Region: The Gloaming — an outlying farming village, and one of Marin’s Hold’s primary sources of food
Status: Failing. People disappearing, crops failing, cows drying up; food shipments to Marin’s Hold have now stopped entirely
Notable: Home to a chapter of the order of Ord, with a communal depository, an infirmary, and an orphanage
Bounty: Castellan Vane is offering a reward to investigate the troubles
Also recorded as “Orlane” in Ulfgar’s own account of his childhood. Same village.
Overview
A farming village of fields and livestock, close enough to Marin’s Hold to supply it and far enough out to be on its own when something goes wrong. It has markets a hungry child could work, an infirmary, an orphanage, and a chapter house of Ord. It is where Ulfgar Kegbreath was born and raised, and the village he was thrown out of.
Orlaine still stands. That is the important thing about it, and it may not stay true much longer.
The Raid on the Kegbreath Farm
When Ulfgar was small, raiders — he names them only as Mugdulbulb — hit his parents’ farm. The farmland went, the livestock went, and his parents went with them. The village itself was untouched. Orlaine absorbed the loss the way villages do, and one more orphan went into the markets to steal fruit and pick pockets badly.
The elders used to tell him he had his mother’s face and his father’s naivety. Those elders are gone now — old age took them, which is what Ulfgar assumes and what the village would have told him. Whether every one of them went that way, or whether some are simply missing, is a question nobody in Orlaine is currently in a position to answer. He says he would trade a cask of the finest whiskey to hear those remarks one more time; they were his only evidence that he ever had parents at all.
The Order of Ord in Orlaine
The chapter of Ord that took Ulfgar in ran an infirmary and an orphanage alongside its teachings. He served as a courier carrying remedies to the sick and as a chaperone to the orphans the order took in — the second of which he felt keenly, remembering what he had been.
His drinking was as well known as his service. The order overlooked a few missing bottles a week until the communal depository came up several barrels short, at which point suspicion settled on him at once. He was blamed for the theft and banished from Orlaine.
The Present Threat
Something is happening to Orlaine now, and nobody knows what it is.
First posting on the Marin’s Hold job board, before the party left for Count Demetrius’s castle: refugees arriving daily. People disappearing. Crops failing. Cows drying up. If it did not change, Marin’s Hold would lose one of its main food sources. Castellan Vane offered a reward to investigate. Nobody took it.
Second posting, on the party’s expected return: the food shipments have stopped. The last messenger sent to Orlaine did not come back. Same disappearances, same failing fields, same dry cattle. Same reward, same man offering it.
Neither posting mentions raiders. This is not what happened to Ulfgar’s family — it is slower, quieter, and it is taking the whole village rather than one farm.
Ulfgar has been in exile this whole time and does not know. Valos, the retired priest who raised him, was living in Orlaine when it started.
Refugee accounts (Session 4)
Many of the refugees camped at Marin’s Hold’s gate are from Orlaine. A woman who recognised Ulfgar there said people had simply started disappearing — she woke one morning to find her daughter gone from her bed, and the same has happened to family after family. Not everyone would leave their homes, but it no longer felt safe. Valos came away with the refugees. Ysolde Brack’s daughter, who had moved to Orlaine a few months ago, also disappeared there; her husband brought their daughter back to Marin’s Hold.
Open Questions
- What is actually taking Orlaine? Disappearances, blight and dry livestock together suggest something feeding rather than something attacking.
- Is it the same operation as the poisoning at the Bittermold Estate? Both are strangling Marin’s Hold’s food supply from opposite directions.
- Is Mugdulbulb a warlord, a warband, a monster, or a place? Ulfgar has only ever named it as the source of the raid.
- Did anyone in the order actually take the barrels, or was Ulfgar simply the obvious answer?
- The elders who remembered Ulfgar’s parents died of old age, as far as anyone says. Given what is happening to Orlaine now, “gone” and “died” may not be the same word for all of them.
- Does Valos still live?
Compiled from Ulfgar’s account of his origins and from job board postings at Marin’s Hold. The party has not been there.