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Far Flung Trading Company
The FFTC, as it is known, isn't really one trading company but a co-operative organization of lots of smaller, independent, companies. It trades along the frontiers and the local trade routes that the big merchant houses don't find profitable, but its co-operative nature means it is more flexible, and the poorer sections of a trade route can survive for years on minimal profit.
The FFTC appear in most of my paper-based and NWN settings and will, apparently, survive for millennia, as a variant appeared in my Traveller setting as well. The PCs normally see a general store stocked with the provisions a small town on the frontier needs - Who buy (or trade for) raw materials (Furs, uncut gems, natural magic components etc) for export. However, FFTC also run the ships that link the frontier to the larger world, and perhaps the frontier port itself.
More broadly, the FFTC includes many small merchant groups, and offers low-cost transport all around the coast of the Hann Sea. Long journeys are often slow, and may involve a number of vessel changes - but that works for some people and some cargoes, and is cheaper than taking the faster ships or the large merchant houses. Moreover, they trade, legitimately, with some of the cities on the north coast of Sakhar, and there are few merchant houses that can manage that.
- The LAS Company
- Occidental Trading (Originally PC owned)
- Kassen Kompany (Originally PC owned)
- V&A Shipping (Originally PC owned)
- House Yitis (Originally PC owned)
- Free Captains of Stilmouth Independent Free Captains| (a catch-all, that lets me used other vessels if I choose to.)++
- The FFTC owns a number of vessels, often used in Frontier Settlements, whose income is used to provide pension for its members.
For more detail, see this page - although be aware this was the implementation for a colonization game that never happened.