TriadCity Message of the Day
2013-11-23

The Merchant City neighborhood is now online.

Modeled in an extremely loose way on Glasgow's real-life downtown, our Merchant City is a student-y zone of outdoor cafes, hip clothing stores, movie theaters showing interesting classics, supercool tattoo parlors, Agitprop theater collectives, and public squares and parks, criss-crossed by buskers and students and artists, many of whom are associated with the University next door.

It's a neighborhood undergoing transformation. Once upon a time a Victorian enclave of burghers and merchants, its people are little by little turning it into a monument to themselves: iconoclastic, anti-authoritarian, and good-humored. Where formerly its public squares were adorned with monumental art celebrating empire and war, its statues and pocket parks are increasingly being morphed into emblems of peace, cooperation, and democratic self-organization. Just the kind of thing to make devoted NorthEasterners positively puke.

Its public squares are frequented by numerous buskers, reciting poems to interested passers-by. Currently we've got Hugh MacDiarmid, Hamish Henderson, Langston Hughes, Guillaume de Poitiers, and Francois Villon all entertaining the public, working for tips. Quite the mix of Scottish Renaissance, Harlem Renaissance, and Troubador cultures, if we do say so. We'll shortly announce a new Busker Role available to players, allowing you to be spiffed dinars and experience for reciting your own works or those you admire. Watch this space.

In a way, this neighborhood is a model for what all of TriadCity will increasingly become, more and more rapidly as the world fleshes out. Swarming with individualized NPCs, Merchant City is alive with movement throughout the day as buskers come and go, cafes change shifts, wanderers wander through, and tourists from all over drop by for sight-seeing, including, we hope, you. There isn't a single static NPC in Merchant City, where "static" means, standing permanently in one place awaiting your encounter. The future is now.

Merchant City is north of the Parc Daniel Cohn-Bendit, east of the University, in the NorthWestern Third. The closest Metro stop is the Red Line at University Station.

Check it out!

Back to the current MOTD index.
Not yet a member? Get started today!