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'Wealth dies, kinsmen die. Cattle die and the wheat, too. But this thing never dies: reputation! Reputation never dies for he that achieves it well.'

Norlund is a large mountainous highland to the north of Daergoth. Norlunders are a proud, honourable, law-abiding people who value warfare and personal reputation above almost anything else. Other people of the Island Kingdoms see them as wild, barbaric, sea faring men who appear out of nowhere in their strange boats - intent on trading just as often as they are intent on raping, pillaging and destroying all in their path.

Ships

When the very distant ancestors of the Norlunders had spread across the far reaches of the Norlund highlands, they ran into a real problem. Bordered to the south by Daergoth - an evil place that held only death - and surrounded to the north by the sea, there was nowhere to go. They were a nomadic people from an area with few areas of open water and little land to cultivate and farm. Yet, within a few generations, they seem to have invented more or less from scratch a design of ship that allowed then to solve this problem.

Long, lean and above all flexible, the hulls are usually of oak planks that have been split from felled trunks. With axe and adze, the planks are trimmed to shape then riveted together with iron nails. At the junction of the planks, a thin rope of twisted hair soaked in pitch (boiled birch tree sap) is trapped. This acts as a flexible waterproofing membrane. The hulls are built first, the distortion of the planks leading to the upwards curvature of the bow and stern. The Norlunders found that this type of hull is very seaworthy and this aspect of the design is exaggerated to create the soaring curve that is such a characteristic of the shape of Norlund vessels. When the hull is finished, the ribs are tied in with the thin fibrous roots of the Larch tree. At sea, the hulls are watertight and because of their flexible nature, would often twist and bend where a more solid structure might break. This allows the Norlunders to make longer sea voyages in deeper oceans than the regular ships of the Island Kingdoms.

The Norlunders have many different types of ship. There are small rowing boats that might be handled by a couple of men each pulling two oars each called Faerings. Trading vessels which have a virtually fixed mast and only four oar ports in their fifty foot length, are known as Knarrs. Also the great Drakkars, the warships that are over a hundred feet long and have crews of more than a hundred men. There are also Karvs, a multi purpose ship that can be used for trade and/or raiding.

Trading

Sometime in their history, the Norlunders created a large trading port in a bay on the eastern Norlund coastline. They called the port Miklagard, literally 'The Great City'. From this trade port, luxury goods like silk and spices are gathered and then taken to be traded throughout the Island Kingdoms. The majority of the trade is made by two main routes; the first is south to Southhold and the other around the northern coast of the mainland to reach the other smaller islands of the kingdom. The main trade route to Southhold is the more dangerous of the two due to raids and harassment by Daergothian pirates and war bands.