Balaour

Balaour may be a trade stopover point, where many rivermen unload goods for despatch to Jalpa, but it is a stranger and more insular place than most trading posts. Houses that have windows here have shutters upon them. Virtually no one leaves their homes alone at night, and all wear a small neck pendant with the motif of a hound's head upon it as a protection. Simply, the 600 folk here are intensely superstitious regarding the dreaded "black dog" of the western moorlands. Spectral, silent, radiating a paralyzing chill and capable of causing almost instant death by its fetid breath and raking claws, this enormous brute is said to stalk the moor at unpredictable times and to slay any it meets. Most disappearances and misfortunes which befall anyone in the village are attributed to this beast. There are a hundred and one rumors of the evil which conjured the creature into being, with the commonest version being the tale of an evil mage-priest (perhaps a servant of Tharizdun, though the villagers will never say that name openly) who buried some fell magical item somewhere on the moors, and conjured his own nemesis into being. All this would be but ignorant superstition if not for the fact that the moor is so barren and has patches of treacherous disguised bog which can draw down a man into a watery grave in a minute or less. Mists and gray clouds hover over and across the moor even on some sunny days, and the place radiates a faint aura of evil and magic. The name of the village echoes the cry the hound is said to make: "baaal... oooo.... urrr."