Terra Firma Thursday

Well I have been absent a day or two.  Moving sans internet at home with kids ultimately shot holes in my eager plans to keep posting.  Internet is now here at the new apartment and so I am returning to Dungeon Mastering by Candlelight.

Thursday is dedicated to interesting locations pulled from my home campaign and share with you for incorporation in part or whole into your own game.

The Worg's Bite and Stonhagel Village.

The Worg's Bite is a treacherous region of flatirons and foothills rising right at the Southern base of the Goblinspite Mountains.  Although it remained a wild place even during the best of times the narrow gap of the Worg's Bite offered a necessary passage into and ultimately through the Goblinspite almost directly North to South making this rugged landscape an important and much sought after trade route.

Rambling and sputtering along the shadowed bottom of this connected series of mountain valleys is the Welsprith River.  Up until ten years ago and the arrival of the Pattern Storms into this region the Welsprith was flanked here and there by at least a dozen settlements of some three to five hundred souls each.

Stonhagel Village is one such settlement and like most of the rest it has become a dreary, silent and abandoned place during the day.  It is more than a ghost town.  Shattered doors and exterior walls stained with old splashes of blood now washed and aged to dim spots of blackish tar speak of horrible things watching and waiting within the shadows of the buildings here.  In point of fact Stonhagel Village is a "Haunt" which is any place abandoned and taken over by the wandering undead spawned by the relentless passage of the Pattern Storms.

Stonhagel is marked with a sold black banner placed at the four corners of its perimeter.  By the law of the Elven Duke of Threnodial whose borders skirt this region to the South, it is unlawful for any fortune hunter to disturb the undead in this region in an attempt to seek plunder.  Violence in a Haunt not only makes the local undead far more aggressive, active and prone to wander, it seems to attract any other incidental undead dwelling in the surrounding region to make the situation in the Haunt even worse.

Those caught within such a place are treated as common bandits.  For the first offense they are branded on the cheek with a V for villain.  The second time they are caught the mark is removed, by removing the offenders head from their body.

Only a member of the "Hallows", a secret society dedicated to the investigation and destruction of undead, are granted lawful entry in a village like Stonhagel.  Usually the Hallow will find a good many lesser undead and perhaps two to four more powerful types which seem to command the monsters dwelling in the Haunt.

Well there you have it.  A short entry but better than nothing as I get back into the swing of making daily AD&D and Swords and Wizardry blog entries here at Dungeon Mastering by Candlelight.

Have a great night and see you back tomorrow.