Forven

Forven is a dock town on the lake, ninety miles and about three days by cart down the trade road from Loshev, and it is very nearly nothing but docks. There are wharves on the riverside and wharves on the lakeside, warehouses at the corner between them, and the middle of the town sits inside the traffic rather than beside it. In winter, when commerce shifts off the lake and onto the river, the docks turn dangerous: hulls come close enough to be lost, and the captains settle it by shouting.

No bridge crosses the river here. Fording is possible and in winter it kills, so the crossings that matter belong to Harad and Loshev and everything else goes by boat. For a town with no crossing of its own Forven carries a great deal of trade. It is the internal-trade hub of Idir, the place to buy mundane goods and to hire woodsmen who know the eastern trees.

Every two or three months traders come to it out of the forest rather than off the water. They are cloaked, armored and near-silent, they say almost nothing and sell well, and a thief who once robbed them was run down and made an example of. Where they live nobody in the town will say. Forven’s own officers have wondered aloud, half in joke, whether they are the people to send after a man the guard cannot catch.

Nobody has counted Forven. Its numbers were never written down, and neither were its districts, its founding year, or a name its people call themselves by. What it has is a guard station, a jail, an inn, a tavern, a marketplace, a council, and more warehouse floor than any of them.

The Guard

Forven’s guard is thin.

Its captain was Cazzik, a former sellsword who was taking money from the Ten Lashes to keep Captain Jack of Harad off the trail. Cargo bearing the Seal of Forven passed uninspected on his word. When the town moved to detain him it found his house trapped from top to bottom: two guards died going in, two of his old crew happened to be in town and fought him clear, and a third guard died in the pursuit east into the woods. His accent, the guards said, was from beyond the Dhel, and several of them thought he had left Idir entirely. His wife Lenore stayed behind and insisted he was innocent.

For a while afterwards Forven had no captain at all. The officer who took the command was Kiras Hallo, the first person in that guard station to treat a warning about gnolls as worth acting on, and straight with the party ever since. She held it as an acting appointment for a long while, and by the time the party next came through Forven it was permanently hers.

What Forven Does With a Prisoner

Forven hangs nobody. It carries no death penalty, and a sentenced prisoner may instead be sold to another city-state that can show a stronger grievance. Loshev, by contrast, executes. The party pushed hard for the sale to go north to Loshev, because sold south to Haudh-Gwenn the prisoners would have come inside Beltran Grayeras’s reach, and he could have turned them loose and put the ring back together.

The jail holds five awaiting trial. Julius Anguil, the richest man in Forven, owned the implicated warehouses and had been seen keeping company with Captain Torr; he has a defense and an alibi manufactured for every charge, his trial has slid and slid again, and he has not been convicted. Cazzik was dragged back to the same jail by cloaked, armored soldiers who were never identified, along with his mage, who had every finger broken and was gagged to keep him from casting. One of the crew got clear.

Forven will not sell any of them to Haudh-Gwenn. Given that city’s part in the slaving, the refusal is a moral one and the captain has said so plainly. Sale to Loshev has been agreed in principle and has moved very little since: the councilors would rather keep their prisoners, and only coin moves them.

Campaign Updates

Cleven Gemsmith came to Forven on an errand from his councilman father, to intercept a ship. Mikhail, who had already been invited aboard that ship and had read the invitation for what it was, warned him that the tattooed captain was a slaver. Cleven could not read social cues at all. He went to confront the man anyway and vanished in the night. Mikhail took the disappearance to Forven’s captain of the guard, who heard him out, seemed genuinely troubled, and named the warehouse owner and the ship’s captain as the leads worth chasing.

The town has been attacked twice since and lost little either time. Gnolls carrying fire came at it and were headed off, because the party had broken their own journey downriver to stop at Forven and tell the guard what was coming. An arson attempt met a watch that was ready for it, and two buildings burned with nobody dead. Its councilors covered the first year of taxes on the party’s Loshev estate, part of what the river towns paid out for the breaking of the Ten Lashes.

For all of that, the Valiant Few are not known in Forven the way they are known upriver. Heroes of Loshev and Haudh-Gwenn is a phrase that buys nothing on these wharves, and they have been building the name back one person at a time: the captain, an old bridge worker in the tavern who knows them well enough to hug Aldo, and his wife, who wants to hear Mikhail play.