Dragonwilds:Dowdun Reach

The Region of Dowdun Reach

Dowdun Reach is a Dragonwilds:power level 6 mountainous region in Dragonwilds:Ashenfall located south of Dragonwilds:Silverthorn Keep in Dragonwilds:Fellhollow, accessible through its gatehouse. Players must first complete Dragonwilds:Withering Heights to gain access to this region.

This region also introduces the Dragonwilds:Black Knights, an order that arose independently of the mainland's Template:RSL,Template:CiteJournal and the Dragonwilds:Black Knight's Fortress along with new Dragonwilds:mithril-tier material progression.

History

The Children of Shadows

The keep and its settlement grew from the Dragonwilds:Children of Shadows, a Zamorakian order who chose the mountains, then called the Dowdun Mountains, as their meeting ground.Template:CiteJournal

The region's value was secured through an accidental finding. A young Zamorakian mining rock for a raven habitat struck a mithril seam and tried to conceal the discovery, but she was found out and killed. Mutiny followed until the order stabilised, at which point the Children of Shadows held the only known source of mithril on Ashenfall.Template:CiteJournal The order's mining operation belonged to the peacetime that followed the Dragonwilds:Human-Garou War, when the four major faiths of Emberwood coexisted.Template:CiteJournal Since the order believed manual labour was below them, goblins were press-ganged into hauling the ore out of the mountain in exchange for scraps of food.Template:CiteJournal Mithril itself was withheld from both arms and armour by strict policy. The Children deliberately kept the supply short to keep its value high, treating it as a bribery currency used to influence those who could further Zamorak's goals.Template:CiteJournal The smiths within the order lived dual lives, openly forging deliberately dulled weapons to arm the Saradominists in Bramblemead while covertly delivering superior goods to their own pilgrims in the Dowdun Mountains.Template:CiteJournal

The Rasmodels

During the Template:RSL and the Dragonwilds:Human-Garou War, Dragonwilds:the Rasmodels, a noble house who migrated from the mainland, arrived in Ashenfall and settled within Dragonwilds:Brynmoor. The family first operated within the Dragonwilds:Temple Woods and Dragonwilds:Bramblemead, and their standing gave the Children of Shadows access to circles the order could not otherwise reach, with members of the order serving the family as its first bodyguards.Template:CiteJournal The order made the mistake of dismissing the family as preening peacocks, and the Rasmodels moved deliberately into leadership seats within the Children's own ranks until the family and the order had become one and the same.Template:CiteJournal With that influence came demands, and more of the Children were assigned to the family as personal bodyguards.Template:CiteJournal The family's reputation for poisoning their rivals grew alongside that influence. When one of the family was finally caught in the act, the whole house was banished north to Dowdun Reach, and they took their most loyal bodyguards with them.Template:CiteJournal At Dowdun Reach, the Rasmodels moved freely through the region and continued operating as they had before. Their scheming eventually overreached. The youngest Rasmodel was caught poisoning a sleeping official, and what remained of the family's standing collapsed overnight. They were barred from the rest of the Reach, restricted to a single part of the keep, and survived only because their bodyguards had grown loyal enough that moving against them was too dangerous.Template:CiteJournal

Dowdun Reach grew into a settlement in its own right, home to the Rasmodels, the Zamorakians, and the goblins pressed into their service. When the head of the family died, his eldest son Milliburn worked to restore the family's lost pride, taking charge of the keep's training and quartermasters, and was duly elected Master of Dowdun Reach. The Children took to calling him Lord Rasmodel, the name used for him hereafter.Template:CiteJournal The new Lord Rasmodel slept poorly. His dreams spoke to him in unfamiliar words, in a dull and interminable voice, and he came to suspect the Archmage Alric of being behind his restless nights. That restlessness hardened into resolve.Template:CiteJournal Milliburn raised a new martial order, the Shadow Knights, who would later be known as the Black Knights. The order grew from his deep distrust of Dragonwilds:Fellhollow and its dragons Dragonwilds:Imaru and Dragonwilds:Xikotal, and his own bodyguards formed its core.Template:CiteJournal For armour, the order drew on a precedent set within the Children generations before. Dragonwilds:Sadia Vulketra, a member who feared an eventual Saradominist reprisal, had already worked with the Amalgamated blacksmith Dragonwilds:Vesk to produce the first suit of steel gear in the Fellhollow area, starting with a black horned helm.Template:CiteJournal Outfitting the Knights in bulk demanded materials, and these came from an unexpected source. Xikotal brought the Zamorakians an offering of coal and iron as a misguided attempt to draw them into the wider Fellhollow community. The gift instead fuelled and fortified their separation from it.Template:CiteJournal The keep's marksmen kept watch for dragons above all else, and their eagerness had to be violently curbed after an incident during one of Imaru's diplomatic visits.Template:CiteJournal

Mystic cloth, a humming fabric that the keep's magi believed had come from Zamorak himself, was long reserved for the Archmage and his council.Template:CiteJournal That changed when a cleric from Emberwood, an attaché of Imaru and Xikotal, arrived at a trade meeting wearing the cloth. Alric burned the contract and cast the envoy from the top of the keep, and the cloth was afterwards freed for any common magi to wear.Template:CiteJournal As the cloth became more plentiful in the Reach, Lord Rasmodel permitted its trade with carefully chosen partners, which brought the Children of Shadows into their first dealings with an offshoot of the Garou, and a friendship of sorts grew between Lord Rasmodel and the Moon Garou merchants.Template:CiteJournal The Moon Garou's physiology kept them beyond the usual methods of infiltration, so Lord Rasmodel turned to Alric, who proposed that the humming cloth itself could be worked to surveil the Moon Garou.Template:CiteJournal Meanwhile, the goblins of the Reach had been promised gold, food, and passage back home to the Felldip hills, and received only scraps, so calls to rise up against Lord Rasmodel and Alric circulated among them.Template:CiteText

The Dreaming Stone

As the Dragonwilds:Dragon Rebellion tore through Ashenfall and the rest of the subcontinent fell to dragons, Lord Rasmodel and his knights held the Reach and protected those within its walls. During the Rebellion, Dragonwilds:Avisk had preserved his intellect within a stone as the rest of the Dragonwilds:Cabal died or awaited destruction.Template:CiteNPC Members of the Children of Shadows who pursued arcane knowledge found the stone buried beneath the desert sands and brought it to Dowdun Reach, where the mages studied it for its power and called it the Dreaming Stone.Template:CiteNPC From inside the stone, Avisk whispered to the Children of Shadows to amuse himself, gradually pushing them into turning on one another.Template:CiteNPC

When Fellhollow was falling to the Withering plague, the Reach's response was to cut itself off entirely. A research group within the keep reported that the surrounding mountains should hold the contamination out, though waterways and crevices still posed a risk. Every pathway to Fellhollow was severed and the Reach closed to the outside world. Knights were stationed in the crypt as an early warning, since the dead rising there would be the sign that the plague had breached the mountains.Template:CiteText Template:CiteText The Shadow Knight snipers' standing orders were to shoot any draconic presence on sight, with the lone exception of lesser blue dragons, which were to be spared to preserve the local balance.Template:CiteJournal The deaths of Fellhollow's guardians changed the keep's smithing as well. The black metal of the knights' arms was steel treated by a process akin to vulcanisation, work Xikotal had once carried out himself as a gift to the isolationist knights. After the dragon's death the work passed to demonic methods, whose poorer results made the original dragonfire metal prized within the Reach.Template:CiteJournal

Within the sealed Reach, the Dreaming Stone's power was eventually turned to fuelling a demon portal, and the Mages of Zamorak were soon summoning demons in growing numbers. The wizard Dragonwilds:Valerius wrote of the undertaking as an attempt to summon beings from another world in the hope of learning from them.Template:CiteText Meanwhile, the Black Knights operated under two sets of orders. The first set was simple. Any demon that broke free of its summoner was to be put down, and the mages were to be protected. The second set was kept secret. It held what the order called the 'Demon's Share', a policy under which the knights were to allow one mage to die before stepping in whenever a demon went rogue, used in practice to keep the mage population trimmed. Above even that, the knights' highest standing order was to destroy the demon portal outright if the summonings ever got beyond control.Template:CiteJournal Archmage Alric uncovered the arrangement, coming to Lord Rasmodel with a ledger showing one hundred and seventeen magi deaths across one hundred and seventeen incidents, exactly one mage lost each time, and raging at what the numbers proved.Template:CiteJournal Lord Rasmodel's answer went out the next day. The Black Knights were now to allow two magi to die with each incident.Template:CiteJournal

The Dreaming Stone had always been a point of contention, and the breaking point came when a demon appeared in the middle of a Black Knight training session and killed the unarmed recruits. Alric and Lord Rasmodel argued the matter out in the war room. When they emerged, control of the Dreaming Stone and the demon portal's power belonged to Lord Rasmodel, and the magi had lost most of their authority.Template:CiteJournal

Alric refused to accept losing command of the Dreaming Stone. Denial is the first tenet of Dragonwilds:The Gospel of Zamorak, and Alric's faithful lived by it.Template:CiteText They secretly redirected the stone's power so that its energy spread to every room of the keep instead of flowing along a single line.Template:CiteJournal The rerouting coincided with a separate scheme of Alric's to capture demon souls in enormous numbers and use them to supercharge the demon portal.Template:CiteText The tens of thousands of stored demon souls bled into the walls of the fortress itself rather than powering the gateway, and demons could summon themselves anywhere within it. Alric claimed this outcome as his plan all along, warning his magi that nowhere in the Reach was private any longer and that an avernic would be listening whenever someone spoke against them.Template:CiteText The rerouting caused other problems too. Overloaded energy tethers set off sudden fires and magical accidents, which the magi pinned on Lord Rasmodel and his knights. Later effects were worse. With the altered flows now running through sleeping quarters, residents stopped dreaming properly, tempers grew short, and a sickness of voices spread outward from the magi wing. The afflicted either fell unconscious or heard competing voices fighting inside their own minds.Template:CiteJournal

The madness spread into the order itself. Black Knight numbers fell as more knights succumbed, and the order's charter forbade resignation.Template:CiteJournal Among the afflicted was a soldier Lord Rasmodel had known long before, whose rambling mimicked the droning voice of his own dreams.Template:CiteJournal Lord Rasmodel resolved to see the stone destroyed, blaming its whispering for the madness of his order and accusing Vulketra and his fanatics of needing its power for their own schemes.Template:CiteText Template:CiteText

Milliburn shattered the Dreaming Stone with his warhammer. The voices that had plagued him for decades briefly ceased.Template:CiteJournal The reprieve was brief, and the afflictions that followed were worse than before.Template:CiteJournal The magic released in the breaking twisted the fortress's residents, prolonging their lives and cursing them with madness.Template:CiteNPC His family appeared around him in their finery, and his father bade him rest. The twenty-fifth Lord of Rasmodel retired.Template:CiteJournal He remains within the keep as the Dragonwilds:Black Knight Titan. The keep's demons felt the aftershocks as well. Some fell still, as though a controlling force had been cut from them, while a subset gathered the scattered shards and fought one another over their stockpiles, becoming the shardbound.Template:CiteJournal The shards themselves lie scattered across the Reach and continue to whisper.Template:CiteText Groups of the afflicted would travel together and kill whoever they met, and the Dragonwilds:Elite Black Knights were deployed to put them down during the worst outbreaks.Template:CiteJournal

Sixth Age

In the Dragonwilds:Sixth Age, adventurers who have driven the Withering from Fellhollow are directed onward by Dragonwilds:Death and find the keep standing between them and the Dragonwilds:Umbral Sands.Template:CiteNPC During Black Knight's Fortress, the adventurer works alongside the Dragonwilds:Wise Old Man and Dragonwilds:Doric to uncover the secrets of Dowdun Reach and unlock the way through to the desert.Template:CiteText Thirteen shards of the Dreaming Stone are gathered from across the region and the stone is made whole once more.Template:CiteText The restored intelligence names itself Avisk, blames the cthonian for the keep's state, and lowers the barrier blocking the way onward.Template:CiteNPC Template:CiteNPC With the keep's gatekeeper defeated, the door to Umbral Sands is opened.Template:CiteNPC

During Dragonwilds:Biohazard, Dragonwilds:Zanik enlists the adventurer to investigate the corruption afflicting the region's residents. Samples gathered from the corrupted ravens point to a cthonian infection, and its source is traced high up in the Reach.Template:CiteText Template:CiteText There the adventurer finds Dragonwilds:Putrilius, one of the last of the cthonian demons that once ruled Infernus, who admits to being part of the madness while holding the mind of the Dreaming Stone responsible for how far it spread.Template:CiteNPC Template:CiteNPC Zanik hopes the demonic corruption can be kept contained within Dowdun Reach.Template:CiteNPC

Sealed Dragonwilds:Nodestone portals lie strewn across the Reach, and during Dragonwilds:What's Theirs is Mine! the adventurer unclogs them while helping Doric track down a thieving mage, with the Dreaming Stone's magic completing their restoration.Template:CiteText Template:CiteText

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Dragonwilds:Black Knights

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Nothing discovered yet...

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