Scarterran merchants

by Eron12 with Hero Forge

-Danuta, leader of the Fumayan Masks

Merchants don't put in their dues and get promoted as recognition for their hard work. Every purchase or sale is a separate transaction and a merchants stands or falls on how their current balance of assets and liabilities sits.   Some starve to death (or give up being merchants and move on to a less risky profession) and others managed to set themselves as veritable princes in all but name.

  This competition is good for society as a whole and is more civilized the savage "competition" the Testers indulge in.

Tengku #5 by Zeta Gardner

-Eknok, tengku merchant

"The second difficulty faced by all merchants, apart from the looming threat of starvation, is that merchants are perpetually strangers wherever they go. Whether you are buying goods from 30 miles down the river or from a distant shore 3000 miles away, in order to buy foreign goods you have to deal with foreign people.

  The Rovers and Tenders try to encourage people to be welcoming to foreign people in their midst, but this seldom works. Most Scarterrans are innately distrustful of outsiders on some level regardless of what the nice priestesses tell them.   The Masks of Phidas try to push forth the idea that merchants are noble, valuable people but they are facing an uphill battle. One, most people don’t like or trust the Masks, so their endorsement doesn’t help us much. Also we have to deal with the counter messages from the rest of the Nonagon.   Most lowborn Scarterrans are farmers or craftsmen. Both farmers and craftsmen produce useful things with their skill, sweat, and toil and they trade these products for other products or for coin. The Stewards, Lanterns, Guardians, and more besides like to crow how much nobility there is in men and women working with their hands.   Most highborn Scarterran make their wealth from land they own, and they back up their credentials this up with weapons and magic. They risk their lives in defense of their lands (or at the very least, their ancestors risked their lives in the acquisition of their lands. Adventurers often end up with a lot of wealth, or they die. Those that acquire wealth gain their wealth from undertaking dangerous quests. Most adventurers, or at least most successful adventurers, are enmeshed in noble politics. Most nobles are at least descended from successful adventurers. Adventurers and nobles are not always viewed as honorable but at least people understand them.   In a way, every long-distance trek moving trade goods from Point A to Point B is a dangerous adventure but the bards and troubadours don’t’ ever sing tales of the hardships of heroic merchants bravely moving goods through dangerous territories. The commoners just take for granted that merchants sometimes appear. Dirty filthy stinking foreign merchants! The nobility isn’t much better.   Nobles and commoners don’t agree on much but they tend to agree on their poor attitude towards merchants. Merchants supposedly don’t make anything. Merchants supposedly don’t face any dangers or travels. Despite this, some merchants are quite wealthy. In the eyes of commoners and nobles, the means in which merchants gain their wealth is little better than theft. and every merchant is out to cheat their customers. Also, merchants are lazy cowards who are shirk from work or risk.   Most merchants are not particularly wealthy. Most merchants are lucky to own more than a camel or pair of donkeys and are constantly one or two bad deals away from going hungry.   No one trusts a poor disheveled merchant, so any impoverished merchant has to dress and act like he is better off than he really is. This attitude carries over for life, so most merchants that succeed tend to flaunt their wealth. So therefore, nobles and commoners alike see merchants flaunting their wealth or putting on airs and they assume all merchants are rich…somehow.   So there are a lot of attitudes leading to Scarterrans treating merchants badly, but we are usually selling things people want so rich and poor alike are prone to be polite to our faces and then badmouth us behind our backs."

Tengku #5 by Zeta Gardner

-Eknok, tengku merchant

No, not all tengku are merchants. If every merchant in Scarterra was a tengku, less than half of the adult tengku population would have a livelihood.   (It would be good for the common man if every merchant was a tengku. Goods would be transported more effeciently and competition between tengku merchants would keep prices down)

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Tengku #5 by Zeta Gardner

-Eknok, tengku merchant

We don't know much about the day-to-day life of the First Age, I can only guess what merchants were like back then.   It seems likely that given how fiercely independent and generally covetous dragons are today, their ancient ancestors were similar. It is likely that dragons had few if any professional merchants because every dragon was a part-time merchant in his or her own right.

  I'm sure the thurekal races and other non-dragons subsisting on the scraps had some sort of primitive economy with their own equivalent to modern day impoverished merchants barely eking out enough successful trades to stay alive. But history books tend to focus on rich and powerful mortals and not the lowly and downtrodden. And most history books dating back to First Age are dust now, so why worry about people this long dead.   We know a little bit more about the Second Age. The ancient elves of this era had very modern notions that merchant endeavors were not real work. Also, elves are often stuck in "slow time". The ancient elves had their heads in the clouds even more than the elves of today. Most of them couldn't have been good merchants if they wanted to.   From what we can tell, at least half of the merchants of the era were tengku. I would have loved to see that! While I'm sure the elves were conscending to the tengku among them (and every other non-elf among them), at least they seemed to not interfere with our ancestors aquisition of wealth and security.   Unfortunately, merchants in general and tengku in general were hit very hard by the Second Unmaking. Common wisdom is that nine of ten mortals died overall at this. It seems nineteen out of twenty tengku died and almost no merchants of any race survived the calamity once the civilized institutions they depended on collapsed.   At the dawn of the Third Age, the survivors of the Unmaking, and the new upstart humans had to rebuild mercantile traditions from the ground up. The Masks will talk about the guidance of Phidas spirits and Phidas priests in helping build up new trade network, but it was really the tengku survivors that made modern commerce what it is today.   Progress was slow, Early merchants were quote primitive. It wasn't until near the end of the Red Era that coins finally began to supplant barter as the main vessel of trade. It wasn't until after feudalism became widespread that merchant guilds and fellowships really began to come into their own.

Tengku #5 by Zeta Gardner

-Eknok, tengku merchant

The first difficulty faced by all merchants is that while traveling from Market A to Market B, he has to eat. If he has employees, they have to eat. If he has pack animals, they have to eat too. There are other supplies merchants need besides food, but food is usually the resource that makes or breaks a trade deal. No matter how valuable the trade goods you are carrying, at a certain point, if you move it too far, the cost of transport will exceed the value of your trade goods.

  A merchant can mitigate this risk if he is trading in high value, portable high end items such as reagents, spices, jewelry, magic weapons, or art, but these goods come up with their own risk. They attract more thieves than mundane goods. Also, you might not be able to find a customer willing and able to pay a fair price for your goods. The more you ask around looking for high end customers, the more rumors spread about what you are carrying that will attract thieves right to you.   You can use boats, ships, barges, pack animals, and even magic to help transport goods, but these things also cost money. Whether you have a magic Bag of Holding or a simple pack mule, you will probably have to make more than one trade trip just to pay for the investment cost of your trading vessel.   While traveling, merchants have to deal with accidents, theft, and inclement weather but above all of this is threat of starving to death because you had to move your goods too far, too slowly.