Gedevar

The island city of Gedevar has been a bustling independent trade city for close to a century, but the city's grown really took off when a gnomish mining consortium came to the island.
Originally scoffed at - Gedevar doesn't have much of its own mineral wealth - they quickly gained both respect and prominence when the locals realized thatthe gnomes weren't mining the island itself, per se, but using it as a basis for dream gates so they could extract dreamsteel.
This process wasn't without its issues. "stable dream gate" is something of an oxymoron to begin with, and the way the gnomes did it spawns an occasional "rogue" dream zone on the island, but then again, not everything in the dream realms is hostile, either. Harbor security for Gedevar city is headed up by a very kind-hearted dreamlands cat paladin named Montague, who takes his job seriously, and also plays favorites with more benevolent or neutral societies over crueler ones. Vanorax ships in Gedevar enjoy basically no security at all, where independent traders and ships from Stelavorn and Karkovia receive much more professional treatment.
In addition, the gnomish mining consortium, knowing the value of the dreamsteel they sell, has imposed a huge number of paranoid security restrictions on the shipping of dreamsteel. A customer wishing to buy some must send five ships, each of which gets loaded with magically-sealed crates of the same size and weight. They are then required to either join a larger convoy for protection or leave and sail in five different directions for a day. Once that day has passed, the crates unseal and the customer can determine which ship actually has the dreamsteel and which ones have simple iron ingots. The gnomes have so far not shafted anyone, and the procedures have cut down dramatically on piracy targeting dreamsteel ships, because only one ship in five actually has dreamsteel on board, and the crews themselves usually don't know.