Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #160 - Tough Trade Routes

Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !

I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀

Image generated by AI in Wombo.art

The prompt this week is - Tough Trade Routes

Trade has never been easy, and that is especially true of long distance trade. Before the invention of the railway, trade was always easier by water. Despite storms, shipwrecks, pirates and ships which were sometimes of dubious seaworthiness, it was always faster and cheaper to move bulk goods by ship or boat.

Movement over land was limited by the fact that the animals towing wagons and the merchants, guards and staff all had to be fed. In practical terms, a horse or ox would literally eat the profits of a trip within a hundred miles, taking up limited wagon space to carry food instead of merchandise.

The amber trade of the ancient world is a good example of the result; precious and lightweight cargoes passed from merchant to merchant in a lot of small steps between the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Each step added to the cost as merchants added their profit element. By the time the amber reached Rome or Greece, it's value had increased a thousand-fold. But early trade even by sea was still expensive due to the time and risks involved. In the 15th Century, a single nutmeg was worth more than a decent house in Tudor England. In the 19th Century, tea clippers raced from China to be the first to bring back the new harvest and earn their owners a fortune.

Tell me a story about trade routes from your fictional setting ! What is traded ? How is it moved, and who does the trading ? What are the challenges and risks, and how are they overcome ? Have new methods of transport been discovered to solve the problems ?

Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.

This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.

Guidelines

I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....

• Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
• Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
• Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
• Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
• Prompt replies can be any length.
• AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
• Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.

Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.

People who have asked to be tagged;
@sherah

If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂