Region: The Gloaming, outside Marin’s Hold
Status: Ruined; occupied by hooded figures who raid the outlying villages and farms
Bounty: High Inquisitor Morvath is offering a reward for their eradication
Overview
A ruined estate somewhere beyond Marin’s Hold’s outlying farmland. Nobody in the village claims it as inhabited, but survivors of the raids on the outlying villages say their attackers — strange hooded figures — fled in its direction.
The Raids
The first reports were of attacks on outlying villages and nothing more. By the time refugees were arriving at Marin’s Hold in numbers, the pattern had sharpened considerably: the hooded figures were kidnapping people and pouring barrels of a foul-smelling substance over the fields and into the animal feed. This is deliberate poisoning of the food supply, not raiding.
One survivor was found clutching a seal torn from an attacker’s clothing — the seal of the Bittermold Estate. That is the only hard evidence tying the ruin to the attacks.
The Church and the Reeve are both worried about winter: the harvest is not all in, and what is in the ground may already be spoiled.
What the party learned (Session 4)
- The barrels. At a poisoned farm on the road into Marin’s Hold — dead livestock melted from the inside, crops liquefied into green ooze, the farmer dead and dissolving in his chair, the house stripped of tools and clothes — the party found emptied barrels stacked beside the well, coated inside with thick green mucus and stamped with the Bittermold seal. A farmer’s wife nearby had seen hooded figures with bandaged hands at that farm. The dead there rose again, rats and a wolf held together by the ooze. Enki kept a piece of the seal and a vial of the ooze.
- Ivek knows it. The estate is where his old cult of Mugdulbulb kept a hideout. He told the party his dark past began there and that he suspects the pestilence comes from it.
- Finch Three-Fingers: the family has been dead for years, “so they say”; theirs was one of the first holds to fall when the curse came on the forest.
- The Reeve: the Bittermolds were a family of equal importance to his own until their keep was overrun.
- Castellan Vane is offering 100 gold for actionable information on cloaked figures seen near the old keep. Enki accepted. It lies further from Marin’s Hold than Mathilda’s trail, and the party chose Mathilda first.
Open Questions
- Who or what were the Bittermolds, and what happened to the estate?
- What is the substance being poured on the fields, and what is it meant to do?
- Where are the kidnapped people being taken, and why take them at all if the goal is starvation?
- Is the seal genuine, or planted?
Compiled from job board postings at Marin’s Hold and refugee reports. The party has not been there.