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In the Bloodrise Mountains, strange things are afoot. In the neighbouring baronies of Sunset lake, Blackpine, and Redwell—all human-led fiefdoms of the Paladin King’s Pax Argentum—the woodsmen and farmsteaders have reported rumblings, and flashes of lightning and fire. At first many suspected a volcanic eruption in the making. Then, those peaks had not erupted in aeons…
Not since the Age of Dragons.
The speculation was only further complicated by the characteristic tight-lipped stubbornness of the dwarves, whose fiercely competitive clans and corporations leased the peaks and vied for the wealth therein. In the silence they maintained festered whispers of a most unsavoury and fantastical sort, a sort of provincial mirror of the conspiracies which in decades prior had circled the capital traveled the trade-roads: a secretive race of lizardmen—like giant version of the local kobold vermin, or the alligator-faced pirates of the south-east, but capable of terrible magic and subtle manipulation!
But, of course, common folk will talk, especially out on the frontier of human and demihuman civilization, where there is little else to do besides work and drink.
The rumours only got wilder as they continued, and it became apparent that SOMETHING was occurring in the Bloodrise. People spoke of seeing black-skinned elves, shaggy or spikey ape things which vanished in an instant, and even enormous bugs or reptiles. According to reports, dwarves were sill coming down from the mountains to trade, but those who did were strangely taciturn in demeanour. When asked what was happening in the hills, they claimed merely to be testing out new mining equipment, and dismissed any talk of monsters in the mountain. Those dead dwarves which washed down from the ravines with the rains were explained away by these traders as sad casualties of mining accidents.
They stuck to this story even when a representative of the dwarven race arrived in Hawksong, the Paladin King’s capital, to tell a very different tale. Hargrat Deepveein of the ‘Treasuretrove Inc.’ faction arrived in Hawksong with a surviving member of the nearly-extinct House of Yosef, telling tales which seemed even wilder than those which the provincials had been spreading—and, to everyone’s shock, seemed to corroborate them! With the exposure and capture of a shapeshifted lizardman in the very CAPITAL, and seemingly-legitimate tales of having uprooted and slain several more such vile creatures across the land, the adventurers lent a chilling level of credibility to ‘reptoid’ rumours new and old.
But then… Nothing.
Not since the Age of Dragons.
The speculation was only further complicated by the characteristic tight-lipped stubbornness of the dwarves, whose fiercely competitive clans and corporations leased the peaks and vied for the wealth therein. In the silence they maintained festered whispers of a most unsavoury and fantastical sort, a sort of provincial mirror of the conspiracies which in decades prior had circled the capital traveled the trade-roads: a secretive race of lizardmen—like giant version of the local kobold vermin, or the alligator-faced pirates of the south-east, but capable of terrible magic and subtle manipulation!
But, of course, common folk will talk, especially out on the frontier of human and demihuman civilization, where there is little else to do besides work and drink.
The rumours only got wilder as they continued, and it became apparent that SOMETHING was occurring in the Bloodrise. People spoke of seeing black-skinned elves, shaggy or spikey ape things which vanished in an instant, and even enormous bugs or reptiles. According to reports, dwarves were sill coming down from the mountains to trade, but those who did were strangely taciturn in demeanour. When asked what was happening in the hills, they claimed merely to be testing out new mining equipment, and dismissed any talk of monsters in the mountain. Those dead dwarves which washed down from the ravines with the rains were explained away by these traders as sad casualties of mining accidents.
They stuck to this story even when a representative of the dwarven race arrived in Hawksong, the Paladin King’s capital, to tell a very different tale. Hargrat Deepveein of the ‘Treasuretrove Inc.’ faction arrived in Hawksong with a surviving member of the nearly-extinct House of Yosef, telling tales which seemed even wilder than those which the provincials had been spreading—and, to everyone’s shock, seemed to corroborate them! With the exposure and capture of a shapeshifted lizardman in the very CAPITAL, and seemingly-legitimate tales of having uprooted and slain several more such vile creatures across the land, the adventurers lent a chilling level of credibility to ‘reptoid’ rumours new and old.
But then… Nothing.
