The Dread River

The Dread River is the eastern border of the World's End. It flows down from the Whitefang Mountains, through the North and South Manmarch (North Manmarch and 350), fed by numerous creeks and streams along the way.

Impressions

Always

• From afar: a sense of stillness
• As you get closer: the rush of the current
• The far shore: ruin-dotted, lonely, mysterious
• Near the water: an uneasy feeling, like anything could be in there—watching, waiting, hungry

Questions

• What famous treasure is said to lie in the Ruins at Road's End?
• What once drove you to spend a night encamped along the Dread River? What evil did you encounter?
• Who do you know who once saw the Suileach, the Wurm with Two-Hundred Eyes? How did it change them?
• Aside from empty ruins, what is noticeably strange about the lands across the river?
• Does one cross the Dread River en route to Lygos? If so, how? And what separates the southern lands from those east of the river? Mountains? A desert? A sea?

Hooks

• Bandits or cultists take up residence in ruins on the Dread River's shores.
• The PCs acquire a cursed treasure, originally looted from the Ruins at Road's End.
• Some fool is mounting an expedition to cross the Dread River.
• People from east of the river land on the western shore.

The Ruins at Road's End

The Highway runs from Barrier Pass through Marshedge and ends at the Dread River. Where the road ends, there was once a sizeable city, a bustling hub of trade and learning.

The Tempest Lords called this city "Northernmost," for it was founded as their most far-flung outpost.

The Stone Lords called it

Aavonkaer ("River City"). To the Green Lords it was Pazara ("The Marketplace"). The Rime Lords called it Jalampravahati ("Through Where the Waters Flow").

Now, though, the city is called the Ruins at Road's End. For when the Stone Lords' servants rebelled and woke the Things Below, the Dread River belched forth countless horrors. The city's inhabitants were slaughtered in a single night.

Throughout the time of the Barrow-Builders, various warlords and would-be sorcerer-kings claimed the ruined city. They sought to recover the lost artifacts of the Makers, or to harness the city's restless souls, or to bend the horrors in the river to their will. Sometimes, they even succeeded. But never for very long.

The ruins sprawl for miles along the shore, and similar vestiges of the past are visible across the river. The legs of a once-mighty bridge still poke out from the water. Everyone agrees that great wealth and troves of lore remain among the crumbling walls.

But everyone also agrees that those old cellar holes and skeletal structures—along with anything dug out of them—are cursed.

East of the River

Beyond the Dread River lie more ruins, bluffs and woods, and gently sloping plains.

The Manmarchers migrated from east of the Dread River sometime before the Time of Cataclysm.

But if people dwell there still, they keep well away from the shore. And if any have ventured across the river and returned, they're keeping quiet about it.

Who or what lies east of the Dread River?

That's for you and your group to decide, but perhaps one might find…

• the husk of a sprawling empire, home now to only jackals and wolves;
• nomadic raiders, bloody-handed even by the Manmarchers' standards;
• descendants of the Makers, greatly diminished, in isolated fiefs
• a people in thrall to an undying sorcerer-king;
• a land of horrors, thoroughly tainted by the Things Below;
• a barren land, dead and still, bereft of spirits and magic;
• the Forest Folk;
• some combination of the above; or
• something else entirely.

Terrain

Pick 1 or combine 2, or have someone roll the Die of Fate (d12).

Discoveries

For any of these, pick 1 or have someone roll the Die of Fate.

Dangers

Hazards

• A stretch of water, and reason to brave it
• A bluff to climb and a reason to climb it
• Rockslides or mudslides
• The river's current, surprisingly strong
• Poor footing (mud, silt, branches, dropoffs) hidden by water/reeds
• Winter ice, thinner than it looks
• Swarms of midges or mosquitos—annoying, distracting, painful, diseased
• Starlings—obscuring, drowning out sound, buffeting, possibly host to a grwgnach

People

• Bandits, hiding among the ruins, possibly cursed/corrupted
• Cultists, led by a sorcerer
• Manmarchers: outcasts or foolhardy explorers
• Adventurers or antiquarians
• A hdour or necromancer, trawling the ruins for power

Monsters

• Beasts: aurochs, a thunder drake, boars, a cave bear, a horned drake, wild horses, etc.
• Predators: a cougar, wolves, a grochslon, a kleztigr, spitting drakes, etc.
• A llamudwr, lurking in wetlands or flooded forests
• Spirits of the wild
• The ghosts or revenants of those who died here
• Emanations of or creatures corrupted by the Things Below, lurking in the river or the ruins

Cursed object

When you remove something valuable from the ruins that dot the Dread River, roll (+nothing, just roll). If you have warded yourself from the evil of this place, roll with advantage. On a 10+, your theft goes unnoticed, or at least unpunished; on a 7-9, the GM will choose (or ask you to roll for) a lesser curse; on a 6-, the GM will choose (or ask you to roll for) a greater curse.

Possibilities include…

• returning the item to where it was originally found;
• destroying the item utterly: burning it, melting it, tossing it into lava, etc.;
• packing it in salt and burying it at a crossroads;
• driving a bronze spike through it, into an ancient elder tree;
• ritually cleansing the item, binding the curse to an appropriate vessel, and burying/hiding the vessel somewhere; or perhaps
• passing ownership of the item (and thus the curse) on to another willing party; they need not know it is cursed, but must claim the item as theirs.