Miner's Guild

The Miner's Guild is one of the major member organisations of the Commercial Guilds which operate in the Eleven Cities surrounding the Sea of Jars. They are the defining players in the mining of metal in the region.

History

The civilisation of the Eleven Cities would not be able to function without a steady supply of metals. Viable deposits of various metals exist around the Sea of Jars, but mining these is a substantial endeavour, but one that for many years was conducted in a rather haphazard way which meant that metals were only available at a high premium. Shipbuilding in the pre-Wesmodian era made far greater use of dowels than of nails, for example.
It appears to have been the clerics of Zargyod who began coordinating the mining of metal during the Mast Wars, when the city of Chogyos began making use of indentured labour. At the direction of the clerics, work details of indentured labourers were employed to work tin deposits in the hinterlands, greatly increasing the output of the metal in the city. This was combined with copper (the exact source of which remains unclear; the major copper deposits around the Sea of Jars are mostly near Pholyos, Chogyos's major antagonist at the time) to create bronze shipfittings and arrowheads which contributed to the increased efficacy of the Chogyan navy.
This advantage did not have the sort of incisive effect on the course of the wars that might have been expected, however. Although historians make much of the organisational links between the government of Chogyos and the cult of Zargyod, the latter organisation was at the time a less partisan, mofre international institution whose various regional offices were pursuing their own objectives largely independent of Chogyan foreign policy. Correspondence with chapters of the cult in other cities, including Chogyos's enemies, spread the notion of this institution promoting and facilitating the large-scale commercial operations required for the mining of ore in quantity. Few cities outside the Chogyan Hegemony were able to stomach the notion of indentured labour, which slowed the implementation of this idea, but did not stop it, and the scale of mining operations around the Sea of Jars gradually increased over the last two centuries BWR. With the backing of the cult of Zargyod, access to metals increased roughly evenly across the region.
This means that the cult was heavily involved with the mining industry at the time of the Wesmodian Reformation. The institution famously weathered the transition very well, as opposed to the cults of gods such as Ynglyas and Dahan which were all but wiped out. The social disruption of the Reformation therefore had little effect on the production of metals and the economic activity thus generated.
As the cult of Zargyod reformed into the modern Commercial Guilds, therefore, they already had a major role in the extraction and sale of metals in the Eleven Cities, to the extent that in some communities this enterprise was their primary undertaking. They were, for example, the full owner-operators of the electrum mine inland from Oluz, and thus major contributors to the economy, with Zargyod's southern associations with metals and good fortune having largely replaced his local capacity as a god of the sea. Nevertheless the methodological divisions between cities greatly slowed the consolidation of these operations into an international guild. By this stage indentured labour had become established in many imaginations as a manifestation of Chogyan culture and mining operations in various regions, notably the Dyqamay Silverlands, strongly resisted the consolidation on these grounds. Despite heavy lobbying from Guild offices within the former Chogyan Hegemony, most of these objections held firm, and only the northern ports of Oluz and Halumay began importing indentured labour to work their mines (and those imports took place on a surprisingly modest scale). Most substantial mining operations - with the interesting and notable exception of the Silverlands - did eventually sign up as operations of the expanding Miner's Guild, which by the end of the second century AWR held something of a stranglehold on the extraction of base metals around the Sea of Jars.

Current activities

The Miner's Guild is a corporate entity which runs most of the large-scale mining operations in the Eleven cities and their associated hinterlands, particularly those dealing with base metals. They mine iron in the hills that rise to the west of the Chondolos River, lead and tin in several locations around the Alluvial plain and on the island of Tyros, tin in the hinterlands between Elpaloz and Andymalon, copper in the region to the southeast of Pholyos and zinc and electrum around Oluz and Halumay. They also largely control the smelting and wholesale vending of these metals, and in most cities raw ingots of metal that lack the miner's seal stamped into them are considered contraband.
This is not to say that black-market metals are not present in the cities; indeed, the guild faces an ongoing problem dealing with material being spirited out of their facilities and sold on the open market. In Pholyos and Andymalon this activity is thought to cost the guild a substantial fraction of their profits, something that (at least arguably) disadvantages society at large by downgrading the efficiency of a vital industrial process. The issue of 'counterfeit' copper in Pholyos in particular has recently been spreading to other cities, and as yet the miners have not been able to leverage their contacts in the shipping industry to find out how this contraband is being trafficked.
The miners have also failed to make many inroads into the Dyqamay Silverlands, a region which would be of obvious value to them. Dqyamay does not permit indentured labour and the work in the silverlands is conducted on a very small scale by free wage labourers. The Commercial Guilds are lobbying heavily to get these workers to amalgamate into a single operation under their auspice, though this idea has not yet gained any traction. The highly independent inhabitants of the Silverlands fear unscrupulous activity from the Guilds and rumours have spread that they will use their connections to international shipping to starve the entire island of Dyqamay into submission in order to force their plans into fruition. The Miner's Guild, and indeed the Commercial Guilds organisation as a whole, have countered this suggestion by observing that in the three hundred years the have existed they have never attempted such a tactic. This exchange, and the fact that neither side appears to be heeding the other, has resulted in considerable tension between the Commercial Guilds and the government, and indeed general population, of the island.
Another activity the Miner's Guild has struggled to keep under wraps is an emerging belief among many of its junior members in supernatural beings known as Clonkers. This belief appears to have emerged in tin mines on the Alluvial plain. The Knockers are said to be diminutive people concerned with the state of mines, and which demand that miners spend time and energy on the cleanliness and upkeep of the mine which they really ought to be spending actually extracting ore. The Guild are trying to stamp out this idea, since it causes inefficiencies, but it has instead spread to operations across the southern coast of the Sea of Jars, ironically via the transferal of indentured labourers. Interestingly workers in the copper mines of Pholyos have also begun reporting Clonkers in their mines, which cannot be accounted for by the transferal of indentured labour as this is forbidden in the region. Thaumatologists have begun attempting to interview miners about Clonkers, something the Miner's Guild obstruct, evidently for fear of spreading the story. The official party line is that no such stories are being reported; why the Guild would be so defensive about a fairly minor issue is a question in itself.