Marcel Grenague
Founder of Grennig
Marcel was, by all accounts, a stocky bear of a man. Hailing from forests alongside the Transythe River, he grew up on a small farmstead at the edge of Synthea, where he honed his woodscraft. Deciding that the life of a substance farmer was not for him, he bade his family good by sometime around his fifteenth winter, making his way to the burgeoning town of Drythe to make his fortune. A single voyage crewing a longship on the Sea of Storms persuaded Marcel that a sailor's life appealed to him even less than a farmer's one and he disembarked along the northern coast in the nameless makeshift port run by Galencian merchants.
These merchants, Marcel found, were a hopeless lot. Oh, they could haggle about the price of wool from Geran or silk from New Solarin, talking circles around a man until he agreed to their price just for the peace and quiet. But they couldn't feed themselves. Most lived on dried mutton and moldy potatoes that they packed into their caravans all the way their mountain kingdom. Even Marcel knew that transporting for both the trip to the Sea of Storms and the return cut into their profits and began selling meat from the massive buffalo and antelope that roamed the Rheuthen Basin. Hunting the creatures was laughable. Their herds were massive and he could fell and butcher two or three in single day, enough to feed a small caravan for its entire return journey.
And so Marcel lived for a few winters until he looked around and saw that it was he, not any of the merchants, who had become the fixture at their makeshift port. His operation had evolved. With the advent of crop rotation and establishment of several permanent farms, he now made more coin their pelts and horns of the bests than he did on their meat. Indeed, he had somehow a merchant himself, spending less and less time on the grasslands or more time on the docks, haggling with the merchants himself. He found himself hiring a half-dozen hunters and tanners and he even raising his own warehouse along the bay. He was, much to his surprise, a community leader.
When the problem of brigands began to grow, as it often does where men establish successful trade, Marcel felt that as a community leader, it was incumbent upon him to help solve it. He organized the various caravan guards into militia units, lead by his own hunters, and tracked down the two largest bands of thieves. Within two moons the heads of their leaders adorned spikes outside the three docks of the small nameless port. Pleased with his efforts he even joked that it was "his village" now. Several of the farmers, uninterested in leadership themselves, quickly agreed and suggested that they name the port Grenague after Marcel. Within a winter the merchants had mangled his name, and by the time he died a decade later, everyone knew the port as Grennig.