Economy - Trade routes Overview
Participating Cities/Towns/Villages
- New Hope – main PC base (mainly Human)
- Gabilgathol – Dwarven settlement
- Lothran – Human trade post/village (near the Dwarves)
- Garthurian – Elvin settlement
- Syn Gond – Gnomic settlement
- Glistencreek Vale – Human trade post/village (near the Gnomes)
From this its is clear that we have 4 ‘Old’ or ‘main’ settlements – (in broad terms) Human, Elvin, Gnome and Dwarf! – And while new Hope is new – it is also built on the remains of a previously large human settlement, so (in some respects) counts as an Old settlement too. However, we also have 3 new settlements - New Hope, Lothran and Glisten Creek.
We have talked a bit about trade and trade systems - we came to the conclusion that it would be possible to trade between the islands in two different ways. First is trade via portals - individuals who travel freely between portals carry small amounts of trade goods about their person. Second - trade via canoe - canoes carrying larger amounts of trade goods between islands - its much slower but larger loads can be carried.
Conveniently - we have two types of settlement and two different trade routes. How about this as a rationale?
When the ancient ones first set up this test of character they originally had 5 stages to the test. (That might fit well as there are 5 Adversaries)
- Kagadan
- The site of New Hope
- Garthurian - Elves
- Gabilgathol - Dwarves
- Syn Gond - Gnomes
So we could just have portals in these places (if that meets the needs of the story arc) - maybe each portal could be a (Non moving!!) statue of one of the adversaries?
From the descriptions of the settlements - Gabilgathol and Syn Gond are both underground and not really suitable for canoe based trade. However, both underground settlements have a human settlement close. If we assume that both New Hope and Garthurian are either on the coast, or close to a navigable river - we can then implement a canoe trading route that takes in the surface settlements
- New Hope - Humans
- Garthurian - Elves
- Lothran – Human access to Dwarfs
- Glistencreek Vale – Human access to Gnomes
The assumption being that Lothran and Glisten Creek act as trade posts for the underground settlements.
That would give us a fairly straightforward economic model to consider.