The Saltwatch
PDFCriminal Organization
Goals
Control the movement of people, goods, and information through the Saltmere port network -- smuggling, extortion, document forgery, and the specific expertise of making things disappear from manifests and making other things appear on them.
Every significant port city develops something like the Saltwatch. The specific version that emerged in Saltmere is shaped by two factors that distinguish it from equivalent organizations elsewhere: the Velkhrun community's established presence and the Coastal Confederacy's structural indifference to the methods by which its members' shipping interests are protected.
The Saltwatch began as a mutual protection organization among Velkhrun families who had established themselves in Saltmere's dock district and found the existing criminal ecosystem unwelcoming. Over two generations it became the existing criminal ecosystem, absorbing or displacing the organizations it had initially been protecting against. The current Saltwatch is approximately forty percent Velkhrun by membership, with a leadership structure that reflects this but does not advertise it.
The organization's current head is known only as the Harbor Voice, a Saltmere tradition of anonymous leadership that predates the Saltwatch and has been maintained through several leadership transitions. The Harbor Voice speaks through intermediaries and has not been publicly identified for eleven years. This is, by Saltwatch standards, a long run.
The Saltwatch's relationship with Watch-Captain Coldwater in Ravensburg is adversarial in ways that are not entirely professional: she was a Saltwatch field operative for six years before leaving, and her departure was not amicable. The Saltwatch considers her a security risk. She considers them a professional embarrassment. Both assessments are accurate, and neither has produced an actual attempt on the other -- a state of productive tension that neither party has been willing to disrupt.