Urban Trade on Duria

Even the smallest village is essentially a central market where local people come to buy and trade for goods that require materials they do not have access to or skills to create themselves. Even a small fort built purely for a military purpose rarely stands for long before merchants begin to settle near or within its walls.

Cities tend to be where skilled craftsmen congregate to manufacture goods using materials farmed, gathered and mined in more rural areas. They, in turn, sell those manufactured goods to one another and back to the agrarians who produced the raw materials in the first place. Of course, this buying and selling does not take place in person… merchant caravans move raw materials from rural areas into cities and then return to rural areas to sell the manufactured goods that those people need.

The largest cities on Duria are not only centers of trade and highly defensible, but often a place where disparate cultures meet and mingle. Most of these cities have found reason in the past to ensure their own native culture is not completely dominated by a foreign culture, so ‘foreign quarters’ (like Neptaris’ Castaway Hill) are a fairly common feature of large urban centers where foreign merchants must sell their goods. In some lands these settlements are temporary in nature, dependent upon seasonal arrival of merchants. Because native merchants don’t tend to enjoy the competition, these foreign settlements are often the target of pogroms or increased taxation by the local merchant class or nobility. Conversely, when one city begins to tax its foreign merchants too harshly, another nearby city usually will begin to relax their own laws and therefore draw these foreign merchants to trade with them. Such activities are what trade wars are all about.

The vast majority of urban economies on Duria are dominated to one degree or another by a myriad of trade guilds that often set prices for goods, purchase raw materials in bulk, regulate the quality of goods produced and establish which craftsmen are considered “Masters” and thus enabled to establish their own shop and train Apprentices of their own. In some countries, such as Lun Dorak and Kamara, these trade guilds are heavily regulated and even sometimes incorporated into the government itself. The port towns of the Pirate Isles, of course, take the opposite approach… guilds are relatively rare and most craftsmen are free to set their own prices and employ who they wish. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the places where trade guilds have the most independence (such as the Freecity of Neptaris) tend to produce the highest quality goods.

The largest cities tend to not only be port cities but the capitals of powerful nations. Noviozeta, Paeldain, Balderstein, Terregos, Trias and Zelos City are all major port cities as well as national capitals. Neptaris, arguably the largest and wealthiest city on Duria (comparable only to Paeldain in the size of its population), is an independent Freecity, despite attempts by others to conquer the wealthy city over the millennia. Davalor, though the hub of trade in Lun Dorak, is located high on an extremely defensible mountain peak and has only gained prominence due to the Dorakian’s highly structured society.