Editing Sigil:Yan Doro (section)

== Trade and the Golden Isles ==

Yan Doro's prosperity depends upon geography, seamanship, and the unusual resources of its islands. The realm stands among sea routes connecting the mainland kingdoms with the wider southern world, and its harbors provide water, repair, pilots, provisions, warehousing, credit, brokerage, and protection to vessels that might otherwise require much longer or more dangerous passages.

Wine, olive oil, salted fish, dried fruit, rope, sailcloth, worked shell, coral, timber, ships, and moongold form important native exports, while imported cargoes arriving through Skell can include almost anything portable enough to survive a sea voyage. Merchants buy and resell goods from several regions without necessarily knowing where their cargo will finally be consumed, and Doran brokers have become expert at arranging transactions between foreigners who distrust one another too much to meet directly.

Moongold occupies a special place in this trade because demand consistently exceeds legal supply. Licensed buyers from Sarrivel, Calael, Angharais, Mazirin, Merant, and farther abroad maintain agents in Skell, while independent adventurers arrive hoping to purchase mining rights or finance expeditions into the outer Sunscatter. Stories of newly discovered veins can inflate land prices, launch ships, ruin investors, and populate taverns with men insisting that they know the location of an island nobody else can find.

Smuggling is correspondingly difficult to separate entirely from ordinary commerce. The same captain may carry taxed grain into Skell, untaxed Calaeli wine to a minor harbor, legally purchased moongold to Mazirin, and a suspiciously heavy locked chest to somewhere he declines to mention. The Crown objects most strongly when smuggling deprives it of substantial revenue or causes diplomatic trouble, and Doran moral outrage has an observable tendency to increase with the value of the lost customs duties.