Region: The Gloaming
Population: ~300
Government: Autocracy (Reeve)
Ruler: Reeve Tarly Winters
Defenses: 20–30 men-at-arms; wooden palisade
Notable Hazard: Magic is outlawed within the village
Overview
Marin’s Hold is a motte-and-bailey settlement of some three hundred souls, ringed by a simple wooden palisade and built on subsistence farming and river fishing. It is, by every account available to its own residents, the last real point of light in the Gloaming — a region of demon-haunted, fey-touched forest that has long since been abandoned by the larger kingdoms that once claimed it. Travelers on the road in are met with a blunt warning before they ever reach the gate: the crucified remains of witches and priests, left to make plain the village’s stance on magic.
Whatever governance once extended out from a distant crown, it does so no longer. Marin’s Hold answers to no one but itself, and has for some time.
Government & Defense
The village is ruled by Reeve Tarly Winters, a warlord in practice if not in title. An older man — by most reckonings in his fifties — he rules as though born to a throne, holding court in a keep he insists on calling a castle, though by any outside measure it is a modest thing: a cold hall, an animal-skin carpet, and little else in the way of finery. He has no heir, and a much younger wife who has not yet changed that fact, a subject the Reeve is visibly sensitive about.
Winters commands a standing force of twenty to thirty men-at-arms — not a large host, but enough, so far, to keep the creatures of the Gloaming from the gate. He does not report to any higher authority; the kingdoms that once held this frontier have long since let it go, and Winters has simply kept ruling in the silence that followed.
The Ban on Magic
Magic is not merely discouraged in Marin’s Hold — it is forbidden, and the village enforces the point visibly. The road into the settlement passes the crucified bodies of witches and priests, left as a standing warning to anyone arriving with power of their own. The Reeve is understood to believe that magic is what draws the Gloaming’s demons to the village in the first place, and rules accordingly. Spellcasters who wish to stay do so quietly, or not at all.
Notable Locations
The Crayfish Tavern
The village’s public house, run by Ysolde Brack, a cantankerous old woman who keeps both a common room and a handful of private rooms available to travelers. It functions as the closest thing Marin’s Hold has to a neutral gathering place — where locals, hired blades, and the occasional stranger from the wider Gloaming cross paths.
Finch Three-Fingers’ Barter House
Less a shop than a standing consignment operation, the barter house is run by a man who lost half a hand to what he insists was a river monster during his old life as a barge trader — a story most of the village quietly doubts. Farmers and villagers bring goods here to trade rather than sell outright, and Finch has a well-known, poorly-kept sideline in less legal dealings: stolen goods, forged papers, and the occasional favor better left unspoken. He also keeps old shipping manifests from his predecessor, some of which point toward items of considerably more value than anything currently on his shelves.
The Reeve’s Keep
Called a castle by its occupant and little else, the keep is a simple, cold structure — more a fortified hall than a fortress. It is here that Reeve Tarly Winters holds court, flanked by his standing garrison, and here that petitioners and the occasionally-summoned are received.
The Church of St. Terragnis
A modest house of faith within the village, tended in the current era by the priestess Egrid. St. Terragnis’s teachings emphasize righteousness and justice, drawing those seeking redemption or purpose as much as those born to the faith.
The Hedge-Witch’s Hut
Just outside the palisade lives Mathilda, a hedge-witch who deals in tea, gossip, and small kindnesses despite the village’s official stance on magic — tolerated, if not exactly welcomed, likely owing to the genuine value of what she offers those willing to make the walk out to her door.
The Docks
The rickety riverfront docks where Marin’s Hold’s eelmen and froggers ply their trade in the early night hours — ordinarily one of the livelier corners of the village after dark. On certain nights, though, an unnatural mist rolls in and empties them of everyone but whatever, or whoever, is waiting at the end of the pier.
The Wider Gloaming
Beyond Marin’s Hold’s palisade lies the region that gives it its name: a demon-infested, fey-touched forest stretching in every direction, home to few other settlements of note. The fey village of Lyohna lies somewhere within it, home to Fey communities who deal — sometimes profitably, sometimes dangerously — with the folk of Marin’s Hold and beyond. Little else in the Gloaming is considered safe to name.
The outlying farms and the village of Orlaine feed the Hold, and both are currently failing — the farms to hooded figures poisoning the fields, Orlaine to something nobody has yet identified. With the harvest not all in, the village’s food supply is being closed off from two directions at once.
Marin’s Hold after Ravenloft (Session 4)
When the party returned, the village was in a very different state:
- The gates are shut. The Reeve closed them about a week before the party’s return. Only citizens and those with business inside are admitted; bowmen on the palisade drive back the crowd when the gate opens.
- A refugee camp of tents and lean-tos lines the road to the gate — people from Orlaine and from the corrupted outlying farms. From a distance its cook fires look like a village on fire. A tent by the gate records every arrival’s name and home in a ledger — kept by Castellan Vane and his goblin clerk — and Egrid serves gruel there.
- A fourth body on the witches’ posts: an old charm-seller with her charms nailed into her, put there by Inquisitor Morvath. Her charms were fakes.
- Food costs twice as much with famine in the land. Farmers are trading heirlooms for food.
- Four soldiers now guard the mill by the fishing quay.
- The Inquisitors have ordered silver arrows for the wall.
- The Church of St. Terragnis has become Egrid’s relief kitchen and command post.
- The blacksmith is now a young dwarf apprentice; his master died in a forge accident. See The Young Smith.
- The village has a sheriff/constable and stocks in the main square.
- The Fairy Path: at the edge of town, a line of large, smooth, round river stones runs off in a roughly westerly direction into the dark forest, then stops. The village’s hunters go no further into the forest than lets them return by nightfall.
Compiled from what is known to travelers and residents of Marin’s Hold as of the party’s most recent visit. Details beyond the village’s gates remain, as ever, unreliable.