Charnel Crown

Professor Lorrimor is dead - found crushed under an old broken portion of the Harrowstone Prison wall, presumably the work of either nature, or else, well, everyone knows how it's haunted out there since the prison burned down. Natural or not, though, nobody suspects those living in town of foul play, and there's nobody living around here but in town. Not that anybody much cares...the professor had a precarious reputation. Plenty in the village called him necromancer, and this he neither confirmed nor denied. His daughter defends him constantly to the villagers, and she's respected enough (or at least, somewhat pitied and somewhat feared, which amounts to roughly the same) that he didn't catch too much grief. Besides, he was out abroad so often - sometimes up to Lepidstadt, other times out of Ustalav altogether. Easily the best-traveled person in town...or village, as the case may be. The village doesn't have a name, anymore; it grew up out of a quarry camp and was once called Harrowstone, then they built the prison and called that Harrowstone, and now it's burned down and nobody calls this place anything.   Here is where you're headed, to this bleak little nowhere because of some friendship or debt, some connection one way or another, to the very same Professor Lorrimor. He's made you his pallbearers, and it's fitting, really, that our story begins in a Pharast yard, a graveyard.   Yours may end there, as well.