Silver Marches Trade Routes (1367 DR)

Current Conditions (Summer 1367)

Obould has withdrawn the bulk of his forces to Dark Arrow Keep in the Spine of the World, taking a substantial tribute haul with him. This buys quiet — Obould's own law runs on tribute, tax, and enforced order delegated down a strict chain of command, so a large haul reinforces his position rather than sitting idle. He holds his commandants in line through the same strongarm logic he uses on everyone else, but not all of them are satisfied; the bloc of generals who want raids and want to hit Sundabar hasn't gone anywhere, just quiet for now.

Roads and river routes disrupted during the invasion are reopening to something closer to normal traffic, and merchant confidence is visibly rebuilding — new caravans, expanded schedules, a few speculative ventures into routes that were too risky during the war. The one exception is the Southern Corridor (below), where bandit activity in the Evermoors has replaced orcs as the main friction.

The Three Trade Systems

The Marches' economy runs on three overlapping systems:

• The Southern Corridor — overland trade to and from Waterdeep via Triboar, entering the Marches at Everlund.
• The River Spine — Rauvin/Surbrin river trade, running from Sundabar down through Silverymoon and Everlund to Nesme, then south toward Waterdeep via the Surbrin and Dessarin.
• Inner Regional Trade — short-haul town-to-town movement of raw goods (ore, grain, timber, salt, furs) into the cities that process or consume them, plus tribal trade at the margins.

All three are seasonal to different degrees — a closed pass, an ice-locked harbor, a barbarian clan not yet returned from summer range are all natural pacing tools.

The Southern Corridor (Waterdeep ↔ Everlund via Triboar)

Everlund is the funnel point for nearly all trade moving north–south toward Waterdeep. This is the overland caravan route — wagons and pack trains, not barges — running Waterdeep → Triboar → Everlund, roughly a week to ten days depending on weather and escort. It runs year-round, unlike the river routes, though winter storms in the higher stretches near Triboar slow it and raise luxury-goods prices through the coldest months.

Goods flowing north: manufactured luxury goods, spices, silks, oils, incense, wine, fine metalwork, books and scrolls (Silverymoon's academies are steady buyers), Waterdhavian coin.

Goods flowing south: silver from Rimehill, furs and hides funneled through Sundabar and Everlund, salted fish and preserved meat, Everlund-finished leatherwork, and — quietly — art and antiquities of the kind Rudi's father used to deal in.

Current state: the road hasn't fully recovered from the orc war — not because of orcs anymore, but because bandit groups have established themselves in the Evermoors in the interim, taking advantage of the chaos and the region's already-thin patrols. Escort costs and effective insurance pricing remain elevated even with the original threat gone. Merchants who can afford heavier guard details are moving with confidence again; smaller operators are more cautious, which favors the wealthier trading houses and is its own quiet source of resentment. This also makes for a clean, low-stakes adventure seed independent of the main plot — an escort job, a bandit camp to clear, a caravan gone missing near the Evermoors' edge — the kind of thing Trovion or another merchant contact might casually ask the party to look into.

The River Spine (Sundabar ↔ Silverymoon ↔ Everlund ↔ Nesme ↔ south)

The Rauvin River is one of the north's most important travel routes, with Sundabar, Everlund, and Silverymoon all sited along it. At Nesme it joins the Surbrin, which eventually joins the Dessarin and flows to the sea — the Nesme–Yartar stretch is an important north–south trade route in its own right. The Rauvin valley from Rivermoot to Jalanthar, thick with farms, feeds both Silverymoon and Everlund.

Seasonality: river barges run from ice-out to ice-in — a spring-through-autumn business. The Silverymoon–Sundabar leg (through the Rauvin Mountains via Rauvincross) closes for winter entirely, and traffic detours to the Moon Pass instead, which inverts seasonally: normally the most dangerous of the three mountain passes, it becomes the safest and shortest route between Sundabar, Everlund, and Silverymoon once winter sets in.

Nesme functions as a transshipment point rather than just a waypoint — southbound shipping usually stops there to top off cargo, consolidating goods that came down the Rauvin from Sundabar, Silverymoon, and Everlund onto Surbrin-bound vessels.

What flows where:

• Sundabar → downstream: iron and worked metal (Adbar's ore trade, funneled through Sundabar rather than direct — the dwarves rarely deal with outsiders themselves), timber and furs from the Black Lion tribe's trade relationship, salted river fish.
• Silverymoon → downstream/upstream: silver from Rimehill, salt from Saltrun and Khelb, finished goods from its guilds and academies (instruments from Utrummin, minor enchanted goods, ink and paper trades associated with the Sages' Archive), and administrative correspondence — the Watchful Order's own courier traffic plausibly rides the same barges.
• Everlund → both directions: the clearinghouse. Everlund produces comparatively little itself; it profits from tolls, warehousing, and the Bell Market's brokerage rather than raw goods, consistent with its standing as the north's second city and center of commerce rather than a producer city.
• Lhuvenhead, forty miles east of Everlund, is an established river stopover — its harbor is full of barges and keelboats year-round, with inns serving the river trade. A natural midpoint stop, toll point, or rumor hub.
• Rivermoot, at the Surbrin/Rauvin confluence, was livelier when Mithral Hall trade still flowed; now it's smaller and sheep-focused, but still an important warm-season stopover between Nesme and Silverymoon.

Mithral Hall: the doors closed over a century ago, and nobody now living remembers where the hall even was — it survives only as forgotten lore, something the eldest folk might half-recall or that could be dug out of old books. The Sages' Archive's underground levels, restricted to Haliver, his scribes, and Cristofur, are the obvious place such a record would sit. Rivermoot still gets the occasional fortune-seeker outfitting a search, and the old dwarven outposts across the Surbrin have all been picked clean, but no way in has ever been found. Some time back, Silverymoon backed an effort to fund inspectors and cartographers to try to relocate the hall; it never went anywhere, but it's a real, plantable thread, with the Map Room and Saltrun's small cartographers' guild both plausible institutional homes for it. This stays background for now, surfacing through incidents rather than announcements — a search party from Rivermoot that goes missing and doesn't come back, a dwarven artifact turning up somewhere it shouldn't, an old cartographer's notes resurfacing in the Sages' Archive during unrelated research. None of these commit the thread to a resolution; they just keep it alive as texture until it's worth activating properly.

Inner Regional Trade (town to town, resource to city)

This is the trade that never touches Everlund or the south — what keeps the Marches itself fed, armed, and supplied.

Established anchors: Saltrun's salt feeds the whole region and is taxed heavily at export — ten gold per pound, searched at the gates, and already the source of widespread smuggling in its own right. Rimehill's silver and Khelb's salt feed Silverymoon's treasury directly. Adbar's iron and ore trade through the small human village grown up outside its gates, since the fortress itself admits almost no one. Whitegrove, south of the Rauvin Mountains, is a genuine breadbasket — grain, barley, potatoes, apples, berries, sheep, cattle, and pigs — feeding the Sundabar–Adbar corridor. Auvandell, on the pass road between Silverymoon and Sundabar, is a modest mining and farming waypoint rather than a major producer.

Barbarian-margin trade: the Black Lion tribe near Beorunna's Well has shifted decisively to farming and now trades timber, furs, and smoked meat to Sundabar and the Order of the Eternal Fire's northern baronies — a live, growing, semi-formalized relationship with temple presence and regular caravans. The Red Tiger tribe's trade, by contrast, runs through personal barter with local merchants like Matias — furs and hides for smithed goods — and depends on specific individual trust (Matias and Adalwulf) rather than any institution. That makes it fragile in a way the Black Lion relationship isn't: it could unravel entirely if the wrong person dies or the wrong insult is given. If the Night Watch or anyone else ever wants a quiet lever over the frontier trade, disrupting the personal relationship is a far quieter move than touching anything institutional.

Land routes to Adbar: since Adbar has no water access, everything in or out moves overland, along two distinct roads.

The Adbar Road runs south from the fortress, curving around the eastern edge of the Rauvin Mountains until it joins the Fork Road, which is the real spine of the corridor — running past Whitegrove (a short detour off the main road) on the south side of the Rauvin Mountains, then Deadsnows on the northeastern edge of the Nether Mountains, then Newfort, before finally reaching Sundabar. This is the iron road: ore and worked metal moving south, grain and Whitegrove's produce moving both directions, and the route that keeps Adbar fed with everything the dwarves won't grow or make themselves.

A separate, older Glimmerwood trail runs along the southern edge of the Glimmerwood, passing Muteford, Ambergate, Grayhollow, Deerwater, Saltrun, and Rimehill before reaching Silverymoon. Full Adbar-to-Silverymoon caravans along its whole length are occasional rather than routine, but the trail carries real strategic weight beyond that traffic: Muteford, Ambergate, and Grayhollow all sit within Sundabar's northern baronies, which makes this trail the only route connecting Adbar's reach past Sundabar's northern holdings without using the Fork Road. It's patrolled for the stretch that runs through baronial land — the Order of the Eternal Fire keeps watch on its own territory — making it safer than its "minor trail" reputation suggests, at least until it leaves baronial land and runs the more exposed stretch toward Saltrun and Rimehill.

Merchant Convoy Schedule

A loose seasonal calendar, useful for pacing and for dropping NPCs into a predictable rhythm. All timing is approximate and weather-dependent.

Southern Corridor (Everlund ↔ Triboar ↔ Waterdeep): runs year-round, roughly every two to three weeks. Larger, guarded convoys in summer; smaller, pricier, more heavily escorted runs in winter. Still recovering rather than fully healed — bandit activity in the Evermoors keeps escort costs elevated, wealthier trading houses moving with more confidence than smaller operators, and the occasional convoy simply failing to arrive on schedule.

River Spine: ice-out (roughly early spring) to ice-in (roughly late autumn). The Sundabar–Silverymoon leg closes for winter entirely, with traffic shifting to the Moon Pass. The Silverymoon–Everlund leg is the most reliable stretch, running the full season with roughly weekly barge traffic at peak summer. The Everlund–Nesme leg peaks in late summer as harvest and mined goods move south for transshipment before the season closes. The Nesme–Yartar stretch continues somewhat longer into the year than the northern legs, since the Surbrin doesn't ice over as readily this far south — a plausible late-season bottleneck if goods pile up at Nesme waiting for southbound capacity.

Land routes to Adbar: year-round but slower in winter. Fork Road traffic continues through the cold months since it's the only way in or out for Adbar — smaller, hardier convoys rather than a seasonal shutdown. The Glimmerwood trail is more exposed and thins out or stops in the harshest winter months, picking back up as a spring-through-autumn route for all but the most local traffic.

Seasonal specialty trade: autumn brings the Uthgardt trading season proper — barbarian clans are least mobile and most willing to trade around their September festival season, making autumn the peak (and most crowded) time for both the Black Lion/Sundabar and Red Tiger/Muteford trade. Late summer and early autumn is also harvest and mining season across the board, with Whitegrove's grain, Rimehill's silver, and Saltrun's salt all seeing their biggest outbound pushes before winter closes routes.

The Salt-Smuggling Economy

Saltrun's ten-gold-per-pound export tax is deeply unpopular and already the source of widespread smuggling. At that price, even a modest smuggled load is worth serious money — enough to attract organized operators, not just desperate individuals. This is a real black-market economy with its own routes, fences, and probably its own occasional violence, not petty theft.

Likely routes run overland via the Glimmerwood trail, easier to slip past checkpoints than the main roads, or hidden within legitimate river cargo heading downstream from Silverymoon — a barge officially carrying grain or wool with salt sacks buried in the hold. Low-level smugglers take the direct risk; the salt gets fenced somewhere downstream, with Everlund's Bell Market the obvious laundering point given its brokerage-heavy economy; and it's entirely plausible someone inside Saltrun's own administration is quietly enabling it for a cut, given how deeply the tax is resented even by the people meant to enforce it.

The thread surfaces through Trovion. His barges are exactly the kind of legitimate cargo a smuggling operation would want to piggyback on, without this needing to make Trovion complicit — he could easily be an honest man whose competitors, rivals, or even a trusted employee are cutting corners he doesn't know about, which keeps the household relationship intact while still giving Rudi a personal stake. Until the thread is ready to activate, it stays background texture: a line in Trovion's ledger complaints, a rumor at the Bell Market, a guard patrol's gossip about a barge searched and cleared, a spike in the salt price at a particular inn. Once activated, it works as a self-contained adventure — an investigation, an escort gone wrong, a favor for Trovion or for Baron Harper — without needing to be threaded through the Night Watch plot.

Political weight, if wanted: Saltrun's salt is the Grand Duchy's third-largest revenue source after the silver mines, and Frederick Tempest's new kingship was funded substantially out of that wealth — large-scale smuggling quietly undermines the crown's finances at the exact moment Frederick needs them most. Baron Henry Harper is caught between cracking down (feeding more resentment and more smuggling) or quietly tolerating it for a price (feeding corruption), and either choice leaves him vulnerable to leverage. And the Night Watch's "legal arm" framing gives it a plausible, deniable pretext to insert itself into the investigation — a smuggling operation that wants to move goods past checkpoints unnoticed is exactly the kind of enterprise that might quietly employ a hedge mage for concealment or forged paperwork, giving the Night Watch a foothold inside Saltrun's power structure that never looks like what it actually is.

Where Trade Touches the Night Watch

Trovion's ledgers are a built-in barometer for how the region is actually recovering, adjustable at future visits without any new lore — currently trending positive with the orc withdrawal, though the Evermoor bandits are keeping the Southern Corridor's recovery uneven. The Watchful Order's own courier and administrative traffic riding the river trade gives Maren's talent-acquisition network — already using Saltrun as a waystation — a plausible, mundane-looking channel for moving people and information without anyone flagging it as unusual.

Map Overlay

See the accompanying trade routes map for a visual reference: the river spine in blue, the Fork Road in red, the Glimmerwood trail in green, the Sundabar–Silverymoon pass route in orange, the Southern Corridor in purple, and Black Lion tribal trade in brown.