Market City on the River · Seat of Local Governance
The Words Over the Market Gate
Where the roads meet the river, and the fields meet the city.
Carved above the market arch, and repeated by every merchant in the region who wants you to buy something.
Overview
Bellhaven sits on a navigable river in the middle of exceptionally good farmland, which is the whole story of the place. Around twelve thousand people live inside the city; another four or five thousand work the land immediately around it. It is the commercial, administrative and social centre for everything within a few days' travel.
It is big enough for a real market, a dozen trades, several faiths and a decent choice of taverns. It is small enough that the countryside starts more or less where the streets stop. A farmer can leave a field at dawn, sell produce, do business, and be home before dark.
Bellhaven is safe, prosperous and unremarkable.
That reputation is one of its greatest assets — and for most people who live here, the entire point.
Market Square
The market runs all week and swells enormously on market days, when farmers, craftsmen and travelling merchants converge on the square beneath the clock tower. Permanent shops ring the open ground; everything else is stalls, awnings and argument.
This is where most visitors form their opinion of Bellhaven, and it is a generous one: full stalls, fair prices, and a fountain to sit on while you work out what you actually came for.
Busiest on market daysGetting Around
Market Square
The commercial heart. Permanent shops around a large open market.
Hearthward
The artisan district — smiths, carpenters, leatherworkers, tailors, brewers. If something in Bellhaven was made rather than grown, it was probably made here.
Riverside
Warehouses, docks, taverns and inns. The busiest district after the square, and the one where news from downriver arrives first.
Lord's Hill
The elevated northern quarter, built around the lord's fortified manor. Administration, records, and the better houses.
Southfields
Where the city stops pretending to be a city. Farms and smallholdings begin immediately past the developed streets.
Temple District
Temples and shrines to several faiths, clustered together and mostly on good terms.
Bellhaven University
Prestigous wizarding school. Originally to train battle mages for Ironwatch. Now a center of learning and research.
Southfields
The land south of the city is the reason Bellhaven exists. Grain, orchards, livestock and produce come off these fields in enough surplus to feed the city, supply the fortress over the mountains, and still leave something to sell downriver.
The holdings are mostly small and family-run, worked by people who have been on the same ground for generations and who will tell you about it at length.
Mills · Orchards · SmallholdingsThe Mountain Road
Bellhaven sits on the south side of the mountains. Ironwatch sits on the other side, watching the abyssal gorge, and it cannot feed itself.
So Bellhaven feeds it. Supply trains leave the city on a regular cycle, hauling grain, preserved food, livestock, timber and finished goods up over the passes to the fortress. The trek is long, cold above the treeline, and unpleasant in bad weather — but it is steady, well-paid work, and the teamsters who run it know every switchback by heart.
Most people in Bellhaven have never seen the gorge and would prefer to keep it that way. They know what the fortress is for. They send the wagons anyway.
It also means Bellhaven hears news from the frontier before anywhere else on this side of the range — usually from a driver in a Riverside tavern, several drinks in, and not always accurately.
Faith
Bellhaven has no official religion. Several faiths keep temples, shrines or congregations here, and between them handle a good deal of the city's charity, education, healing and burial.
The Dawnflowers, who follow Sarenrae, hold one of the larger and more active temples — healing, care for travellers, help for the poor, and the first to open their doors in an emergency. They are widely respected and hold no civic power whatsoever, which is roughly how everyone involved prefers it.
That balance is why Bellhaven has stayed tolerant. No faith here is large enough to run the place, and all of them are useful enough to keep.
Learning
Founded to supply Ironwatch with battle-mages, the university has flourished becoming a major center of learning for the region. Though the war and civic magic schools are subsidized and sponcered by the wealthy of Lord's Hill, most of the arcane schools can be learned within the walls. Also boasts a sizable research library.
At a Glance
Region
South of the mountains, opposite Ironwatch
Settlement Type
Regional market city
Population
~12,000 in the city, 4,000–5,000 in the outlying farms
Ruler
A hereditary local lord, seated at Lord's Hill
Known For
Grain, river trade, the university, and a very good market day
Danger
Low in the city. Bandits and wolves on the outlying roads.
Supplies
Food and goods to Ironwatch, over the mountain passes
Trade
Roughly a third of the city's living comes from agriculture and food, another third from trade and river commerce, a fifth from crafts and manufacture, and the rest from services — taverns, inns, temples and administration.
Out: grain, fruit, livestock, wool, leather, preserved food, timber.
In: fine textiles, specialty metals, luxuries, exotic food, books, magical components, and good weapons and armour.
The watch is professional, competent and small. It handles theft, drunks and disputes. Anything worse tends to get handed to the militia, the lord's people, or whoever happens to be in town and capable.
Known Locals
A short list to start from — the GM can add to it as the party actually meets people.
A devout Dawnflower family who have farmed near Bellhaven for generations. Garran farms and does carpentry; Mariel is a gardener and herbalist who serves the community through the Dawnflower temple. Ordinary, well-liked, and entirely unprepared for what their eldest daughter has turned out to be.
Collects the taxes, maintains the roads and bridges, regulates the market, keeps the watch, settles the disputes that matter, and hosts anyone important enough to need hosting. Locally significant; beyond the region, barely known.
Needs a Name
Left deliberately blank. Whoever holds Lord's Hill also decides how much Bellhaven is willing to send over the mountains to Ironwatch — which makes them a lever the moment supply becomes a problem.
Currently enrolled in the university's school of Ars Grammatica. Many professors are advising her into a more civic or war based track.
For the GM
Bellhaven's stability is load-bearing. Three things would crack it:
The passes close. Weather, a rockfall, or something living up there cuts the supply route, and Ironwatch starts going hungry while Bellhaven's warehouses fill up with grain it can't move.
A bad harvest. There is no slack in a city that feeds two populations off one set of fields.
Someone notices. A prosperous, lightly-defended city with a small watch, sitting on the only supply line to a frontier fortress, is a very obvious target to anyone who thinks about it for a minute.
Everyone notices when something unusual happens here. That is the city's real security — and the reason strangers get remembered.