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Gandren Department Store
May 1, 2026 at 03:06 AM
Initial version (2026-05-01)
Gandren Department Store is the largest retail anchor in the city of Tingen, located in the affluent Golden Indus Borough. It is one of three named landmarks featured in the Crimson Test build alongside Iron Cross Street Market and Evildoers' Tavern, and serves as the city's primary mundane-side commercial destination for new players.
Gandren occupies a multi-floor brick-and-iron building on a major Golden Indus avenue. The ground floor opens onto a covered colonnade where doormen greet shoppers and route deliveries to the rear loading bay. Inside, the floor plan follows the late-Victorian department-store template: a central atrium with skylight glazing, balconies on the upper floors looking down into the ground-floor display hall, brass-railed staircases at the four corners, and a discreet service lift behind the manager's office.
Ground floor: perfumery, accessories, mundane gloves and hosiery, and the visible-sale display windows fronting the avenue.
First floor: ladies' and gentlemen's tailoring counters, made-to-order suits, civilian outfits, and the wardrobe display showcase.
Second floor: furnishings, household textiles, and a small art-print gallery.
Third floor: a refreshment salon and the manager's offices. The salon doubles as a meeting space for the city's middle-class regulars.
Basement: warehouse and packing area; not directly accessible to shoppers.
Gandren stocks the mundane civilian-cosmetic catalogue: outfits, hairstyles changed at the in-house barber counter, accessories, jewelry of mid-tier pricing, and home furnishings. The store does not sell weapons, ritual ingredients, or any Beyonder-tier goods. Its value to a starting player is two-fold: a clean source of cosmetic outfit-base purchases through the in-game premium currency described in Monetization, and a low-friction quest hub for civilian-side investigations.
Gandren is the daytime meeting point for several faction contacts whose evening operations are elsewhere. The Nighthawks maintain a quiet observation post in the third-floor salon, screened as a long-running afternoon coffee meeting. The Blackthorn Security Company has a security-consulting contract that explains uniformed Blackthorn personnel patrolling the loading bay. Senior managers from the Church of the Evernight Goddess use the salon for low-key parish meetings. None of these presences are advertised; they read as ordinary commerce until a Beyonder player reads the room.
Beyonder commerce does not happen openly in Gandren. The store does host a small number of mundane-cover Beyonder transactions through cover-purchase patterns: a buyer purchases an apparently mundane item (a pendant, a perfume bottle, a ledger) whose true contents have been swapped at the warehouse. These deals are arranged elsewhere; the store is the handover point. Tingen's Mandated Punishers auxiliary occasionally surveils these handovers, particularly when the seller is suspected of a maritime or storm-anomaly link.
The store is not a Beyonder ingredient source. Players who need ingredients should route through Iron Cross Street Market or, for darker categories, Evildoers' Tavern.
Gandren appears in the introductory campaign as a checkpoint civilian-side venue. Three lines of content are routed through it during the Crimson Test:
First-look outfit unlock: a tutorial step prompts the player to visit Gandren's tailor counter to redeem the free starter outfit awarded at character creation.
Salon eavesdrop: a Nighthawks-side quest sends the player to the third-floor salon to surveil a mundane suspect; the encounter is the player's first exposure to the Acting Method social-stealth check.
Cover-purchase intercept: a Mandated Punishers cross-over case routes through the loading bay during late-game Tingen content, after the player has cleared the Iron Cross smuggling line.
Gandren's interior reads as the deliberate contrast to Tingen's seedier districts. Polished brass, velvet drapes, and skylight daylight in the atrium; the smell of perfume from the ground floor and roasted coffee from the salon. The crowd is middle-class and family-leaning, with civil-service clerks, gentlemen taking their daughters out for the afternoon, and tourist visitors from outlying boroughs. A Beyonder player passing through reads the salon especially carefully: the same patterned table cloths and the same cake selection on three consecutive visits is a tell that the room is being kept available for a faction operative.
Tingen: parent city.
Iron Cross Street Market: the gritty mid-tier complement to Gandren.
Evildoers' Tavern: the underworld counterpart in the same city.
Nighthawks and Mandated Punishers: the two faction surveillance presences.
Monetization: cosmetic-shop currencies that interact with Gandren purchases.
