Street Sellers
3. The Street-sellers of Eatables and Drinkables,—including the vendors of fried fish, hot eels, pickled whelks, sheep’s trotters, ham sandwiches, peas’-soup, hot green peas, penny pies, plum “duff,” meat-puddings, baked potatoes, spice-cakes, muffins and crumpets, Chelsea buns, sweetmeats, brandy-balls, cough drops, and cat and dog’s meat—such constituting the principal eatables sold in the street; while under the head of street-drinkables may be specified tea and coffee, ginger-beer, lemonade, hot wine, new milk from the cow, asses milk, curds and whey, and occasionally water.
Even though Shadgard is kind of a small town, I think it'd be awesome if there was a semi-random chance (maybe base it off of how much riln is flowing into and out of the market, as well as how much riln is stored in the banks at any given time, with increased riln flow and wealth accumulation increasing the chances) of a room having a "Street Vendor" in it, hawking wares. The easiest (I imagine) one to work out would be food vendors - simulating folks that have extra food they've prepared, trying to hawk it to adventurers and People of Interest (IE, PCs) that they expect have money to shell out.
To maintain the importance of Player Cooking however, I would make it so that the quality of street vendor food is hidden/obscured until the item is consumed, if that's at all possible (and maybe even obscure the nutritional value as well) - have any given vendor a chance to either be a Legit Hawker pushing average (or very rarely, Fine) foods, or Grifters pushing Terrible and Low Nutrition foods. I'd make it so that PCs with the Trade skill (amongst other things, see below), Cooking Skill, or the Awareness Attribute had a chance to determine the quality and nutritional value when ordering the food however.
Street Buyers
This would be a perk of the Trading skill! It'd be cool if there was, each day, a random chance (see above Street Seller idea for methods that would alter this chance) for a Street Buyer to show up in a room in town. People with the Trading skill could effectively hear "down the grapevine" that someone is particularly interested in a commodity, and after learning such, be able to see a special line in a randomly determined (but still crowded) room in Shadgard about someone who's looking for specific wares. I'd imagine this could be a way to (purposefully) circumvent Market Flooding, and maybe even have a chance for the Street Buyer to buy things (in limited quantities) for a slightly higher price due to increased demand.
I think this should (if implemented) obviously apply to both Shadgard and NotShadgard when the latter is released. Mostly, this would just be a cool way (imo) to bring the world alive a little, and maybe help lend credence to the concept of vNPCs existing and having lives in the world.