Village of Thornhill

Standing on the fringes of a vast and noisome fen, Thornhill is a miserable, hard place. The folk are insular and superstitious, keeping to the old ways and worshipping the spirits of the marsh.
Surviving on a mixture of hunting, fishing and desultory trade with nearby tribes of lizardfolk, the folk here care little for the world beyond their dismal domain.
Thornhill stands atop a large island in the centre of the deep, but sluggish waters of the Elmarsh. A once formidable stockade of aged, sodden timbers surrounds the place.
Stands of sickly, dense thorn bushes grow over much of the island; the villagers have deliberately let the bushes grow wild to form an almost impenetrable barrier around the island’s periphery.

LAW & ORDER

Thornhill is a rough and ready place and there is no watch to speak of. Theoretically, Aelfgar Wymer is in charge of law and order, but in practise the villagers sort out their own problems and do not view meddling outsiders kindly.

LIFE IN THORNHILL

Life in Thornhill is hard. Isolated from other villages, its folk have become insular, inbred and fearful of their lizardfolk neighbors. Tensions over the looting of ancient tombs hidden deep within the fens with the degenerate Red Jaws and Jagged Claw tribes have been steadily rising over the last few decades. The lizardfolk are suspected of several unsolved murders.

Demographics

Population 157 (127 humans, 15 half-orcs, 12 half-elves, 2 halflings, 1 elf)
Alignments N, LN, CN, NE
Languages Eldorian, Draconic

Government

Government Autocracy
Ruler Aelfgar Wymer

Architecture

With the exception of Osred’s House (location 7) and the Drunken Lizard (location 2) all the village’s buildings are single storey and of wooden construction.
They are low, rambling affairs and often in poor repair. As well as their human occupants, most buildings also house livestock—mainly pigs and chickens—which during the day roam about the village. Worn wooden causeways snake their way through the village. In places, planks are missing or rotten and unwary travellers can find themselves unceremoniously dropped into the mud beneath.
A wooden palisade surrounds the village; between 6 ft. and 10 ft. high it would not stop a serious assault but the thick masses of bramble bushes growing up against it give even the hardiest of interlopers pause

Natural Resources

Thornhill’s main (and indeed only) industry is fishing. Most of the fishermen in the village sell their excess catch to Yonwin, who exports his smoked fish to nearby villages and several lizardfolk tribes who view them as a delicacy.
Occasionally, adventurers use the village as a base from which to explore the fens—such folk are a source of great wealth to the impoverished villagers

Village Map

Village of Thornhill

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Standing on the fringes of a vast and noisome swamp, Thornhill is a miserable, hard place of cloying mud, grasping thorns and insular, superstitious folk.
There is a little cheer to be had in Thornhill; the few visitors describing it as dull and dreary as the surrounding swamps.
For all that, though, a steady trickle of adventurers visit Thornhill for the half-buried and drowned ruins of several tombs said to lie forgotten in the surrounding marshland and the villagers have friends among the nearby degenerate lizardfolk who make excellent guides in the trackless, far reaches of the swamp

Type

Village

Location under

Elmast woods

Thornhill flag