How to Play TriadCity

The TriadCity Players' Guide

Mapping

TriadCity's developers have provided a minimal set of very general maps which you can find here. Instead of fleshing these out, developers have left the occupation of map-making to players with the Cartographer Role. Cartographers contribute the most detailed visual representations. It's a potentially rewarding way to make a living by contributing to the world.

There are two problems with physical maps. First, in an environment like ours which is continually changing, they rapidly go stale. Second, they're not super useful for the visually-impaired. We encourage you to keep your own mental maps up to date by frequently re-exploring areas you've already experienced.

Our beloved veteran adventurer Gwene offers some experienced suggestions:

Knowing the location of some important neighborhoods is a great start for creating your own mental map of the City. There are maps created by players, but knowing the approximate locations of different neighborhoods makes moving around much easier.

For example, internalizing the way to Gardener's Cottage or Pirate Ship can be done by counting steps. Starting from The Temple on Sanctuary Island and documenting steps to find your way back is a good idea.

Knowing your steps to north and west, and the turns along the route to both staircases leading up to White Plaza 2nd level (and the Continuing Education Classroom) is a good start for being able to move around the City with ease. Later on expanding your exploration to South and NE allows you to understand the similarities and differences between the Thirds.

Please note that Zones may be bigger inside than they appear to be outside when you walk by them. For example, if you walk West from the room named "Before The Gardener's Cottage", you get to Lenny Bruce Street with 6 steps. From that room, taking 4 steps south brings you to the "Intersection Along the River". However, if you decide to return to Sanctuary Island just by turning east, it will take 16 steps to get to "Vista Point On the Riverbank", which is just 4 steps south from where we started. The reason is walking through another Zone: the southern part of "Royal Gardens" with 10 rooms of plants, plus an archway in each end.

We note that some MUD clients such as Mudlet feature automapping as part of their appeal. We don't know if these are useful with TriadCity, or not, because frankly we've never been able to get them to work. Maybe that's a peculiarity of TriadCity with its frequently nonrational geometries. We just don't know.

Players' Guide TOC

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