Inn Merchants

As you can see, the merchants who operate at the inn all sell junk, and overpriced junk at that. You’re never going to be in a position where you want to buy something from them. You will find them useful for quickly selling off heavy items like looted equipment that’s not worth keeping around. Something you’ll notice when you sell things to these merchants (and others in the game) is that the sold item immediately appears in their inventory. This means that you can buy it back, provided you don’t let too much time pass.

You will also notice that Geralt’s sell prices are a small fraction of the price most merchants will charge for an item once it’s in their inventory. In general, merchant items in The Witcher 2 are sold at extremely high markup. This means that anything you need that you can acquire for free, whether as quest loot or through exploration, is well worth your time to obtain. While all merchants buy Geralt’s used items for the same amount of orens for items, they tend to sell things at rates that can vary. You can further manipulate merchant rates by obtaining the Haggling attribute later in this chapter.

Most of the merchants in Flotsam happen to charge the same markup, but there’s one merchant who doesn’t. It’s a good idea to go see what a town’s merchants have in stock and how their prices compare first thing when you come to a new town area. There are relatively few ways to acquire lots of orens in The Witcher 2, so be as frugal as you can when it comes to managing your money.

When you aren’t using the inn for item management, you can also use it to play mini-games and to visit the brothel. You can find arm-wrestlers on the inn’s upper level. On the lower level, you can find fistfighting and dice poker. There are side quests associated with playing these mini-games that we’ll cover later.

The Brothel

If you descend to the inn’s lower level and exit through the door opposite the stairwell, you can enter the brothel. At the brothel, Geralt can offer one of the prostitutes a certain sum of orens in exchange for a night of passion. Each of the prostitutes has an offer range, and Geralt must offer above her minimum or she’ll refuse him. The amount you must offer a given prostitute at any given time is determined semi-randomly, much like the success chances of influencing an NPC by using a sign or intimidation. Generally, you need to offer at least 50 percent of a prostitute’s maximum value to get her to accept Geralt’s offer.

While you do get to see a love scene depicting Geralt’s sexy funtimes with his lady of choice once you make a successful offer, there is no other benefit to sleeping with a prostitute. She won’t restore your health or offer you any other benefit later on in the game. The brothel is basically just a way of making Geralt’s orens disappear (much like real-world escort services). It’s worth noting that almost any offer high enough to be accepted by a prostitute would buy you something far more useful from one of the town’s merchants.

Above the inn is the residence of the visiting sorceress, Síle de Tansarville, and a few of the brothel’s other employees. Inside the inn is usually where you’ll find NPCs friendly to Geralt during this chapter of the game: Triss, Roche, Dandelion, and Zoltan. The only times they won’t be in the inn is when progressing a quest causes them to travel to another location.