Mostly okay . . . yeah. That's something.
It's hard to convey the uncannily uniform (and some might say distressing) . . . okayness of the Grand Bazaar (both the book and the titular fantasy location). It's not a utopia. There are conflicts. Potential adventures. Someone in the Culinary Plaza might hire your group of mystic warriors to travel into the depths of Vasgothia to retrieve some Fruits of the Passions, on the misguided belief that it will help them win a cooking competition (or perhaps just impress the lizard folk adventurer-turned-chef-turned-district-administrator who is very clearly modelled on Gordon Ramsey). But, in the end, whatever problems these merchants are having, it's going to be okay. "While his demeanor is fierce in the kitchen, he is entirely cool and calm in other social settings."
The result is a book that sometimes feels like it's wearing its blandness as a badge of honor. And which, quite honestly, it should, because it's at its best when it's at its most boring. Oh no, foreign ideas from Travar, the merchant city, have led to a renaissance in marketing, where low quality goods, advertised by famous troubadours, are crowding out traditional dwarven "built for a lifetime" crafts. People don't seem to care because the newcomers are successfully competing on price. Will the noble houses be able to adapt? Is enshittification inevitable?
Anyway, there's an urban housing crisis too. It's all very relevant. You could run a variety of low-stakes adventures out of this area and stay busy for a long time, but mostly the vibe of the book is "what if we did all our shopping episodes in the same Mall."
Oh, man, I really am on the verge of self-parody here. I'm staring at this post and I'm torn between thinking it's way too short for being the first in nearly two weeks and realizing that if I keep going, it's only because I love hearing myself talk. This book is the purest grade of fluff imaginable. My notes are so low-drama, you don't even know. There are two gay dwarf couples and I ask myself if that could be a window to fatuously demand more Rozko the Unruly, but even I know my heart isn't in it.
There's a blacksmith shop called "Dame of the Flame" and that's pretty cool. It's run by an elf and an ork who were forced by the governor to share a forge (because of the "Governor's politics of mixing up hostile factions vying for favor ") and if you were writing a fanfic about it you'd 100% make it an enemies-to-lovers yuri.
I think the author of the "Culinary Plaza" chapter might be a little disconnected from the realities of animal agriculture. Like, there's this notion that you could make a combination dairy/restaurant/petting zoo that would attract families because the kids will want to pet the sheep that are being milked for cheese and . . . I don't know, I feel like maybe there are good reasons why "farm to table" restaurants aren't usually built on actual working farms.
Also, I'm just going to say, the choice to replace Magician's Row with Gallery Row and to knock down the "haphazard chaos of stalls in every nook and cranny" in favor of a sensible grid layout . . . maybe those are good ideas in the Watsonian sense that the characters really want to gentrify the hell out of this marketplace, but it's an absurd direction to go from a Doyalist perspective. "Let's go to the clean, well-lit art gallery and not the rats' nest of alleys crammed with shady merchants hawking dubiously magical goods" . . . said no group of fantasy adventurers, ever.
And that's pretty much it. All I have to say. Grand Bazaar is a perfectly adequate book, filled end-to-end with locations, characters, and adventure hooks that are . . . consistently serviceable. Throal has been gentrified.
Ukss Contribution: There's a magical curio shop that, in addition to its other goods and services, allows customers (for a fee) to open a sinister magic box that "delivers what the customer needs or deserves, not necessarily what they want." They then have thirty days to use the item to "accomplish their charge in life." If they can't get their business handled and return the item before the time limit, the box eats their soul.
It's got a good balance between fairy tale logic and ttrpg pragmatism ("welp, you're on an adventure now"). I think I could find a place for it in Ukss.
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