guide Dang It! example) sell vital and otherwise unobtainable Plot Coupons, though they don't come cheap. The shopkeepers tend to be undead, and say that you're the first customer in hundreds of years.
• Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom takes it cues from the later Wonder Boy games and so there are a few shops located in dangerous areas away from civilization
• The dungeons of Spelunky have, besides the ordinary emporiums, gambling parlors, kissing booths and the super-secret Black Market. The shopkeepers are tough and well-armed, as players may find out the painful way, meaning that it is actually reasonable for them to have made it through the dungeons. That still doesn't explain why they feel the need to serve the vast customer base that typically appears miles underground. Or why they don't just grab the gold lying around themselves.
• The merchant in Prehistorik Man sets up shop in any non-friendly territory... though he'd not get close to the haunted Dinosaur Graveyard.
• Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap has many shops set outside of the your hometown and in dangerous areas. But the flipside of this is that these shops are close to the monsters which are your source of money farming.

Roguelikes

• Most roguelike games have sections of dungeons that contain items for purchase. Try to leave their store without paying, however, and you'll face some very nasty consequences. Played with in Desktop Dungeons, which has single-item shops. "After you make your purchase, the mysterious shop mysteriously disappears".
• In Dicey Dungeons, there's a chance that one of the spaces on any level of a dungeon is a travelling merchant, where coins earned in battle can be spent on new gear, upgrades, or a healing apple.
• Played with in The Enchanted Cave. The shopkeeper is badass enough to survive in the dungeon because he's the final boss .
• For the King: Goblin merchants are among the special encounters that can be found at random within dungeons. They generally offer Healing Herbs, consumables, and rare items, albeit at a markup.
• Hades: Charon will appear intermittently at random rooms selling items he has dredged up from the Styx. If you happen to "borrow" the bag of money right next to him, Zagreus will be in for a rude awakening.
• Noita: Each Holy Mountain has a small shop area selling either wands or spells appropriate to your current depth. Spells can be stolen by using certain methods to drag them away from the shop, while wands must be purchased. Shops also have a random chance of spawning in levels and there are a few non-Mountain shops which are guaranteed to spawn each run. Notably, none of the shops have an actual owner.
• Wizards Castle: There are always three vendors on each dungeon level, across eight levels for 24 vendors in total. Every vendor can sell your character armor, weapons, a lamp, and potions that increase strength, intelligence, and dexterity. Revisiting the same vendor reveals he's never out of stock on anything. Slaying any one vendor will net your character the best armor (plate), the best weapon (a sword), a lamp for peering into adjacent rooms, and one bottle of each potion. This will cause all other vendors to become hostile, and refuse to sell your character anything, unless they are bribed with one of the eight precious treasures you've acquired.

Role-Playing Games

• In Diablo II, there are a couple of vendors who literally setup shop in Hell.
• Justified in The Legend of Heroes: Trails series. The party would arrive to the Final Dungeon via airship that comes with its own shop, granting enough stocks for supplies when needed.
• The Vision Of The Ant: You will occasionally come across travelling merchants in any of the dungeons.
• Torchlight has them. Possibly justified by the fact that they're traveling goblin (who might get a free pass from some of the dungeon's inhabitants) merchants.
• Wild ARMs 5 has them in little jack-in-the-boxes.
• Santa shows up in Star Ocean: The Second Story and later games in the Bonus Dungeon and sells you stuff. Just be prepared to hand over a few mil for his goods, though.
• The Camp Gay brothers in Shadow Hearts: Covenant show up almost everywhere. They lampshade it in the Neam Ruins; when you talk to them, they bitch about having had to go through all the puzzles to get that far and demand you make it up to them by buying their goods. (They also offer you a ride out in their van.)
• In South Park: The Stick of Truth, right before the Final Boss, there is a shop in Clyde's Fortress who will sell any items New Kid needs during the fight, along with some exclusive Weapon Strap-Ons and Equipment Patches found only in that dungeon. The kid who runs the shop lampshades it when you first walk by:
  Shopkeep: Welcome, weary adventurers! You know how before the big final boss fight of any game, there is a conveniently placed shop where you can stock up on health potions and arrows and stuff? Well, this is that shop.
• The Kecleon shops in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Games are found in various dungeons, selling some rare items like stones, scarves, looplets and TMs. Possibly justified by the fact that they're always at ridiculously high levels and will most likely kick your ass if you steal from them.
• Brax the Salesdemon from Dungeons of Dredmor almost makes sense. Being a demon, he can summon Debt Collectors (more demons), which explains why monsters don't dare attack him. Also, most civilians probably wouldn't buy merchandise from a demon, even one with a suit, so he just markets his stuff for adventurers who find his shops.
• One long dungeon in the first Phantasy Star game contains... a bakery, in which you must buy a cake - at an absurdly high price - and bring it to a security robot on another planet entirely to progress the story.
  • Said bakery, the Naura Cake Shop, later became a recurring element of the franchise. In almost all cases it is always a dungeon shop, spawns excruciatingly rarely and randomly, and always sells items (and in one case, a Quest) that cannot be obtained anywhere else.
• One dungeon in Shining Soul II is actually a house and storefront that you are asked to infiltrate by the Hub Town's storekeeper. The entire purpose of going there is to secret-shop so that the storeowner can compare prices and undermine her rival.
• Atelier Series has you play as one of these shopkeepers.
  • There are in-game examples in the Mana Khemia subseries: in 1, there's a student-run store in the Student Resource Center dungeon, and in 2, the person selling stat-boosting items is found in a dungeon. It's justified by the fact that at Al Revis, sending teens to face a dungeon full of monsters is a perfectly normal homework assignment, and anyone with so many stat boost items that they're selling them likely doesn't have to worry about random encounter monsters.
• The Cat Girl Koma in Super Robot Taisen: Endless Frontier games has a habit of setting up shops in the middle of dungeons, although depending on her mood and current employer, she might want to fight you first. Justified in the first game due to her being a competent fighter as stated above and in the second game, she's travelling with you. She almost gets left behind after temporarily separating from the rest of the party to peddle her wares when the Load-Bearing Boss's defeat takes effect though.
• These are a staple of the Final Fantasy series, first seen in Final Fantasy II under a waterfall in the Jade Palace, and last used in Final Fantasy XII in the Necrohol of Nabudis - where one of the monsters is a shopkeeper. Final Fantasy XIII gives access to shops through every save point, and scatters said save points everywhere. Worse, even, Final Fantasy XIII-2 replaces the old save point shops with Chocolina... a feminine humanoid thing that can just pop up anywhere in the space-time continuum, including the middle of a warzone, and sell you stuff with a smile and lots of chatter.
  • Chocolina is justified, however; she is Sazh's chocobo chick, who asked to be of help in some way. Etro responded by making her humanoid, giving her the shop, and scattering her across all time and space, effectively meaning she literally is everywhere at every point in time to help Serah and Noel.
  • The Mognet Moogles in Final Fantasy IX generally are used to either rest, save, or pass along mail. The few that offer the "Mogshop" option usually do so in the middle of a situation where leaving to go to a shop in a town is either wildly inconvenient or entirely impossible at that point, and are usually a sign that the situation for the party is either currently or about to be very difficult.
  • Final Fantasy X has a blue chest in the underwater section of the Via Purifico that inexplicably buys and sells items. Perhaps Spira's equivalent of vending machines?
  • Final Fantasy X-2: There are times when Barkeep will run into a room of a dungeon and offer to sell you items, usually stationing himself at the last save point before the boss of the area. Anything to help Mish Yoona.
• Odin Sphere: Vendors can be found in certain levels on every stage. While some, like Titania, aren't too far-fetched, it's a wonder merchants wander around the peaks of Winterhorn Ridge or the lava pits of Volkenon. The Netherworld, however, actually has dead souls as vendors.
• Ōkami: The only shops in dungeons are run by the actual monsters residing there. And yet, they still sell the holy paraphernalia Ammy needs to do her job.
• Secret of Mana: Neko sometimes pops up in dangerous places, like in a forest infested with monsters.
• Playfully avoided in Jade Empire. The main character has (from a very early point in the game) a personal merchant spirit that constantly follows him/her from the spirit world, making sure that you will always have access to a shop-full of magical goodies wherever you are.
• In Xenogears, a couple of dungeons had shops run by Fixbots; one could choose "I don't trust you" when talking to them, leading to a fight...but doing so would (obviously) remove the shop, seeing as you just killed the owner. Meanwhile, in the second disc, most dungeons had a shopkeeper/inn at the beginning, since you couldn't leave the dungeon until it was done.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Hinopio's shop in Barrel Volcano in Super Mario RPG. Also, Toad catches up to you at the end of the final dungeon - how did he get there?
  • Paper Mario 64 has a bored storeroom Goomba in Bowser's Castle that will gladly sell Mario his inventory (at heavily inflated prices, of course, though he'll also buy "useless" items like Mistakes and Pebbles for prices much higher than any other shop).
  • A shopkeeper randomly appears every 10 floors of the Pit of 100 Trials in both Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Super Paper Mario. Naturally, his prices increase the further down you go.
  • Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time has Monty Mole's Mole Mart, which is not just in a dungeon, but hidden in a dungeon. And Fawful's Bean'n'Badge, which is in the castle sewers (counts as a dungeon, since they're swarming with Goombas).
  • Mario & Luigi: Dream Team has them in every dream world in the game except Dreamy Somnom Woods. Including Bowser's dream in the final dungeon. Oddly enough, they're always manned by the dream versions of the people you meet nearby in the real world, so that means Broque Monsieur in Dreamy Pi'illo Castle and the final dungeon, Britta in Dozing Sands, the tour guide in Wakeport, the Massifs in Dreamy Mount Pajamaja and Broque Madame in Dreamy Driftwood Shore.
  • In Paper Mario: Color Splash, there is a Toad café deep within Fort Cobalt, Ludwig's HQ. There is in-game justification for it: The Toad who runs the place is undercover, selling drinks and food to the Shy Guys there while slipping information about Ludwig's plans, and its weaknesses, to Mario.
• Dark Souls likes to place its vendors in hostile environments: Andre of Astora may not be in a dungeon, but he's mere meters away from a fierce Titanite Demon; Shiva of the East can set up shop in Blighttown's poisonous swamp amid pestilence and toxic terrors; and then you have Vamos operating a forge in the darkest depths of the Catacombs, though technically, he is among his own kind and probably doesn't want too many visitors anyway.
• Played with in Dragon Age: Origins.
  • During the "A Paragon of Her Kind" quest, the PC will encounter a dwarf named Ruck in the Giant Spider-infested Ortan Thaig. Ruck is deliberately hiding out in the ruins of the thaig and has become tainted from eating darkspawn flesh. Provided you don't kill him, Ruck will trade you items that he scavenged from the ruins.
  • Then in the Very Definitely Final Dungeon, literally two rooms before the final boss, you find Sandal, standing hip deep in Darkspawn corpses and with his father's full inventory available for you to load up. The game allows you to express your disbelief and demand an explanation, which is of course just answered with "Enchantment!"
  • Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening features yet another salesman in a darkspawn lair. At least this time, the guy explains that he has an agreement with them to bring them supplies. You can convince him to move his business to your castle instead.
  • Not only does Sandal do that again in the Dragon Age II endgame, but he also helpfully hauls your own party storage chest all the way to the final dungeon.
• Happens three times in The Legend of Dragoon: A (justified) merchant in Hellena Prison and the four brothers Primero, Tercero, Segundo and Quarto. The first two are met in a frozen glacier, the latter in an abandoned, mystical ruin.
• Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter has the three puppet ladies, who sell up items, weapons and the like in areas where no normal citizen would be able to even reach. They also move faster than the player's party, somehow.
• Legacy of the Wizard has over three dozen shops in the dungeon, not counting Trauma Inns. However, most of what they sell can be obtained free if you know where to look.
• The last merchant in Nox sits rather uncomfortably on the edge between the Land of the Dead and the Dismal Swamp, within running distance of the Necromancers' fortress.
• Dead Island has several merchants in the City of Moresby, Jungle, and Prison that hold out in fenced off areas that sell you things at insanely inflated prices in the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse. They are in areas where there would be a lot of traffic, they probably lived there beforehand, and have weapons to defend themselves.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • Persona has several examples in each game. There's a door to the Velvet Room in some dungeons in Persona 2 and Persona 1, 2 and 4 have NPCs in dungeons that will heal you for a price^note Trish the Pixie and the Fox heal you for ¥100 per HP/SP. You can get a discount from the Fox through the Hermit Social Link, though. Trish, however, is stated in-universe to be conning you because she was so greedy about money and forced to watch over the healing spring. Since she turned it into a shop...
  • Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne: The final dungeon of has as well as in a few other dungeons. However, considering that the towns in the game also obviously has a shop and is filled with Random Encounters, every shop may in fact be a Dungeon Shop.
  • Digital Devil Saga: In the second game, Johnny owns the Express Mart which appears in almost every dungeon, even when the Embryon die and the final dungeon is the surface of the sun, he dies too and still sets up shop.
• RuneScape:
  • The game has several "Wilderness Merchants," shopkeepers that wander through various parts of the Wilderness, selling capes. Said Wilderness is the only place where players may kill and loot other players, and is potentially the most dangerous standard area, depending on who you run into.
  • There's also a general store called "Bandit Duty Free" in the Wilderness; the shopkeeper can buy and sell at better prices, due to a lack of taxation.
  • Outside of the Wilderness are "roving bankers," who exist in various far-flung areas. Don't ask how they manage to transport your stuff from your bank account....
• While not particularly prone to appearing in proper dungeons, wandering merchants can appear in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. In the latter, they have established trade routes that take them through some of the more dangerous areas of the Mojave and occasionally pit them against some of its myriad threats. It's not uncommon to exhaust yourself fighting a den of nightstalkers in a canyon, then turn around to find a merchant caravan behind the next rock, ready to sell you food, ammo, and stimpaks (at a price). Wandering merchants are not particularly powerful fighters on their own, however, but they'll usually travel in numbers and often have much better armed mercenary bodyguards accompanying them. It's still not uncommon to encounter their remains after they've had the misfortune of crossing paths with a particularly powerful enemy, especially late in the game when the really nasty creatures start spawning.
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution:
  • The game has a LIMB clinic semi-hidden within The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. Mostly justified because the area only became a "dungeon" when an event caused most of the population there to go insane, and the shopkeeper managed to barricade herself. Transactions are all computer-based, which explains why the shopkeeper simply can't give you free merchandise. Still, it does come off as a bit silly.
  • In a level, the player encounters some gang members willing to sell weapons and ammo - on the perimeter of a FEMA base/detention center. Though the gang members at least have the sense to set up shop where there are no enemy patrols.
  • In The Missing Link DLC, the player can buy weapons and Praxis kits from a shop in the middle of a Belltower base/detention camp. Somewhat justified, as the shop is also the base's official supply office, though it's noted that the shopkeeper also runs a black market side business and would otherwise not have access to such powerful weapons.
  • Averted by the black marketeers in the Alice Garden Pods, who do not stick around when Belltower raids the building.^note They ultimately set up shop elsewhere in Hengsha.
• Might and Magic X has this, with a trio offering various services near the entry to the final dungeon, which is itself within a dungeon. How they got there is made clear, though it does make it odd that the two who sell stuff has any stuff to sell (they were prisoners until you liberated them, and had been prisoners since before the game started). The The Falcon & the Unicorn DLC has another example, but in that case it is fully justified and a part of the plot of the quest — the shopkeepers are a few specific prisoners in an island fortification, given leeway by the guards because they can get stuff the higher-ups in the prison administration can't or won't provide, and because they can't escape anyway (unless they learn to breathe water, which they can't). They get their supplies by contacts with naga, who, being able to breathe water, can get in and out.
• The merchants in Pixel Dungeon set up shop every five floors beneath the ground. It's justified that these merchants are able to make huge profits from desperate adventurers paying up to 400% of an item's base price—and, given that the game is a roguelike, some of these items are in high demand. It's additionally justified that they have magic to protect them from the monsters that roam each floor.
• Mother:
  • An inversion occurs in EarthBound (1994). At some point you get the "For Sale Sign" item, which calls a customer over so you can sell stuff to them. This item works practically anywhere, even in dungeons, leaving one to wonder just how the customer manages to avoid all those enemies on their way to you.
  • Mother 3: Osohe Castle features a small shop run by a ghost. Since there is no money system at that point in the game, you buy stuff with rotten eclairs (the ghosts' favourite food) instead. One such item, the Rope Snake, is required to proceed through the castle.
• Lufia:
  • Lufia & The Fortress of Doom has a dungeon tower with an inn on the first floor. The innkeeper lampshades the convenience of this.
  • Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals has a shopkeeper, Jaffrey, who can randomly appear in the Ancient Cave to sell you low-tier equipment and healing items, as well as combine Mystic Stones. He is a complete and utter extortionist with his prices, but since you have nothing else to do with the money you earn inside...
• Chantelise: There's a fisherman you can trade fish to, that appears in the first dungeon after you progress far enough in the game, and in the 60-floor Survival Dungeon, at the lower levels, there's a merchant to buy/sell things to on every 10th floor.
• BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm:
  • One path in the Deep Web catacombs leads to a cozy modern supermarket run by a pair of talking chibi onions. Like everything else in that place, it’s meant to be weird and dreamlike.
  • Starting in Chapter 7, you can buy the Shopping Catalog item, which lets you open a shop menu to buy and sell items anywhere you like, including dungeons. One has to wonder how they get delivered to you way down there.
• A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: There's a merchant that sells you things at the beginning of a monster-infected corrupted area.
• The Merchant from RE4 plays this role in Rakenzarn Frontier Story, usually popping up before a boss fight in the major dungeon areas. While his timely arrivals might be handwaved by the fact that he knows of the Realmwalkers and might be affiliated with them, it still doesn't explain how he keeps getting there.
• Grim Dawn: There's a merchant in each of the five Skeleton Key Bonus Dungeon. The role of merchant is filled by one of the local monsters, which explains why they are not troubled by the locals but also raises further questions about how and why that particular undead specter or demon or Yugol cultist or Man-Eating Plant decided to turn entrepreneur.
• Cattails: The 25th, 50th, and 75th floor in each mine is a small, safe room containing a mole merchant.
• Every shop in Dungeon Encounters that isn't on Floor 0 is of this type. While it's not hard to find one-off shops, it's just as easy to find "towns" on certain floors that provide a cluster of shops and healing/regenerative resources; however, these locales are just as prone to monsters as the rest of the dungeon. The game helpfully provides shopkeeper images to inform the player that the majority of shops in the game are being managed by monsters.

Shoot 'em Up

• Downwell: There are shops where you can buy sushi and batteries in the middle of a well filled with monsters
• Forgotten Worlds: Sylphie is an Arms Dealer with a shop that emerges from the ceilings and floors within enemy areas. One wonders how did she set up her shop that way.
• Wolfenstein: BJ Blazkowicz encounters a black marketeer in the middle of a heavily defended airfield just prior to entering the zeppelin hangar. He takes time from looting supplies to offer BJ a pick of his find. BJ does find a lot of intelligence on supply thefts and black market infiltration, though the fact that it's possible to have multiple firefights within sight of the black marketeer still stretches the credibility of this one.

Survival Horror

• Fear & Hunger: Termina: There are two of these in the city, justified by the fact that their shopkeepers already owned them before the festival, and kept their sanity after being moonscorched.
  • Bandage Man's shop opens up on day 2, selling commonplace basic supplies.
  • Dr. Kefer's Tricks & Magic specializes in magical items, along with smoking supplies.
• Resident Evil:
  • Resident Evil 4: The merchant shows up at numerous "safe points" throughout the game, offering guns, healing items, ammunition and maps in exchange for coins and treasure. Strangely, even if he's killed in one location, he'll simply respawn at the next.
  • Resident Evil Village: The Duke is an obese shopkeeper who acts similarly to the merchant from Resident Evil 4. He also takes on a larger narrative role as he provides Ethan with information and rescues him after his heart is torn out by Mother Miranda.

Puzzle Games

• Grow Maze: There's a shop in the maze where you need to buy some objects in exchange of hearts to advance.

Turn Based Strategy Games

• Age of Wonders: There are randomly appearing shops such as Wizard Towers, where you can buy spells, artifacts and units. Given that the world is undergoing a massive war between the humans and the elves as well as scattered allied, hostile and independent forces, the whole setting can be seen as one big dungeon rather than only the tombs and ruins you raid.
• Warhammer 40,000: Gladius: The Jokaero Trade Outposts are available to buy and sell artifacts for the various heroes that enter their shops. Given that Gladius Prime is one big relic world full of technology from the Old Ones, ancient Eldar, Necrons and Adeptus Mechanicus renegades as well as wandering hostiles, the planet is essentially one big dungeon.

Non-Video Game examples

Anime & Manga

• Delicious in Dungeon: The first floor of the dungeon has been turned from a cemetery into a social hub and marketplace. A few black-market shops have also set up in the lower levels, populated mainly by renegades and rogues. There's a village of orcs further down, too, but they’re usually not so into trade.

Comic Strips

• Played for Laughs in The Far Side when a traveler in a Thirsty Desert encounters a tropical fish pet shop. Don't ask the logistics of how a such a shop remains supplied in the middle of a desert or how many customers they get.

Literature

• Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?: Rivira is a whole town in the dungeon dedicated to offering rest, food and items to adventurers.
• I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level: Parodied with Yggdrasil. Though the tree is said to be 108 levels of escalating peril, it's become a tourist trap full of overpriced shops. The legendary healer at the summit is a friend of the protagonist, who set up a branch of her business there and hitches a ride to the top for work.
• The Witch of Knightcharm: One of the incoming rookies at an evil Wizarding School, Bahar Aktas, essentially runs one of these. She brews potions and then sells them to other students in exchange for passes (the local scrip) and magical equipment. This works because students are not permitted to leave campus, meaning they can't get supplies elsewhere, and they're only allowed in the school store if they meet certain academic requirements. Students who aren't powerful enough to qualify for school store passes thus can't get any supplies, so they have to cut deals with Bahar... who consequently does a very good business.