Revels End Prison
The prison is situated on the far northern coast of Icewind Dale, due north of Lonelywood. It sits atop northward-facing 160 foot-high (49 meter) cliffs overlooking the Sea of Moving Ice, and is carved out of the northwest side of a massive rockface known as the Windbreak, so-named because it also serves to shield the prison from harsh winds off of the Reghed Glacier.
There is no road that connected Revel's End to the rest of civilization, so the most reliable ways to access the prison is by sea or by air. For travel by sea, a pier is located at the base of the cliffs with an elevator leading up to the prison. The elevator is essentially just a large wooden box that followed a scaffold up the cliff, and it is raised and lowered via a crane at the top. For travel by air, a mooring for airships is located atop the prison's tall central tower.
For travel by land, a horse-drawn sleigh bearing an iron cargo hold well-secured with chains and padlocks is used to transport prisoners and guards across the ice in the 1490s DR. With prisoners inside the hold, it has three armed guards outside, one of them the driver. Taking no chances, the gates are opened first and the sled was backed into it and locked to the gate walls, so there is no gap to the outside world. Only then is the compartment opened and the prisoner escorted directly into the prison courtyard.
Revel's End was constructed as a panopticon, wherein individual prison cells encircled a central surveillance room. The primary prison structure is a single-story, 20 foot-tall building with a six-sided star shape that has four two-story, 40 foot-tall guard towers erected at the northwest, northeast, southeast, and southwest "apex" points of the star. The northeastern and southwestern arms of the star are dedicated to open-air courtyards paved with flagstones, which grants prisoners some space for exercise when weather permitted. The southeastern corner of the structure backs into the Windbreak from which the whole prison has been carved and constructed, and some interior rooms are tunnelled into the rock itself. A four-story, 140 foot-tall central tower lined with arrow-slits rises above the panopticon surveillance room to loom over the rest of the structure.
History
Revel's End was constructed at the order of the leaders of the Lords' Alliance sometime in the 15th century DR. Workers laboured hard to build it in such harsh conditions.
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