As you walk about the market, smells hit you more than colors or sounds. The Hightown Market is not filled with the brightly colored fabrics of Crosspoint, nor the bright vegetables of most markets, but with crates, barrels, and pallets. You smell the sharp smell of newly-made leather; the sickly-sweet smell of autumn’s first cider pressing; the smell of horse is everywhere.
While your first impression is one of barrels and crates, you soon see that there are stalls for individual buyers. Most sell leather goods, hot foods, and ciders and beers to drink. There are apple pies in the stall to your left; cured meats hang to your right.
Everyone around you is haggling over something. The numbers you catch range from pennies for pies to shillings and pounds for wagonloads of beer, salt, leather, beef, and hams.
A crowd gathers beyond the pie stalls, and you hear music. The singer sings a story about two Knightly Orders going to war.
The center of life in Hightown is the market. Here, merchants exchange goods; many West Highland merchants never leave West Highland, and many East Highland merchants never go further west than Hightown. Within the market, deals are made and wholesale goods change hands.
Here, also, caravans will stock up on the supplies they’ll need to cross the High Divide or to travel the Leather Road, depending on which way they’re going. Hightown is the only choice for such supplies, and they know it. Prices are usually about 20% higher for arms, armor, dry rations, and other traveling supplies.
Villagers from the surrounding villages will come to sell their crops or wares, and perhaps to pick up a few things themselves that their local markets don’t carry. Occasionally, Knights of one of the northern Orders will send a delegation to purchase or commission supplies.
In almost all cases not involving merchants (and in many cases involving them also), trade occurs without the use of money: barter is the order of the day, and an important part of interpersonal relations in Hightown is determining what the other person would want enough to trade for a good deal for what they have.
As befits the main town of the Leather Road, leather is everywhere.
For the rest of this adventure, it is assumed to be autumn; if it is not you will have to modify some descriptions.
