Small, flightless, and entirely convinced they are the better merchants.
The Dohwar are a flightless avian people of the Feywild, resembling penguins in build and bearing. They are telepathic, speaking mind to mind rather than aloud, and they are known across wildspace almost entirely through commerce. Dohwar traders describe themselves as the rivals of the Mercane, a claim they advance more often than the Mercane acknowledge it.
Merging
The defining Dohwar practice is merging. Two Dohwar join minds, and from that point the pair communicates with outsiders as a single voice rather than as two individuals. The arrangement is permanent in practice, and a merged pair is treated as one party in a negotiation.
Merging appears to require both participants to be sound. A Dohwar whose partner is transformed, cursed, or otherwise altered cannot complete the joining until the condition is lifted, which makes the removal of such a curse a matter of some urgency in a Dohwar household.
Commerce
Dohwar trade in whatever wildspace will carry, and their dealings extend to materials that most merchants will not handle. Emberlyr passes through Dohwar hands, along with technology recovered from realms far outside the ordinary reach of trade.
They keep a vault at the Rock of Bral which, from the outside, has the appearance of a junkyard. It is heavily defended, and the guardians posted over it are autonomous rather than crewed, hostile to anything that is not Dohwar and particularly attentive to anything magical.
Dohwar commerce is governed by the seller’s discretion rather than by price. A Dohwar who does not wish to sell will not sell, and a buyer who has paid for the privilege of first refusal can close a vault to everyone else until they arrive. Would-be purchasers accustomed to money settling the matter have found that it does not, and Dohwar traders are entirely unmoved by the frustration this produces.