Dragonwilds:Ghornfell

Ghornfell is a Dragonwilds:Power level 3-4 region in Dragonwilds:Ashenfall, in the north of the continent. Poison lies to its east and storms to its west, and General Velgar circles overhead

File:Ghornfell.png

The region of Ghornfell

History

Garou settlement

The garou were not native to Ashenfall. Their homeworld was Antumnos, where the moon goddess Dragonwilds:Lougrim arrived as an outsider and was hunted as prey. She overpowered her hunters, travelled to the garou capital of Magrawn, and defeated every reigning clan king in a single battle to take the mantle of High Queen.Template:CiteJournal She brought her people to Ashenfall some time afterwards, and they settled Ghornfell.Template:CiteText Their kings preserved a link to the old world through the tokens they wore, each holding a single pebble taken from Antumnos and passing from monarch to monarch.Template:CiteJournal Those kings held their seats by the rite of challenge, and a leader who declined a challenge was judged unfit to rule.Template:CiteJournal

The garou shared the region with the dragonkin. Dragonwilds:Brakka held land in the Dragonwilds:Fractured Plains, and he took garou as slaves to raise a tower there. Dragonwilds:Rasthin had granted him mastery over the earth, and he used that power alongside their labour to build a monument to himself.Template:CiteJournal

Under garou custom, humans crossing their land were held to have consented to the hunt by trespassing, and the killings continued until a treaty was made with Lougrim that closed garou territory to the practice.Template:CiteJournal That agreement held for several years, and in that time the garou of Ghornfell traded with the villagers of Dragonwilds:Bramblemead, a settlement in the neighbouring region of Dragonwilds:Brynmoor.Template:CiteJournal

The war with Brynmoor

The agreement held until Bramblemead exhausted Brynmoor's iron deposits and sent militias north into Ghornfell to prospect for more. The garou watched them fell woodland as they searched and treated the incursions as a breach of the treaty.Template:CiteJournal The garou found these militias harder to kill than earlier travellers, and their attacks became skirmishes rather than slaughters.Template:CiteJournal

What the garou faced changed when Bandos offered the villagers a solution to the conflict, and the Saradominist priests agreed terms with his emissaries under which they would receive the mines of Ghornfell and Bandos would claim Lougrim's head.Template:CiteJournal The garou defences broke under the ogres he brought with him.Template:CiteJournal They then held their lines against goblins sent in continuous waves from fortified positions, killing them by the dozen while the replacements outnumbered them.Template:CiteJournal Their two enemies fought for separate reasons. The Saradominist priesthood held Lougrim to be a false goddess whose followers had to be destroyed.Template:CiteJournal Lougrim told her people that Bandos pursued them over a slight they had inflicted on him long before, on a world far from Ashenfall.Template:CiteJournal Garou armour that had held against bronze failed when the humans introduced iron, and the militias razed their settlements and killed whole families.Template:CiteJournal The garou held that advance at Dragonwilds:King's Pass, the route from the Dragonwilds:Whispering Swamp into Ghornfell, for months. however casualties kept mounting.

Lougrim answered by giving herself into the service of the dragonkin Cabal, and their dragons entered the war on the garou side.Template:CiteJournal The garou gained the titan wyrms the dragonkin Dragonwilds:Lacrussa had bred, which had served as the heaviest units the dragonkin fielded.Template:CiteJournal By 4213 the garou had been driven back to the point of defeat, and these new allies turned the war around.Template:CiteJournal

During the war, a patrol of garou cubs hunting the kill that would mark their passage into adulthood ambushed the hunter Dragonwilds:Ulv, a close friend of the necromancer Dragonwilds:Ravanna.Template:CiteJournal She answered his death by drawing on the souls of slain garou to raise a storm over the Stormtouched Highlands, and the garou living beneath it have been struck by its lightning ever since.Template:CiteJournal Lacrussa's titan wyrms died in that storm, and their bones remain scattered across the Highlands.Template:CiteJournal

Garou who wanted no part in the fighting withdrew to the eastern plains, where they sowed wheat and barley and settled there for the duration of the war.Template:CiteJournal

Velgar's ascendancy

With the war turning, Bandos left the garou lines and took the fight to the dragons himself. He discarded his wards and armour and challenged the dragon Velgar to single combat at the tower in the Fractured Plains, where Velgar's hide turned the axe aside and his poisonous breath drained the god's strength until he withdrew from Ashenfall entirely.Template:CiteJournal Following the victory, Velgar spilled his own blood across the wheat fields to the east, and the crops the garou had sown there collapsed into venom.Template:CiteJournal

The goblins of Ashenfall read Bandos's defeat as proof that the dragon outranked their god, and they took Velgar as his replacement.Template:CiteJournal They have held to that faith since, living longer under him than they did under Bandos.Template:CiteJournal The garou gained a truce from the withdrawal, agreed on terms that each side keep to its own territory, and it held for decades.Template:CiteJournal

Kuldra's reign

The truce ended when the dragon queen Dragonwilds:Kuldra devoured Lougrim and claimed the throne. Garou tradition records the succession as a challenge fought and won on equal terms, in keeping with the rite by which their own kings ruled.Template:CiteJournal A Dragonwilds:Moon Garou scroll recovered in the Dragonwilds:Umbral Sands contradicts that account, holding that Lougrim had spent her power shielding villages from dragonfire and that Kuldra killed her without issuing a challenge at all.Template:CiteText Most of the garou submitted to the new queen regardless, and those who refused left Ghornfell to become the Moon Garou. Their own account holds that Kuldra pressed the garou who stayed into wars they had no part in and trained their young as killers.Template:CiteText

Her rule also changed garou hunting practice. Lougrim had taught her people to kill cleanly and had refused them poison on the grounds that it cheapened the hunt, and Kuldra instructed them to use every tool available instead.Template:CiteJournal The druids, once held to tradition and to a narrow choice of prey, adopted harsher methods under her.Template:CiteJournal She set humans as the standing quarry, and the thanes enforced that order in her name.Template:CiteJournal

Kuldra afterwards killed Brakka at his own tower and took his mastery of the earth, granting it to Velgar, who claimed the tower as his lair and holds it still.Template:CiteJournal From it he destroyed Blue Flame Keep, the Saradominist presence on the continent, and Bramblemead itself, the village his region had once traded with.Template:CiteJournal

The garou of Ghornfell serve Kuldra in the present day while keeping the rites Lougrim taught them. Her priests still carry the moon as their symbol and continue to mourn Lougrim.Template:CiteJournal

Geography

Ghornfell is divided into three subregions, each with a distinct environment.

Fractured Plains

Template:Main The Fractured Plains are the hunting grounds of the resident garou. Unstable anima turns the local plants the colours of dragonfire, and Brakka's ruined tower stands at the centre of the region as Velgar's lair. A crystal on the mesa carries a mournful sound on the wind.Template:CiteJournal

Stormtouched Highlands

Template:Main Ravanna's storm rages over the Highlands, and its lightning strikes those who travel the ground below. The bones of the titan wyrms lie across the region, and the garou camp beneath their ribs. A stone monument to a fallen garou king overlooks the area.Template:CiteJournal

Bloodblight Swamp

Template:Main Bloodblight Swamp grew wheat and barley before Velgar's blood poisoned it. The water and the air both carry the toxin, and the garou living there have grown resistant to it at the cost of their tempers.Template:CiteJournal