The Creek-Stream River route from Colymar to Nochet

[Squaredeal Sten]

Just how hard is it for merchants to trade by water along the Creek-Stream rive route from Colymar lands (basically from Duck Point) to Nochet?   

In a previous thread today,

1 hour ago, Jeff said:

The Creek Stream River drops some 700 meters in around 300 km between Duck Point and Nochet - much of it in territory controlled by Beast People or Trolls. That's not nearly as easy as the nice straight roads of Sartar, protected by a nice friendly Orlanthi Prince.

That nice friendly Orlanthi Prince of course charges tolls. But the only "monopoly" granted is to Issaries, who gets to oversee all markets. 

 

From other discussion i got the idea that the Ducks used to handle river traffic on this route, mostly using reed duck boats. 

I haven't seen much discussion of the river passage through Best Valley (do the Beasts interfere?  How do they feel about humans floating through?),

nor discussion of what happens when you go past the western edge of the Shadow Plateau. 

What happened to this river traffic when the Duck Hunt was active?  When the Lunars invaded Esrolia?

Seems to me that if you as a trader get to Esrolia post-Dragonrise, you may be able to breathe safely.   But do the queens in Nochet really exert control throughout Esrolia?  What happened when Belintar went down?

Edited August 25, 2022 by Squaredeal Sten
spelling

[Jeff]

This is perhaps easiest with reference to a map. As you can see, river traffic first needs to get to the Dammed Marsh north of the Shadow Plateau. That's troll country. Then you need to follow the New River, which is the north bank is Esrolian, but the south bank is troll, at least until you get to the Building Wall. 

Back in the Second Age, much of the Creek-Stream River was considered to be "difficult or impossible due to the general lay of the land" - I doubt that is changed. Barges did travel up and down the river - I suspect back then the rulers were able to built towpaths, so the barges were towed by oxen or even dinosaurs!
 

 

[M Helsdon]

33 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

From other discussion i got the idea that the Ducks used to handle river traffic on this route, mostly using reed duck boats. 

They do, but the quantity of cargo carried in what are effectively small coracles cannot compete with a mule or wagon caravan by road.

The big problem is geography as Jeff illustrates.

If you look at the map, the descent is pretty wild in places, with a series of waterfalls, cataracts, and wild rapids along the Runnel River just north of the Building Wall and before the New River Gorge. The map in the Argan Argar Atlas shows at least five major cataracts, and there must be many more lesser ones.

The Ducks and their boats can get down, but human craft not, I suspect. Going the other way, even the Ducks have to take their boats out of the water to portage them around the Runnel rapids and probably much further up the Engizi. The currents will be fierce and even for Ducks paddling up river, will be long, slow, and arduous. And, given the terrain, carrying boats past the rapids will be difficult, especially as the southern bank is troll country.

Another factor is probably that this watercourse is geologically new.

Belintar changed the course of the Engizi so that it now drains through the Lyksos, not the Marzeel, and that change is going to seriously affect the waterway.

Edited August 25, 2022 by M Helsdon

[Squaredeal Sten]

At this point the clearest map I have is inside the cover of Glorantha Bestiary. 

Or, wait, the Argan Argar Atlas -

 

The Creek-Stream river flows into a marsh east of New Cryatal city, so i take it that's the Dammed Marsh.  Is there a navigable route through the marsh or past its edge? 

After that the river turns west, apparently through a canyon (new River), to be or to merge with the Runnel River, and around the Building Wall it becomes the Lyskos River. All the time on the edge of the Shadow Plateau.

I don't see an indication of rapids in the Atlas map, unless that's the five white lines in the canyon.  Yes the map key says rapids or waterfalls.  Yes that would indicate a portage.  Or maybe a carry by cart or mule to reach larger river craft west of the rapids and canyon.

I have never seen much about new Crystal, Valadon, or Monros cities..

Edited August 25, 2022 by Squaredeal Sten
capitalization, then adding map portion

[Jeff]

This map shows the original flow of the Creek-Stream River (in red) through to Karse. But Belintar dammed the river when he made the Lead Hills and then dug a deep ditch (shades of Paul Bunyan) for it to link up with the Lyksos River.

Prior to the Dragonkill, the banks of Creek-Stream River were the most densely populated areas in Dragon Pass, and the trolls cooperated with the rulers. Now they are inhabited by Beast People, zombies, dragonewts, and dwarfs - and the trolls of the Shadow Plateau are no longer under anyone's direction.

[M Helsdon]

27 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

I have never seen much about new Crystal, Valadon, or Monros cities..

The Guide to Glorantha would be the best source at present.

 

Edited August 25, 2022 by M Helsdon

[Squaredeal Sten]

Thanks, that is food for thought.  I can see the difficulty with upstream traffic, with the rapids, with the Uz on the south bank. 

Seems to me that New Crystal would have a good location for trade if the Beast men let it through.  If not then New Crystal is a backwater.

 

 

[Jeff]

New Crystal City is an odd place. 

NEW CRYSTAL CITY (SMALL CITY)

After Belintar dug the New River, he constructed this city using a fragment of the Gift of the Sun Crystal. Belintar grew the fragment into a huge crystalline building with spires of green, blue, yellow, red, and white. Around the crystal palace, he laid out a city to guard passage along the New River. New Crystal City has around 5,000 residents, and it is an important offloading point for trade going into Dragon Pass. 

New Crystal city has major temples to Ernalda, Orlanth Thunderous, and a local variant of Yelmalio, minor temples to Argan Argar, Orlanth Adventurous, Chalana Arroy, Engizi, Issaries, and Lhankor Mhy, and shrines to Babeester Gor, Maran Gor, Humakt, Esrola, and Ty Kora Tek. 

So of course there are trade caravans that go from New Crystal City - and I suspect most are Grazelander pony caravans. Rich Post is only about 40 km away after all. But the volume of that trade is dwarfed by the caravans that go from Karse to Boldhome to Alda-Chur to Furthest.

[Squaredeal Sten]

I consulted the Guide to Glorantha, and

Pages 257-258

"Lyksos River: The Lyksos River drains northern Esrolia and empties out with its mouth at Nochet. The river gained

tremendously in prestige and power after Belintar cut the New River to divert the Creek-Stream River to flow into the Lyksos.

It is the main arterial for waterborne traffic between Dragon Pass and the Holy Country."

So, canon - there must be some waterborne traffic.

Whether it's just by ducks or whether Beast Valley lets humans through on the river is another question of course.

And I did find the entries for those three cities,

Page 257

Monros (small city): This city, named after a Second Age king, is located at the junction of two important roads and a ferry across the Lyksos River. A rich sanctuary of the goddess  Ernalda and her warrior daughter Vinga is outside the city walls, surrounded by citrus orchards. In 1620, the goddesses confronted the Feathered Horse Queen and forced her army to retreat from Esrolia.

 

New Crystal City (small city): This city near the ruins of lost Elmalvo was constructed by Belintar from a fragment of the Gift of the Sun Crystal. With the aid of the gods of Kethaela, Belintar grew the fragment into a huge crystalline building with spires of green, blue, yellow, red, and white. New River: Belintar dug a deep canyon to divert the Creek-Stream River into the Lyksos River. It has steep cliffs, hundreds of feet high, and is nearly impossible to cross.

 

Page 259:

Valadon (large city): Also called Willford, this city in the North March of Esrolia is the lowest fordable place on the Lyksos River. Valadon is best known for its annual harvest festival celebrating Esrola and Argan Argar.

So from north to south:-

No mention of trade in conjunction with New Crystal city.  But if there are people there they need to have some reason to be there.  Is being a local / regional market enough? Is the tourist traffic to see the crystal building enough?

it's next to the canyon, rapids- so not a river port.  but maybe a portage route, so traders would unload the duck boats and cart the cargo past the canyon?

Valadon:  "the lowest fordable place" so it will be the northern limit of navigation for large watercraft.  But not necessarily a barrier for ducks boats or rafts or any purpose built shallow draft boat.  No ships north (up river)  of there, but that doesn't mean no cargo on the river.

Monros;  A road junction and ferry, as well as a 'rich' temple.  The river here is clearly navigable.

 

Edited August 25, 2022 by Squaredeal Sten
spelling

[Squaredeal Sten]

14 minutes ago, Jeff said:

New Crystal City is an odd place. 

NEW CRYSTAL CITY (SMALL CITY)

.....

So of course there are trade caravans that go from New Crystal City - and I suspect most are Grazelander pony caravans. Rich Post is only about 40 km away after all. But the volume of that trade is dwarfed by the caravans that go from Karse to Boldhome to Alda-Chur to Furthest.

So there is trade by a somewhat circuitous route.  Questionable how much through Beast Valley but the Grazers have a pack train  route south to Esrolia.  The Grazers do also seem to have some routes through to Sartar, despite the Upland Marsh.

Edited August 25, 2022 by Squaredeal Sten

[Erol of Backford]

We came up with a series of locks to move around some of the falls, it will take years to build. Booms and hoists powered by slaves in other locations designed and built by Openhanded Dwarves.

[Joerg]

The cataracts in the New River couldn't be shelves with high vertical drops, as Enjossi was able to lead the salmon up that route, so probably they are more like whitewater canoeiing challenges.

Ordinary barge traffic avoids such obstacles. There is a limit to what bargemen can tackle, like e.g. the Danube gorge upriver from Kelheim, where the river took advantage of a meteorite impact crater to shorten its route long before human history began, and where bargemen could pass only using metal rings affixed to the vertical rock of the gorge. Entering there slowly with a rather powerful motorized boat gives you an impression what those bargemen had to overcome with their hooked poles.

 

[M Helsdon]

5 hours ago, Joerg said:

The cataracts in the New River couldn't be shelves with high vertical drops, as Enjossi was able to lead the salmon up that route, so probably they are more like whitewater canoeiing challenges.

Good luck getting a boat loaded with cargo up or down these....

 

[Joerg]

I'd hate to have to tow an empty reed raft down the olympic whitewater parcours. Some cataracts can be managed downriver by rafts, but it is a wet experience, and the raft may break some of its lumber. Upriver, it is carriage of the cargo, or riding a water elemental or similar wave/current. Such a feat is possible, otherwise Enjossi couldn't have made it all the way into the Stream.

I had a brush with a riptide in the Biscaya, thankfully instinctively doing the right thing and escaping to the side rather than trying to fight the current, and I had fun in the Amper river floating down half a kilometer in just a few minutes (swimming against the current, too). Neither of those were whitewater. But having such a current working in your favour, even against a whitewater, might just work. The imagery of Patagonian orcas creating their own bow wave to ride onto the beach to pick of seals (or sea lions) gives an idea how a swimmer or boat doing such a thing might look.

My personal visualisation is an experience at Saltstraumen halfway from high tide to low, with a current raging by at about 40 mph, and watching a (rather rusty and decrepit looking) ship speed by faster than any lorry on a highway just to keep its steering slightly faster than the current. The edge of the current was at least a meter lower than the middle, with eddies gurgling downward several meters.

The Bosporus experience of the Argo reconstruction is another reminder how much magic would be required to counter a much tamer looking current, and the wisdom of searching and riding counter-currents.

 

The Creek-Stream-River is massive. We sat with Greg on the wall of Castle Stahleck overlooking the Rhine after a period of strong rainfall upriver in the previous weeks, with motorized upriver traffic slowed down to a crawl and downriver traffic almost matching the road traffic in speed. Greg pointed out that the Rhine carries less water than Engizi and friends, in a narrower bed than Engizi, too. (And that the Oslir had passages wide enough that seeing the opposite shore needed a clear day.)

Belintar's New River takes probably two thirds of the water carried down after the Stream joins the water seeping through the Upland Marsh, which must have quite a few sections with significant currents, possibly deep below floating patches of vegetation, with places where the water wells up under some pressure. The rest seeps through the Styx grotto into its former bed east of Shadow Plateau, where it is joined by the Marzeel River after passing through the Backwind (or Blackwind) Marsh.

Belintar's New River is quite a deep gorge, a work of water management a lot harder than Waha's Good canal, and the Runnel and Lyksos rivers further downriver would have been swelled beyond previous Thawing floods as the new normal. Any pre-existing bridges or riverside buildings would have been lost, and the Nochet outlet of the Lyksos narrowing around Orlanth's Hill would see currents equivalent of a cataract, and might be passable upriver only at the highest tides.

It is possible (or even likely) that the new River has side canals with locks for upriver traffic, built (or at least prepared) when Belintar drained the Dammed Marsh, possibly using the accumulated power of the frustrated river to cut the passage through topsoil as much as bedrock. An entirely new fan of sediment may have accumulated in Choralinthor Bay as the changed current headed towards Holy Island, the excavated material from north of Shadow Plateau, and some of the former sediments in the much expanded Runnel and Lyksos beds.

If either the Lyksos or the Runnel meandered on their courses before they were joined by the New River, that new force may have shortened quite a few of those side loops while raising water levels in those, too. If so, those side loops would offer routes of much lessened counter-current, with occasional excitement as the upriver craft would have to cross the main current to reach such a loop cutting into the opposite bank.Storm and Sea Season would probably pretty much impossible to travel upriver, as the permanent torrent of the Skyfall gets boosted by heavy thaws. Fire, Earth and Dark Seasons might be the best time for upriver travel.

Edited August 26, 2022 by Joerg

[Joerg]

 

Portage of a reed boat might be quite impossible. Looking at Thor Heyerdahl's experiences with the Ra and the Tigris (both built with the aid of expert reed boat builders from Lake Titicaca), the buyoant reed bundles soak up water and continuously lose buoyancy. After a journey downriver, the reed bundle may well contain half its volume in water, making it extremely hard to lift out of water or to transport it overland.

One possible solution would be for the reed boats never to travel up a cataract, but occasionally traveling down one to the next stretch of somewhat calmer river, where it would alternate between the cargo transfers of the carriage paths. What would that mean for the durulz crews, though?

One answer might be a division between crew assigned to a boat and crew assigned to accompany the cargo. The cargo ducks would jump boats at each carriage, working as deck hands under the nautical supervision of the ranking boat ducks. (All of this applies to bachelor newtlings cooperating with the ducks, too.)

The boat ducks would start out in the region of Duck Point with a brand new reed boat and travel the (rather long) stretch through Beast Valley to the Dammed Marsh with their still fairly light in the water craft. When a craft gets too heavy for convenient upriver traffic on that long stretch, it is carefully towed down the cataract, or boldly ridden down the cataract, now to plie the next leg alternating upriver and downriver, with cargo ducks and boat ducks who finally gave up their craft to the tides returning upriver bolstering their upriver crews.

 

Still, managing upriver traffic even against a non-whitewater river sounds like a feat impossible without some magic.

One possible magic would be a friendly current or wave surrounding the hull, helping it upriver.

Another magic known to exist in Glorantha turns a reed boat into a giant paddling bird. The Nogatending weeder humans still use this magic on the Black Eel River in Saird. Do the ducks have a similar secret magic? 

Still, for upriver traffic across the cataracts some other magic might be required.

My old non-Gloranthan RuneQuest world had a culture (Roman/Carthaginian/Melnibonean) inhabiting the mountain range between two major inland seas who controlled a network of canals and dammed lakes, with huge water elementals powering the locks between these stretches of elevated water surface. There is no such system evident for the natural stretches of the River, and none mentioned (yet) for the New River dug by Belintar.

The rivers of Glorantha used to expand uphill in the Gods Age, until Sky River Titan spearheaded the release of all their active motion towards Magasta's Whirlpool encapsulating the Void left behind by the implosion of the Spike. That uphill motion hasn't been forgotten by the rivers (or their deities), and might be re-awakened with sufficient magical exhortion, for a limited time and extent at least. Unfortunately, the Engizi River doesn't have such a history of crawling inland into Dragon Pass. Sshorg did, but had its back broken by Orlanth, separating off the Oslir river from the connection to its parent Togaro.

For the Lyksos and Runnel rivers, this mythical uphill traffic is an option, allowing a craft pr possibly a flotilla of craft to reach Belintar's New River from Nochet with sufficient magical input.

Belintar's New River might have features in its design to offer an alternative aid upriver.

Crocodilians or huge sweetwater snapping turtles might be controllable by durulz shamans, to be used as sub-surface draft animals for upriver travel.

[Erol of Backford]

14 hours ago, Joerg said:

Ordinary barge traffic avoids such obstacles.

But if there were a series of locks and booms (maybe dwarf made or influenced) which in turn developed into a small trade post where would it be located between Nochet and New Crystal City?

Also what is the elevation change between the two locations, sorry if I missed it but I cannot clearly see the contours on the map posted a while back... maybe where red arrows are in clip? Also the little white ticks in the Lycos circled in red are waterfalls? If so and they were 100m each the locks could be there. (I love all the detail in the maps!)

From the AA Atlas it looks like about 2000' drop over about 20 plus hexes which would be about 100m elevation over 5000m or 1/50? If the falls are 100m or so the river wouldn't be such a white water rafting expedition but still dangerous I am sure...

 

[scott-martin]

43 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Another magic known to exist in Glorantha turns a reed boat into a giant paddling bird. The Nogatending weeder humans still use this magic on the Black Eel River in Saird. Do the ducks have a similar secret magic? 

It's an interesting question. I'm almost convinced that any river cultist deep enough to exert much of this magic on Great Engizi is practically deep enough to just send the boat all the way down the Pool and then eventually drop back on the Sky Fall ready to start the downstream cycle fresh and maybe carrying strange cargo. Naturally that's a whole lot of magic, but at least at no point are you going against the will of the creek • stream • river. And going against the flow is not what advanced river adepts do.

I don't think Belintar explicitly banned profane shipping on the New River but he might not have even seen the need. Maybe things were different in ancient times.
 

[M Helsdon]

The elephant in the room is that the New River feeds into the Runnel and the Lyksos, and these waterways have only been carrying the waters of the Engizi for barely two centuries. The Engizi drains almost the entire Dragon Pass basin, which is almost surrounded by mountain ranges, including the massive Rockwoods. Throughout the year, and especially after the thaw enormous quantities of water run into the Upland Marsh and then on into the Dammed Marsh, through the canyon Belintar dug for the New River, and then into the cascades and rapids of the Runnel. The name of the Runnel suggests that it was once a fairly small river, descending towards the lowlands, and now it carries most of the waters of one of the major rivers of southern Genertela. The massive quantities of water are going to make what was a white water stream into a raging torrent, even when the thaw is over. Add to this the erosion of the banks, there are not going to be stable towpaths or side canals This is a rough energetic waterway, constrained by the canyon walls of the New River. Most of the descent looks to be in the short length of the cataracts of the Runnel.

There's going to be limited Duck river traffic, but even Ducks will struggle in places. With trolls to the south and Beasts to the north east, this is not the place for massive engineering works.

[Erol of Backford]

What if the builders/ Belintar made an agreement with the trolls at the south that they were allowed to charge a toll similar to what they do at Smithstone with chains across the river there provided they didn't trouble commerce? (likely not canonical about trolls at Smithstone) This goes on with the Praxian Sundome...

[Squaredeal Sten]

15 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

What if the builders/ Belintar made an agreement with the trolls at the south that they were allowed to charge a toll similar to what they do at Smithstone with chains across the river there provided they didn't trouble commerce? (likely not canonical about trolls at Smithstone) This goes on with the Praxian Sundome...

There are no trolls at Smithstonr. It's Volsaxi country.  

Belintar is dead.

As for the what if   are the Uz all united so they only have to cut one deal?  

If so it looks like a eat adventure hook.

 

Edited August 27, 2022 by Squaredeal Sten
My phone's spelling scrambler.

[Shiningbrow]

8 hours ago, M Helsdon said:

 especially after the thaw enormous quantities of water run into the Upland Marsh

Might be interesting to see what flows out within that water.....

[Joerg]

8 hours ago, M Helsdon said:

The name of the Runnel suggests that it was once a fairly small river, descending towards the lowlands, and now it carries most of the waters of one of the major rivers of southern Genertela. The massive quantities of water are going to make what was a white water stream into a raging torrent, even when the thaw is over. Add to this the erosion of the banks, there are not going to be stable towpaths or side canals This is a rough energetic waterway, constrained by the canyon walls of the New River. Most of the descent looks to be in the short length of the cataracts of the Runnel.

I agree that both ther Runnel and the non-tidal portion of the Lyksos river beds have been totally overwhelmed by the re-direction of the River, leading to heavy erosion and a permanent state of "worst floodiing of the century" turned up to eleven.

However, let's take a look at some of those "once a century floodings" we have seen so many times in the last few years. The rivers escape their beds, claiming an area often a hundred times wider than the usual width of the river, but slowing the torrential whitewater into a "Rhine below Stahleck" or Danube between Weltenburg monastery and Kelheim situation, and that's what I think would have happened to most of the Lyksos and Runnel valley taking in that extra water.

This admittedly still leaves the cascades of the original Runnel river, a quite secondary waterway draining parts of the southern Grazelands, probably almost seasonal in nature.

We don't have any detail maps of this river prior to the formation of the Lead Hills with isohypses (height lines) or a typical river bed. A river draining the foothills of a place with seasonal large amounts of water tends to have an outer bed inside which you will find the detritus too heavy to be carried off by the seasonal floodings and an inner water course into which the river retreats outside of the annual floodings.

Let's switch to a river that used to be proverbial for its floodings,at least until the Assuan reservoir was built: the Nile. For much of its length, it runs through a rather broad canyon of its own making, most of the time restricted to the rather broad basin in the middle, with rather level farmland on either side slightly sloping up towards the steeper slopes of the canion walls, with side valleys formed by wadis. The Zola Fel has such a structure too.

The Nile floodings were famous for the massive sedimentation of fertile mud (easily carried off sediment) during the floodings, indicating the loss of speed and turbulence where it escaped its regular bed. Outside of river gorges where there is no room to flood low-lying area left and right of the river, i.e. the cataracts, the speed of the current away from the deep channel will be a lot lower.

Navigating such flooded area carries other hazards, as it is basically the same as crossing a wadden sea or a stretch of shifting sand bars in a river, but the nature of the durulz and newtling reed boats is actually ideally suited to deal with these.

 

What remains are the passages where the flooding river has to pass through a narrow.

Every once in a few years, the baroque monastery Weltenburg, just upriver of that meteor impact crater the Danube drilled its way through on its way to Kelheim, enters the news as its Unesco world inheritance substance is threatened by the flooding Danube again.

The monastery sits about  five meters above the regular bed of the Danube. When the upper Danube floods, it swells to a huge, mostly stagnant pool upriver of the gorge, which then has a situation similar to the tidal Saltstraumen near Bodø. What happens there twice daily at low tide is that you get a height difference between the Atlantic and the more than 50 miles of Saltfjorden behind the narrows north and south of a rocky island blocking the exit of the Fjord of several meters, and the phenomenon I described earlier with a massive elevated current in the center of the canal and a slope towards the edges of the waterway with eddies and even localized counter-currents (that not even an Olympic white water kayak would be able to use).

(As a tidal current, the reverse situation also happens twice a day. making observations about sedimentation moot. Not that there is any in the section with the tidal currents.)

I have seen a standing wave of almost a meter on a much smaller fjord with a narrow opening to a larger one, at Skutvik in Hamarøy, Norway. The kind of obstacle that I associate with the Doom Currents or the Bezarngay Boil in the East Isles, a slope in the water.

[Joerg]

What happened to Elmalvo, the north Esrolian city roughly at the site of New Crystal City from which some of the Adjustment Wars flooded into Esrolia? Was it flooded by the re-directed River, with New Crystal City being Belintar's resettlement offer?

 

On 8/25/2022 at 11:02 PM, Jeff said:

After Belintar dug the New River, he constructed this city using a fragment of the Gift of the Sun Crystal. Belintar grew the fragment into a huge crystalline building with spires of green, blue, yellow, red, and white. Around the crystal palace, he laid out a city to guard passage along the New River. New Crystal City has around 5,000 residents, and it is an important offloading point for trade going into Dragon Pass. 

 

 

[Darius West]

11 hours ago, M Helsdon said:

The elephant in the room is that the New River feeds into the Runnel and the Lyksos, and these waterways have only been carrying the waters of the Engizi for barely two centuries. The Engizi drains almost the entire Dragon Pass basin, which is almost surrounded by mountain ranges, including the massive Rockwoods. Throughout the year, and especially after the thaw enormous quantities of water run into the Upland Marsh and then on into the Dammed Marsh, through the canyon Belintar dug for the New River, and then into the cascades and rapids of the Runnel. The name of the Runnel suggests that it was once a fairly small river, descending towards the lowlands, and now it carries most of the waters of one of the major rivers of southern Genertela. The massive quantities of water are going to make what was a white water stream into a raging torrent, even when the thaw is over. Add to this the erosion of the banks, there are not going to be stable towpaths or side canals This is a rough energetic waterway, constrained by the canyon walls of the New River. Most of the descent looks to be in the short length of the cataracts of the Runnel.

There's going to be limited Duck river traffic, but even Ducks will struggle in places. With trolls to the south and Beasts to the north east, this is not the place for massive engineering works.

I absolutely agree with this assessment of the obstacle.  But suppose some enterprising Diros worshipper built a very sturdy type of boat for shooting the rapids reliably, and once a certain amount of cargo was stashed and tied down securely, there was room for passengers left over?  Would people consider white water boating a terrible threat or a tourist attraction?

[M Helsdon]

There's a second elephant in the room.

It's modern thinking that you can adjust and manipulate the environment (the God Learners thought the same thing....) and despite the presence of Iron Age technology, the mindset of the majority of Third Age humans is 'Bronze Age'. The rivers are feeling thinking entities, and you don't mess with them without a very great deal of effort. The Lunars have 'tamed' most of their rivers, exterminating the river dwellers, but whilst Belintar certainly created changes, he seems to have done so with at least a modicum of respect and cooperation. The Engizi needed a new path to the sea; the Runnel is probably overjoyed to go from a minor river to an adopted son of Engizi; the Lyksos is probably still a bit astonished and floods his banks more than he did.

Re-engineering the river with canals and locks would likely need someone of Belintar's powers, and he chose not to do it.

So trade up and downriver is limited to the special Duck boats, which need portage, and can't carry cargo in quantities comparable with the road caravans to and from Karse.

There's a third elephant in the room.

A sense of wonder.

Can you imagine what the flow through the New River and the Runnel looks like? It will be spectacular.

And you want to tame and circumvent it?

We know there's a major trade route from Karse to Peloria; we know there's a very minor one from Nochet via the Grazelands or Duckpoint.... Isn't that enough?