Carter Post

Carter posts, also cartage posts, are depots for carts and wagons transporting freight, functioning as temporary storage sites where goods are held before being loaded for transport elsewhere. These posts play a crucial role in the collection, transfer, and distribution of goods, particularly raw materials and farm produce, which are gathered from rural areas and hauled to urban centres. There, larger carter posts receive and unload these shipments, preparing them for market sale and distribution.

Most carter posts are owned and operated by guild concerns, established to collect, process, and distribute essential goods for manufacturing. Once processed, finished products are then transported to distant customers via these same posts. Additionally, carter posts form a vital connection to seagoing trade, facilitating the continuous transfer of cargo between ships and land-based transport.

Due to the frequent delays and overnight stops associated with long-haul freight transport, carter posts are equipped with essential amenities for teamsters and animal handlers, along with their draft animals. Each post includes a bunkhouse capable of housing at least eight persons, an outdoor paddock, a tether for two oxen, and two stalls for sick or injured animals. A galley kitchen provides meals, while a roofed shelter with minimal walls offers protection from the elements for at least two wagons or four carts. A storehouse holds maintenance supplies and emergency provisions, ensuring that both transporters and their cargo can withstand delays, repairs, and unforeseen crises.

Carter posts must have access to a cart path or better form of road.

Personnel

A regular staff supports this collection of buildings. Apart from cook, stablehand and domestic, the carter post includes a farrier, stockkeeper and head overseer, who in turn employs a scribe to keep accounts. The farrier and overseer each live in their own dwelling, counting 1-7 persons each (2d4-1). The remaining persons live collectively in two dwellings, supported by 2-5 additional persons each,

including spouses, siblings and children. Most of these persons can handle themselves well in a fight, but count the possibility that there are 0-3 guards as well, in case things get out of hand. This makes for a total population of 9 to 27 persons.

Larger carter posts may include far more residents, depending on additional services offered. It's best, however, to see these larger posts in terms of collected individual posts, with attached other facilities, for the purpose of determining their importance in a community.

Activity

As wagons and carts roll in, each needing to find a place where they can wait and be addressed, the number of persons moving to and fro can make the post full of activity. The occasional ox that's goaded along, the arrival of a visitor seeking the attention of the overseer, the occasional villager looking for some small service and so on each adds it's part to the scene — and the players too. It may take some time to arrest someone's attention, for directions or to speak with the right person regarding what's wanted.

At other times, however, when no haulers and their carts are around, the tempo of the place might be reduced, with individuals resting themselves, enjoying the lack of work to be done. After all, in another few hours, all could be chaos again.

Bargaining

Carter posts in type-7, type-6 or type-5 hexes are willing to purchase raw materials such as ores, stone, farm produce, raw fibres or cloth, tanned leathers and skins or timber. Amounts paid out can't exceed 40 g.p., according to the amount of coin on hand, and will be granted at 50-80% of the material's value. Characters with bargaining skill can improve this by 10%, or by 20% through pressure bargaining.

In more advanced hexes, these matters are dealt with through other parties. As carter posts are contracted to deliver their existing stores, they cannot sell goods to other persons.

See also,
Hammer (symbol)
Note Payable
The Adventure