And now the region map: why does all those roads go to Cauldron, as if it was the fucking center of all commercial roads ? Cauldron is at the fucking top of a mountain ! You construct a fortress at the top of a mountain, not a town ! The whole point is to make the access to your fortress as hard as possible, and the access to your commercial town as easy as possible, not the other way around ! Commercial towns naturally develop around rivers and in mountain pass, not around a fucking lake connected to nothing on the fucking top of a fucking mountain !
In regions that aren't fully secured by some system of armed men or social construction, places where trade happens are the ones that are not in danger of being attacked, and which contain enough armed men to patrol the roads near the settlement.
Frontier towns being built 'wherever convenient' is an Old West thing - there, guns made defensive terrain advantage less necessary. Large, powerful walls or being built on a hill with good view were prerequisites for rough area towns in the middle ages that were not under the direct protection of a powerful noble. And a beholder is not a powerful noble - they spend too much LA on not-being-a-caster.
FrankTrollman wrote:
Wait... what?! Goblins in 3e D&D are people. People who are usually but not always part of rival nations and tribes. One of the player characters could just be a Goblin. The captain of the guard is basically paying for Injun Skalps, and that is totally fucked up. There's nothing about ears that marks warriors or members of miscreant gangs from like fishers or tinkers or whatever. What the actual fuck?
-Username17
People actually did pay for injun scalps, also for ears. The general faith-trust was that the ears you were bringing in was not of random peasants because people would see you killing the peasants and report that men fitting your descriptions had 'raided a village north of whatever', being as it was hard to kill all the people in a village and not leave some survivors to report your doings. And that if no reported murders + a bunch of ears happened, you'd gone and killed a bunch of bandits, who survivors of that group would not go and report the killings to the authorities, as they are outlaws, and known in the area by description, dress, or just are scared of being hung for the reason of not knowing if they were identified or not.
In a world where people are far more differentiated than 'injuns' from 'white men' or 'irish' from 'english', there is no reason why people in a medieval background would not pay for ears. Presumably the goblins in this area are native tribal goblins or criminals, and any exceptions (if there are any) take a lot of care to dress well and not act 'goblin-like' so people will accept them as 'not goblins'.