Tieck

Tieck is an incredibly poor country located in the continent of Naivara. It is exploited as a sock-puppet state and key trading route for the neighbouring Republic of Telimar, and populated mainly by humans, halflings, and some tieflings.

Because of the lack of resources and money, many of the folk of Tieck resort to crime, stealing off traders, cargo barges, unwelcome travelers and the like. There seems to be a sense of comradery amongst thieves in the country, a thief will almost never interfere with their starving brothren, and never snitch, in fact Thieves' Cant was created in Tieck.

## History

Before Tieck was taken under the control of Telimar, it was highly isolated. Due to its harsh, rocky terrain and largely infertile land, it was not a well-populated area. The people who lived there largely farmed potatoes (which they do to this day). Tieck was not considered economically fortunate by the standards of the outside world, with its citizens surviving largely off of the potatoes they grew and fish they caught, but its people fed each other: local trading routes were developed by farmers in the regional areas to bring vegetables and homemade goods such as clothes and furniture to the coastal towns, and the people of the coastal towns traded for these things largely with fish they caught. There was no overarching leadership of the country as a whole, groups of farmers and fishermen in specific regions worked together to organise trading and look after the people. Besides trade, a key aspect of life in Tieck was religion: the dominant church was that of Isul Aieha, located on the coast, with smaller churches and religious groups dotted throughout the regional areas.

However, things changed when the Republic took interest in Tieck as a trading route. Telimar sought a way to more easily traffic goods to the Black Sea for export, with tensions and difficulties arising along their established route through the countries of Clare and Domier. This gave rise to the establishment of the Black Road, a trading road to be used by nobles and merchants of the neighbouring Telimar, stretching from the border of Tieck and Telimar all the way to Tierm, a small coastal city that would develop into the major docktown for the Black Road.

The development of the Black Road, and subsequent political control of Tieck by the Republic, majorly disrupted life for Tieckan citizens. They were not used to the idea of being controlled by a government, and the representatives of Telimar that came to build and operate the Black Road were cruel: they would steal from Tieckan farmers and fishermen with no recourse, and were known to kill citizens that tried to fight back. Besides this overt violence, once the Black Road was complete, Tieckans had to pay exorbitant taxes to use what was once their local trading route to do business with other regions, essentially barring many Tieckans from trading at all. This contributed massively to the plunging of Tieck into its current state of poverty: farmers could no longer obtain fish from coastal regions, and many turned to poor-quality meats such as rat and game birds, and coastal citizens could not obtain goods such as clothes and furniture from regional artisans. Additionally, locals of Tierm were barred from their prime fishing spots due to the development of huge docks on the coast of the Black Sea.

## Wealth inequality, Crime, and The Thieves Guild

The coastal town of Tierm became the hub of activity for Telimarian trading, and is now a major docktown for import and export of goods. As such, many Telimarian people moved to Tierm to work in this industry or conduct their own business. Because Tieck is incredibly poor, middle-class Telimarians frequently move there and become extremely rich and powerful merchants just by relativity. These people tend to either live in Tierm, or in the small villages that have cropped up along the Black Road as trading checkpoints and outposts, where they exploit the Tieckan citizens in the area. These Telimarians are known derisively as goblins or dragons by the locals, cultural terms for someone who is cruel and greedy. They are also sometimes incorrectly referred to as ‘nobles’, because to the people of Tieck, a sufficiently wealthy merchant is indistinguishable from a king: they are both completely free of punishment for their actions, have no idea what life is like for the common people, and are absurdly rich.

The influx of rich people from Telimar, and subsequent thrusting of Tieckans into severe poverty, led to a massive increase in crime in the city of Tierm. Once a busy, but content fishing village, Tierm is now a sprawling city with a huge wealth gap and a booming criminal underworld. Poor, but law-abiding Tieckans tend to live on the outskirts of the city and maintain small gardens to grow potatoes off which to survive, while much of the city proper is taken up by Telimarians described above. But also thriving in the inner city and docks region is the Thieves Guild of Tieck; a highly organised force of mostly young adult Tieckans (though a few older citizens are involved) that work to steal from and interrupt the supply chain of imported and exported goods, mainly just to feed themselves and poorer Tieckans, but also as a form of hitting back at the Republic. The Thieves Guild are a complex, ruthless organisation, and have been known to steal from the supply chain at many points, be it emptying wagons as they are pulled through the city, commandeering entire cargo ships, stealing gold from prominent merchants, or sending missions out to regional checkpoints along the Black Road. They are also an intelligent force and rarely caught or punished, using stealth and wit to their advantage: indeed, legend says that Thieves Cant was invented in Tieck. An incident with an incredibly rich Telimarian merchant and a Guild member known as Miri of the Black Road, known for conducting several operations that resulted in wiping out Telimarian trading checkpoints, resulted in the arrest and execution of many prominent Thieves Guild members, forcing those remaining to retreat from the city for some time.