The Warren
The Warren was once described in this manner...
- "...over through the brambles...Where all the business goes on. And iffin' you don't know how to git there, then you probably don't need to be gittin' there."
The Warren is a neighborhood only in the loosest sense of the term and deeply shrouded in secrecy. It is the heart of all the smuggling in River's Rest and is the location of the surviving houses of the Smugglers War of 5018. Its exact location is unknown, aside from the fact that it is located deep in the brambles. Those brambles have long served as a shield for anyone involved in smuggling activities, allowing many citizens of River's Rest to live their entire lives unaware of the extent of smuggling in the area.
A suggestion about how to find the Warren...
- "You could probably jump in the North Fork and try and float there...
But most folks who do that end up hurtin' awful."
The Warren is not a place people travel unless expressly ‘invited’. Those few unfortunate folk whom have been unlucky enough to have been taken there (and fortunate enough to have come back) have never been able decide upon an exact location, distance, or direction. What they do agree on is this: There are always eyes watching and lips ready to pass on information for a price. The Warren is not a safe place, neither for those not involved in smuggling nor for the smugglers themselves.
Houses
There are known to be 5 main houses involved in smuggling that are located in the Warren. Two of the houses are remnants of the original smuggling families and the other three have evolved from families originally involved in piracy who turned to smuggling after a great earthquake created Tempest Falls, disrupting river travel. This ruined the town for the pirates whom dwelled here, and also hurt smugglers too, since craft could not as easily go up and down the Tempest. The pirates whom remained turned to smuggling, but with one difference, they had, and still have, no honor. The pirates fought with the old families and some families were wiped out. Others survived, but those were not powerful enough to eliminate the pirates… and the pirates were not powerful enough to fully eliminate the smugglers.
By the end of the Smugglers' War there was a precarious balance. Both sides were too weak for either to take control of the smuggling trade and each side gradually sought to gain the power to overthrow the others. Casler Huntington of House Lefante made an attempt to swing the balance of power in the smuggler's favor when a storm sank the Imperial barge he was attempting to steal, taking the finest of the Lefantes and the other families with it. However, the pirate families were quick to take advantage and the balance of power currently belongs to those families of a piracy background, led by the DeRichter House.
