Karellford

This village of 600 souls was once an important, if small, trading post for the fruits of the eastern Grandwood forest and for goods headed south from Eastfair and Delaric. Goods were then taken on to Rauxes and also used for provisioning The Phalanx.

Karellford was appropriated as a Royal protectorate under Ivid IV's ownership some 50 years ago in response to a trumped-up charge of treason against the local landowner, a mage. The mage was publicly burned, but not before he issued an appalling curse on his executioners.

The curse appears to have had some effect. Within a year, four of the Companion Guard who had stood beside the pyre died in "accidents." The next year, the Flanmi flooded and the fields around Karellford sprouted a growth of poisonous blue algae which rendered large swathes of good land infertile for many years. Local folk learned that the bite of a rat, ferret, or similar animal was almost always fatal. Domestic animals sometimes broke out into paroxysms of inexplicable violence, or else they wasted away and died. Stillbirths and premature deaths became increasingly common.

Despite an attempt at a ritual cleansing and lifting of the curse by a priest of Pholtus, these effects did not entirely abate, and in the past 30 years the population here has fallen from 1,200 to its present number. It is not just the decline of trade which gives this place its air of gloomy resignation. The local administrator, Branwenden, tries his best to cow and beat the villagers into sullen servitude. However, lately he has developed a severe neuralgia and a paralysis of the right side of his body. Even he fears to explore what might lie below the long-burned ruins of the mage's cottage and tower.