The Riven Mile

• A bell-rope strung between trees signals approaching patrols, customers, or trouble.
• Covered stalls offer stolen luxuries, forged papers, salvaged weapons, and discreet repairs.
• A ring of white stones marks the market's peace boundary.

• Mara Venn, a retired highway robber who enforces the market's rules with calm severity.
• Six to ten rotating outlaws, fences, scouts, and traveling merchants.
• Hidden archers in the surrounding trees, loyal only to the market's neutrality.

• The milestone conceals a tunnel leading to an abandoned tollhouse used as an emergency refuge.
• One regular trader secretly reports market activity to the local magistrate, but only to settle an old debt.

• A locked strongbox containing 240 gp, coded ledgers, and several signet rings.
• A bundle of forged travel papers bearing convincing royal seals.

The Riven Mile is a neutral exchange run by fugitives, smugglers, deserters, and debtors who pay for the privilege of being left alone. No bloodshed, theft, or questions about real names are tolerated within the market's boundary.

Mara offers the characters a generous payment to escort a caravan of outlaws through a patrol-heavy region without revealing the caravan's cargo.

A broken milestone leans beside a muddy crossroads, its carved distances chiseled away and replaced with painted prices. Beneath patched awnings, masked traders quietly sell goods while lookouts watch the road from the branches above.