There are few things like a port town for variety. Bayport features a busy waterfront with a row of warehouses on shore mirroring a row of docks and wharves on the water. These handle many boats of trade coming from upriver and across the bay. The warehouses also deal with the many wagon trains running overland from town to town, connecting land routes with sea routes.
Centrally located, Bayport has become a hub for activity of all kind, drawing in traders from every compass point, by land or sea, as well as every race and class across the social strata. There are merchant stalls with a wide variety of goods from the entire surrounding countryside, as well as guild halls to cater to the needs and interests of the separate classes.
In addition to its healthy core of merchants and goods, the town has also become a gathering point and launch off for adventurers of all ilk. The easy access to any other part of the map is one drawing point, as are the promise of risk and reward offered by the forbidding mountains that tower over the low river valleys. Much gold has been found in those hills, as well as gems and other precious metals. And much of it has been retrieved at great cost, with vile monsters drawn equally to it, along with outlaws and bandits of all sorts.
The town is fed by two main waterways flowing into the bay, the Willow River and the Northflood. The Northflood is a strong, swift flowing river that crashes down out of the northern and eastern hills, rushing to the sea. The Willow River, on the other hand, winds lazily through the flat pastures and swamps south of the town. It is a broad, slow moving stream at this point, but its origins stretch far up through Pleasantville into the high mountain valleys, and it claims many branches for its head, some as wild as the mouth is calm.
The Northflood rises quickly into the hills above the town, across the moors to Dassal and Waynesburg, the Golden Lake and beyond to Hillsburg in the far north.
Lately I have been thinking Bayport ought to be a boom town - maybe wars around Waynesburg cut it off from the big cities in the Kingdom in the south, so its trade started to go through Bayport and by ocean to the south - turning a modest port city into a bustling one, full of money and crooks and trouble. (Kind of like the original Hardy Boys Bayport - those Long Island boom towns fueled by bootlegger cash.)
ReplyDeleteThat sounds good. It makes it fit better too, since it was never a part of the old setup. It became a necessary port, and quickly grew into a major city. I think its likely that some kind of a gold rush or similar "find" helped draw refugees and the usual restless together in a hurry. This allows a whole populated area to be developed that can connect with everything else we already have. It also ensures the unsettled nature between "natives" and newcomers, allowing for very frequent and random clashes between the groups, as well as allowing monsters of all kinds to be found.
ReplyDeleteThat was always kind of a blank area on the map, between Waynesburg and the western sea. You had Oceanside over there - and later I stuck Lenay in there (big peninsular straight west of Bayport, north of Oceanside, invented from reading about William Wallace on one of our trips to Cape Breton, that convinced me we needed a Scotland.) You had the Kingdom in the south (down where Jonathan got into his solo adventures among the upper crust) - various duchies and whatnot along the river, but nothing between that stuff and the west coast. But Bayport fits nicely over there - a smallish port, trading with Lenay and the Vikings and whatnot up in the north, etc. - which suddenly becomes the recipient of all this extra commerce. Kind of like how the civil war shifted all the north south commerce on the rivers east west, on the railroads - only without railroads...
ReplyDeleteI like it too because it's wide open to be invented. I'm inclined to set (or start) adventures in Lenay - I've been imagining Robin Hood style campaigns (outlaws, crusaders, absent kings and usurpers, uppity barons, etc.) for years, and that's a good place. It's just off to the west of Bayport, I think - across the sea - separate but close enough to allow for easy transport back and forth. But I think Bayport is like the magnet that draws all the trouble in this part of the world, like Waynesburg does in the central part of the world.