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Kaibis
2018-11-22, 03:17 AM
How much distance would a travelling merchant cover annually?

Given:
- 5e Faerun setting
- The merchant has a caravan, two horses, and a companion.
- The merchant stops in various towns along the route (to buy and sell). I.e. Spending 2-8 days in a town, plus one entire month in Waterdeep (getting repairs done, doing major business, etc).

I am plotting an annual loop for the merchant.
Comments on any aspect of this are welcome.

Mordaedil
2018-11-22, 03:29 AM
It kinda depends on the traveling route, but there's a handy page in the 3.0 Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book where all of the exports and imports are listed on a city-to-city basis on the world map, so you could from that conclude a sort of trade route, calculate the distances between the cities, use the traveling for a 40 ft. transport per day, round up when necessary to give the idea that the merchant takes his sweet time, see how long it took him to make a full route and repeat that route for the year, but subtract bad seasons for the trade or simply chose a different ware to export for the winter seasons.

Honestly, I think this is more of a fun excersize to leave to your players who want to run a trading caravan, and then as a DM you set up dangerous routes and the link, prompting traders to take longer routes.

Kaibis
2018-11-22, 03:35 AM
It is a fun exercise! But in this case I am the player, just getting overly caught up in the fun of character building for a new campaign.

Our characters are all busy working out how we know each other and setting up general backstories. Mine is a travelling merchant that met one player on the road (right before we were robbed) and knows the other fairly well from the annual stopover in Waterdeep.

I was just pondering what the realistic routes might be so I can work out what towns/routes the char would be familiar with.

Mordaedil
2018-11-22, 03:49 AM
Here is a copy of the old map.

West Map (https://www.realmshelps.net/faerun/lore/life/pix/mapwest.jpg)

If your hub is Waterdeep, you have a lot of options for travel. You could go the northern route to trade gold, silver, copper, gems, leather and timber, or the southern routes for potter and wool. Athkathla region exports ale and iron, which might be in high demand up north one would think.

I dunno, I think this map is kinda vague, but maybe it gives a few ideas.

Kaibis
2018-11-22, 03:59 AM
Here is a copy of the old map.

West Map (https://www.realmshelps.net/faerun/lore/life/pix/mapwest.jpg)

If your hub is Waterdeep, you have a lot of options for travel. You could go the northern route to trade gold, silver, copper, gems, leather and timber, or the southern routes for potter and wool. Athkathla region exports ale and iron, which might be in high demand up north one would think.

I dunno, I think this map is kinda vague, but maybe it gives a few ideas.

I have been using https://loremaps.azurewebsites.net/Maps/Faerun which even has a handy measuring tool. I am not trying to be to specific, just lending some time to pondering the backstory.

Does the merchant do a coastal run, do they annually travel the same route, or do they vary the route every year returning to only a few towns, do they winter somewhere etc. So many choices -- I tend to get really bogged down in choices like this, particularly frustrating when I know that they will never ever matter. Three hours of research will amount to a single sentence one day when I answer a question.

Pauly
2018-11-22, 06:33 AM
I have been using https://loremaps.azurewebsites.net/Maps/Faerun which even has a handy measuring tool. I am not trying to be to specific, just lending some time to pondering the backstory.

Does the merchant do a coastal run, do they annually travel the same route, or do they vary the route every year returning to only a few towns, do they winter somewhere etc. So many choices -- I tend to get really bogged down in choices like this, particularly frustrating when I know that they will never ever matter. Three hours of research will amount to a single sentence one day when I answer a question.

Historical merchants tended to keep to a regular schedule. Lots of reasons
- Some products are seasonal, for example furs.
- It gives the customers a reason to stockpile coins for buying or supplies to sell because they know when you’re coming.
- You can time your trip to coincide with local festivals.
- If you are part of a larger caravan for even part of the trip you are subject to their timetable.
- certain routes may be non-viable at different seasons due to mud, snow, prevailing winds etc.
- you want your run to councide with or avoid regular runs from other merchantsl from other regions.

It was only the smallest of merchants or merchants travelling huge distances that were itinerant.

Kaibis
2018-11-22, 06:54 AM
Historical merchants tended to keep to a regular schedule. Lots of reasons
- Some products are seasonal, for example furs.
- It gives the customers a reason to stockpile coins for buying or supplies to sell because they know when you’re coming.
- You can time your trip to coincide with local festivals.
- If you are part of a larger caravan for even part of the trip you are subject to their timetable.
- certain routes may be non-viable at different seasons due to mud, snow, prevailing winds etc.
- you want your run to councide with or avoid regular runs from other merchantsl from other regions.

It was only the smallest of merchants or merchants travelling huge distances that were itinerant.

Thank you, that was what my gut kind of thought. Even in the small towns I imagine that they would have a general sense of when they would see a particular merchant again.

The idea of meeting up with a larger caravan is a good one, even meeting up with another merchant at a particular town in order to trade for exotic goods on an annual basis. (Or knowing a small trader in a town that new if he bought X from that merchant from the East, then the merchant from the West would always arrive a month later and buy the lot).

Darth Ultron
2018-11-22, 08:26 AM
For an example typical merchant:

1.Start in Waterdeep during the winter. Load up on as many things as possible.
2.As soon as the weather breaks a bit, head north along the Trade Way, stopping at small tows along the way. Trading things from the city of country goods.
3.Get to Neverwinter, trade the country goods for city goods.
4.Again head north along the Trade Way, stopping at small tows along the way. Trading things from the city of country goods.
5.Get to Luskan, trade country goods for city goods.
6.Head north stopping at small towns, looping up to Icewind Dale, and then back down south east.
7.Get to Maribar, trade.
8.Head south and east to get to Nense and Mirthral Hall.
9.Get to Silverymoon, trade.
10.Head south to Everlund, then east to Yatar
11.Loop up to get Triboar and Longsaddle
12.Then back down south to Waterdeep

Yora
2018-11-22, 09:43 AM
Traveling merchants are basically import businesses with their own shipping infrastructure. Even today, personal contact with your regular suppliers and customers is very important, and it would have been even more so without any electronic communication. You can't just come into a port and expect someone to come up to you and want to buy a whole ship load of beeswax and silk, or that you can simply walk into the market and buy a whole shipload of beaver pelts. You need to make contracts one year in advance and have the confidence that your business parters will have your goods waiting when you arrive and pay up for the goods they ordered.
Trading is a very different business than shopping. Goods are often produced or procured after they have been ordered and your customers might not be able to fully pay you until they sold off the goods they got from you. You really need to know which people you can trust, and with the trust come better deals, and accordingly better profits. This really only works when you have regular routes.

Knaight
2018-11-22, 10:06 AM
Fairly short routes were often more common - things like the silk road were a bunch of routes overlapping each other, not the distance any one merchant went. This gets a bit messier if you have sea trade, especially transcontinental sea trade (and I don't mean the technically transcontinental trade that happened across the Mediterranean), but just going back and forth between two fairly nearby cities could be surprisingly viable. Loops of a few more cities were often more common, especially because that let you take valuable goods further away (if your loop is city A,B,C,D then you can do A-C and B-D trades, and vice versa) which tended to raise margins, while doing smaller circuits for bulk goods.

King of Nowhere
2018-11-22, 01:51 PM
An ox-driven cart could cover some 20-30 kilometers per day, on average. you could cover more by pushing the animals, but then they wouldn't be fit for the following days.

what others said for the seasonality of trips still applies; that's just an upper estimate.

jayem
2018-11-22, 03:36 PM
An ox-driven cart could cover some 20-30 kilometers per day, on average. you could cover more by pushing the animals, but then they wouldn't be fit for the following days.

what others said for the seasonality of trips still applies; that's just an upper estimate.

Also at the extremes you have the likes of the Polo's, where (presumably following the local cash gradients if without other purpose) they do move ever further out.
Taking his word for it thats 10,000 km in 4/2 years.

There's also plenty of Roman, Viking and Medieval precedent for people doing a double journey across Europe some of which is for trade.
And of course the aristocracy were always moving round the country, which must have been tied in with trade somehow

It seems Scottish Fishwives (in later days they went from the north of Scotland to Great Yarmouth) easily had a range of about 10-30 miles. Which seems a good dividing line for direct selling.

2 days travel, 1 day buying selling, 2 days back, 1day buying selling would give you a range of 60 km, the logical thing would be to have a variety of routes to give a rarer service to more unimportant places, while maintaining a weekly service at the keypoints.
So I'd expect you to know intimately Northamptonshire (a rectangular county) if your route was across the length (I can't think of any). Or say Silverymoon-Everlund

A monthly cycle would give you a range of 400 odd miles. At this point you'd probably have a half decent handle on England (depending on if you stuck to the same route, etc...) Or the high forest.

A quarterly cycle would take in some foreign travel while a yearly cycle would easily take you across Europe (Faeun). It also seems reasonable to me that your exceptional journeys are a notch higher than the regular ones.

So perhaps Dec-Jan you look after your house, Feb-Oct you go between the villages and towns, after the last harvest you make a trip to London to buy rarer goods.
Or perhaps in your first year (or as your child started to be responsible) you went further afield.

Kaibis
2018-11-22, 04:27 PM
Thank you for your answers, everything said has helped (that trade route is great, and similar to what I was thinking).

One further question that has struck me.

Given a cart pulled by two horses for 20-30mile per day (or whatever is a moderate pace), how many days in a row can the horses travel without resting them? I am googling this one but coming up with nothing. It doesn't really matter, but the question was bugging me when I was doing the math of it all.

Darth Ultron
2018-11-24, 09:47 PM
Given a cart pulled by two horses for 20-30mile per day (or whatever is a moderate pace), how many days in a row can the horses travel without resting them? I am googling this one but coming up with nothing. It doesn't really matter, but the question was bugging me when I was doing the math of it all.

Well, zero.

But then you don't push the horses 24/7 anyway. You rest the horses every day. In real life it was common to ''push" draft horses to death.

In general, a merchant is not ''racing" to the next stop. And often towns, villages, trade sites and camp sites are roughly ''a day" or so apart.

lightningcat
2018-11-25, 02:55 PM
If I remember correctly, military standards for baggage trains was 20-25 miles a day. A merchant is likely to be able to maintain a similar pace.
My grandfather was able to do 45 miles a day with a team and wagon, but that ws not on a continuous basis, more like once or twice a month for 2 days. There and back again.

Tvtyrant
2018-11-25, 03:43 PM
I don't know so much about medieval times, but in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries merchants had business relations called Factors who the merchant would sell their goods to and the Factor would resell at the local level to individuals.

So a merchant wouldn't stay in a town for more then a week, long enough to unload what they sold to the factor and load what they are buying from them to go to the next town. The reason is merchants rack up a lot of debts, and wanted to convert goods to liquid assets as quickly as possible.

Pauly
2018-11-25, 07:00 PM
If I remember correctly, military standards for baggage trains was 20-25 miles a day. A merchant is likely to be able to maintain a similar pace.
My grandfather was able to do 45 miles a day with a team and wagon, but that ws not on a continuous basis, more like once or twice a month for 2 days. There and back again.

Depends on era and the size of the army. It also depends on whether you are goung into enemy territory or between depots in your own country.

Generally speaking moving into enemy territory was less than 10 miles a day, because you had to bring your own supplies and fodder. Also organizing the army to move and to scout ahead took time.

Within your own territory between depots 20 to 25 miles a day was fairly common. The army was usually more concerned about not working beasts of burden to death in peacetime than civilians, because the army knew they might need those animals at any time for an emergency. However the army didn’t have large numbers of beasts of burden and for large campaigns contracted hauling out to civilians.

In an emergency up to 50 miles a day was possible. But this was not a sustainable pace, no more than 3 days before rest was needed.

Kaibis
2018-11-29, 04:43 AM
Well, zero.

But then you don't push the horses 24/7 anyway. You rest the horses every day. In real life it was common to ''push" draft horses to death.

In general, a merchant is not ''racing" to the next stop. And often towns, villages, trade sites and camp sites are roughly ''a day" or so apart.

You missed the first part of the sentence. "Given a cart pulled by two horses for 20-30mile per day (or whatever is a moderate pace), how many days in a row can the horses travel without resting them?"

How many days in a row could they cover this moderate distance without needing a full days rest (as opposed to just the regular rest they get at night).

Kind of like how us real-life people work every day but then get a weekend, and occasionally a few weeks off.