The founding families of Bingtown, a prosperous trading city whose charter grants them exclusive rights to trade along the Rain Wild River in exchange for their ancestors' willingness to settle in a difficult and dangerous region. The Bingtown Traders are defined by their liveships - ships built from wizardwood that quicken into sentience when enough family members die aboard them - and by the complex obligations those ships create between family members across generations. The Liveship Traders Trilogy examines what happens when the economic and political foundations of Bingtown's prosperity are threatened simultaneously.

The group of Rain Wild inhabitants selected to accompany the damaged young dragons upriver to find the lost Elderling city of Kelsingra, assigned one keeper per dragon on the basis that neither dragons nor keepers have much to lose. The keepers are misfits within Rain Wild society - too physically marked by the river's changes to be easily integrated into normal life - and their journey with the dragons becomes a process of mutual transformation as both species recover something of what they were always meant to be. The Dragon Keepers are the central community of the Rain Wild Chronicles.