Mysterious Merchant
Mysterious Merchant is a live-action quest-based social event that I have built up over the last 3 years. I created the experience to push DigiPen students outside of their comfort zones by participating in fun and humorous quests that encourage social interaction. I perform as both the Shopkeeper and Quest Master NPCs, each of whom have distinct voices and personalities intended to create more immersion. Completing a quest awards gold coins that can be spent in the shop to acquire fantasy-themed items from the Mysterious Merchant universe.
Mysterious Merchant Worldbuilding
This is a picture of me roleplaying as the Quest Master “Mysterious Mark” during my Mysterious Merchant event. I gave him the personality of a seasoned guild master in the style of classic fantasy RPGs, like Dungeons and Dragons. Although I allow for some variation depending on what players ask, Mysterious Mark has set lines of dialogue and idle animations meant to imitate the quest-giver NPC stereotype. The same thing can be said for his counterpart, the Shopkeeper “Strange Stan”, who also has his own set of unique voice lines and dialogue meant to be a FOIL of Mysterious Mark’s. Furthermore, Strange Stan’s lines about each shop item are made to build out the world that Mysterious Merchant takes place in, while also giving Mysterious Mark more lore through describing how each item was found on his adventures.
Strange Stan’s Stupendous Store
Alongside the quest giving is the corresponding shop, meant to give the players a place to spend the gold that they earn for participating. Every item has a distinct description meant to explain what it is in-universe, such as the flavored water being health potions or the 3D-printed eggs being dragon eggs. On top of that, every item in the shop has been given a gold cost and a rank requirement that incentivizes players to participate multiple times in order to earn rank ups and get more valuable items, or to get enough gold to afford items they would not otherwise be able to afford in a single playthrough. All of the lower rank items have gold costs below 5 coins so that even if someone purchases something after their first quest, they still have gold leftover to save, allowing them to return in the future and have more gold for more expensive items the next time.
Bonus Information
Mysterious Merchant has been an ongoing personal project of mine for the better part of three years at school. This event has gone through several changes over the years as I began to iterate and playtest different ideas that I had to see what would incentivize people to participate more. This led to me trying out ways to encourage people to return through a loyalty/reputation system, more expensive and desirable rewards, and a trading card set for people to try and collect based on both Mysterious Merchant and the school itself. Results showed that these ideas made it much more appealing to continue to participate, as I would get repeat customers with fully completed loyalty cards, multiple people who saved up enough from quests to buy the most expensive item (the wizard hat), as well as people encouraging their friends to participate.
All of this was accomplished purely through word of mouth, as I had no form of advertising the event outside of telling anyone who asked when it would happen. Since I made these improvements, I averaged around 15 - 20 people participating every time I did the event, with many of them being new participants.
On top of all of that, I also did bits of system design with the shop, working out how much items should cost based on the amount of gold a person would have or be able to save up, designing it in such a way that almost every item would leave a person with one or two coins leftover to incentivize returning and saving their gold for the more expensive items.