Eda Oweland
Mayor Eda Oweland
Eda is a gruff, pragmatic woman with scraggy grey hair that she keeps tied back with a ribbon, and whose face and hands bear the signs of a life lived mostly at sea. In fact, she was born in Saltmarsh and has never travelled on land out of sight of the town wall. She is well known for excessively colourful language when frustrated or angry.
Eda married a captain of one of her family's ships when she was 20, but his ship was attacked by a sea monster less than a year later and he drowned with the rest of the crew. She has never had any interest in remarrying, and has no children. Her younger sister, who resides in Neverwinter, is presumed the only heir to the family business when Eda passes.
Commonly perceived as the matriarch of Saltmarsh and respected by all, even those who may disagree with her, Eda owns three large fishing boats, which are highly successful operationally. However, she favours the traditional ways of fishing and doing business, so competition and aggressive efforts to monopolise the seafood market by Solmor have been eating into her profits. Accordingly, she is keen on substantially expanding Saltmarsh's fishing industry, and her fleet, seeing that as the town’s lifeblood, and is lobbying to build a new, much larger dock.
Her old-fashioned outlook and championing of traditional values make her well respected on the docks, but she is also popular with the townsfolk generally as someone willing to stand up for commoners and her passion for the town as a community. She will deal harshly with any who disrupt the peace or do harm to the town or its people.
As the senior member of town Council, serving her third term, Eda does not consider herself a politician, but recognises the expediency of using the position to bring about her goals. She is entirely dismissive of the dwarven mining initiative, being distrustful of the motives of “outsiders” and cynical about Saltmarsh’s best interests being served by anything other than its well established success as a fishing town.
Social
Contacts & Relations
Mayor of Saltmarsh's Town Council, with Anders Solmor, Eliander Fireborn, Gellan Primewater and Manistrad Copperlocks.
Eda...- reluctantly indulges Anders Solmor's role on the Council, but sees his youth and erratic behaviour as irrefutable symptoms of a future she does not want, and quietly fumes that inadvertently fortuitous decisions have substantially impacted her business;
- mistrusts Eliander Fireborn as an outsider and that he is impelled by the greedy interfering hand of Waterdeep, and that his goals serve their interests far more than Saltmarsh's;
- likes Gellan Primewater for his ostentatious style, and is easily influenced by Primewater's bombastic manner;
- loathes Manistrad Copperlocks for the underhanded ploy that got her elected and subsequently making no secret of her exclusively selfish objectives, and cynically dismisses the possibility to prosperity for the town will arise from mining.
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