Northern Trading Company

The legally-mandated sole business of Baelheim — "the only thing in Baelheim that is allowed to do business, nobody else is" — with branches reaching south into Rivalon (the party first meets it in Ponterford). It runs an oddly modern, corporate economy on a 1300s fantasy world: tiered membership cards (bronze → silver → gold → platinum, ~1,500 gold for platinum), separate buyer and seller memberships, raffles, brochures, watch-lists of items it overpays for, and discount perks. Members can commission its craftsmen and preview stock before it hits the shelves.

Its darker face is debt-bondage: customers who buy on credit and can't pay are "put in the cupboard" and made to work off the debt at a standard 2 gold a day — effectively sold (a debtor's contract can be bought by a third party, or simply torn up). Frauds and usurers within the company are "thrown to the ice" in the Baelheim winter. Its couriers (like Sven Swiftfoot) move only company goods — they may not carry private post, since Laewendas outlawed the postal service.

(Heard as the "Northern Trading Company" and the "Aetheric"/"Aethelric Trading Company" — the latter colliding with Eldrich the Elder. Spelling/name unconfirmed.)

Session 32

• The party shelters from a hailstorm in the Ponterford branch, run by the clerk Ragnar (a platinum member who bought her house through the company), and spends most of the session there.
• Ragnar's back-door offer, declined. Haggled to 95 gold for a 100-gold silver bar, she leaned across the desk and offered to put it through under her own platinum membership — "nobody has to know anything else." The party turned it down and paid 98 gold 1 silver at bronze rates so the spend would count toward Fenric's own account, which took him straight to silver and its early-preview access to stock before it goes on sale.
• Liquidated much of Caressa's hoard through it — trade-guild bars, rings, sacks of magic items, broken watches — carrying Thalia from silver (216 gold) up to gold (976). The overpay "watch-list" is the silver perk: a hit list of wanted items the company will pay well over value for, sometimes mundane ones, because its stock levels are strange. Gold buys the engraved solid-metal card — bronze and silver are cardboard that would wash away in a river — and the deference that comes with it.
• Fenric freed the debt-bonded orc Algrimmar by buying his 62-gold contract and tearing it up.
• Lash agreed to apprentice under the company craftsman Big Finn, and met its courier Sven Swiftfoot.
• Crucially, its staff will not comment on the missing children "while on duty" — a corporate neutrality the party has to work around.

Session 35

• A late-night knock by Lash on the company lodge (a Baelheim-style longhouse) roused a plate-armoured "War Maiden," heard lacing up armour and sharpening a double-headed bearded axe behind a metal-fanged helm — but Lash wisely declined to set the warrior loose. The dragon-revering northerners would be the most upset of all at the desecrated, night-screaming drake skeleton.

Session 38

• The Session-35 War Maiden is named Warmaiden Yngraf and recruited for the Guardian hunt; clerk Ragnar reimburses her receipts and sells the party three gag "ant sprays" (20 gold each, repels exactly one ant of any size).
• Liv is found at the longhouse, bonding with Warmaiden Yngraf as a fellow Nord (Baelheim). The Company's real trade, it's stressed, is cupboards and barrels — its adventuring stock pure coincidence; it does not deal in enchanted gear.

Session 44

• The downtime liquidator. Buys the bulk of the cleared cave's loot (the general haul ~3,740 gold; the +1 weapons alongside Renforth's magic-item buy) and ammunition; Thalia rides the sales to Mithril membership.
• Its Ponterford guard Cecil sells Lash his animal-trick belt — his pet dog having "learned every trick it can, it's max level."