Cliffside Market
| Cliffside Market | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Information | |
| Plane | Mercadia |
| Part of | Mercadia City, Mount Mercadia, , the Mercadian plains |
Located on the edge of the upside-down Mount Mercadia, the Cliffside Market of Mercadia City is a sprawling expanse of vendors' booths and is thick with milling crowds.
Description
The Cliffside Market is known for its incredible noise. The hustle and calls of the Lower Market at the foot of the mountain, accessible via the city's lifts, are nothing compared to the roar up on the Cliffside. It is omnipresent and almost deafening in its intensity. On either side of the street are long stalls bursting with goods. In the center of the broad avenue is raised a circular set of stairs ending in a platform. On this platform, sellers crowd, each waving a paper and yelling out the virtues of goods offered or wanted for purchase. Along the street at regular intervals are other such platforms, and beyond more streets and platforms and noise. Around the platforms, the crowd ebbed and flowed, looking over the items in the booths, picking them up, putting them down, touching, tasting, squeezing, stroking, asking the price, arguing over the price, and paying the price. The stalls themselves are little more than temporary creations of wood and canvas, stretching out from the fronts of buildings. Behind the stalls stand dun-colored buildings with square windows and arched doorways. Structures crowd against each other, shouldering for space and forming rankling canyons that maze away through the city. The dizzy chaos of mud walls is accentuated by the tiles and elaborate mosaics that cover them. No street is straight, no block is level. The roads climb and shamble, dip and drift, giving visitors a sense of vertigo.[1]
History
After passing through the Lower Market, the Weatherlight Crew was brought by the Magistrate's soldiers via lifts to the Cliffside Market. Having had to separate into smaller groups to fit on the lifts, heavily reducing the presence of the soldiers guarding them, Gerrard Capashen saw this as an opportunity to wreak chaos and escape. He used the boy Atalla as co-conspirator, having him steal a full wineskin from a merchant, then pretend he'd been ordered to do so by the soldier's guard. Tensions escalated quickly, and an all-out brawl ensued, but then a cateran enforcer appeared. Surprising both Gerrard and Tahngarth with its superior combat skills and defensive carapace, the battle was almost lost until the horror noticed that Squee was part of the crew. Quickly submitting to the goblin's will, thinking him a Kyren, the cateran allowed the crew to escape into Mercadia City.[1]
In-game references
- Represented in:
References
- ↑ a b Francis Lebaron. (1999) Mercadian Masques, Wizards of the Coast. ISBN-13 0-7869-1188-3.