Voadam
Legend
An Echo Resounding
Labyrinth Lord
Shade: A great and magnificent battle took place in the ruins. Some such struggles involved substantial magical energies or the interference of some divine power, while others were simply the product of ferocious valor and exemplary martial courage. The shades of these heroic warriors remain present to a degree, and can be propitiated with the correct sacrifices and reverences to their memory.
Undead Archmage: ?
Undead Swarm: Some necromancers call up these mobs of mindless undead, while other packs are simply the undead detritus of some terrible massacre.
Angry Dead: The dead of the ruins are furious. Sometimes these spirits are angry for comprehensible reasons, such as the unburied and unlamented condition of their bodies or the terrible way in which they died. In other cases these angry dead seem to spontaneously erupt from incomprehensible causes and strange tides of evil fortune. Necromancers and other deathworkers are the most common sources of this plague of wrathful corpses.
Dead Legion: ?
Ancient Lizardman Priest Undead Shell: ?
Ghostly Defender: ?
Undead Shou: ?
Dwarven Undead: They are infesting the chambers of grave-goods, crazed with centuries of terror at their lonely and forgotten deaths. The dwarves of Hammersong are mortified at having somehow forgotten these dwarves, and seek outsiders to do the shameful work of putting their bodies to rest so that their spirits may be tended. Somewhere in the lost section is the awful reason why their names were forever struck from the rosters of the clan.
The Screaming Stones have many slaves within their halls, both to tend the fungal gardens and beetle-farms that feed the dwarves and to serve as sacrifices to their goddess. More wretched than the living, however, are the spirits of the dead. Dwarven prisoners are slain with consecrated, red-runed picks that pin their spirits to the mortal world. The Repenters use dark rituals to give these spirits fresh bodies of flesh, the better to inflict new agonies on the hated traitors to their Mother Below.
Mindless Undead: ?
Thinking Spirit: ?
Undead Miner: Rusty Gold Mine / Good Mine / Bad Feng Shui-5: Before the Ravaging, this mine was a rich and prosperous gold mine. The Shou witch-priestess who led the horde that sacked it was a powerful sorceress, and her magic collapsed several important tunnels, rerouting an underground river and slumping half a hill over the main entrance to the delve. Until workers are able to undo the damage to the site’s feng shui- and deal with the undead miners who have been trapped inside for a hundred years- the mine will suffer from luck so bad that even gold tarnishes in its vicinity.
Strange Undead Hybrid: The half-mindless servants of the Grass General have confused a massacre site’s nest of undead for a band of humans. They’ve captured the undead and fed them to a hungry cultivator, causing strange undead hybrids to grow and uproot themselves in search of human flesh.
Waiting One, Undead Serpent-Priest, Undead Lizardfolk Cleric 13: Ages ago, in the time when serpent priests ruled among the lizardfolk, one among them appalled even that harsh race with his thirsts and his cruel excesses. For a time he even seemed likely to ascend to rulership over all his kind until a pact among his rivals resulted in his sudden fall from glory. So great was his sorcerous might that his rivals feared to actually kill him, lest his blood bear a curse that they could not break. Instead, they stripped him of his regalia and arcane implements and imprisoned him deep within the mountain under nine great stone seals.
The better to keep watch on him, all five of his rivals moved their own lairs into the mountain. Their own apprentices and mates would serve as vigilant guardians over their hated foe. Within the mountain, they built laboratories and temples and serpentine pleasure-gardens for their delight. For centuries, the long-lived snake priests dwelled in tense harmony.
Such peace was ruined when one among them appeared to have the chance to ascend to the throne. The others dragged him down before all five became prey to a swift tangle of betrayal and counter-treachery. In mere months their peaceful lair became an abattoir, and none lived to escape the stone door.
Yet the Waiting One still lived, translated from living flesh to immortal corruption by the sheer, malicious hatred that boiled in his serpentine breast. He could do nothing within his living crypt, an undead serpent-priest condemned to eternal isolation beyond the wards and walls of his betrayers’ homes.
Mummified Undead Ancient Lizardfolk: ?
Castellan Liu, Mummified Xianese Officer: Once a bold keep on the Westmark borderlands, Vanguard Keep was the first conquest of the Witch-Queen Agrahti when she and her hordes rolled out of the Godbarrows. For too many decades, the mountain tribes had been quarrelsome and disorganized, easy prey for disciplined Xianese soldiers. With the Witch-Queen to unite them, their numbers and wild sorcery were too much for the high walls of the keep. The gates were shattered and the soldiers within slaughtered before they even knew what was happening.
Agrahti knew that haste was her best friend in crushing the Westmark, so she was profligate in hurling soldiers against the strong walls of the keep. Wave upon wave of Shou were sent forward to break upon the stones and to fill the trenches with mounds of their own dead. All the while, Agrahti’s witchcraft conjured elemental forces to shake the foundations of the fort.
When the fortress was broken and the Shou surged east, nothing was left behind but the unburied dead. The sudden, savage release of so much death and mystical energy left a pall over the ruined keep, one that slowly infected the bones of the dead. It was not long before they rose once more to repeat the battle, rusted swords and broken spears becoming spectral weapons in their hands. Each cloven skull and broken pelvis became whole with each new dusk, and the dead rose once again to repeat their battle.
Neither side can ever truly win. The patterns of mutual destruction are too strong and old destinies still cling to their bones. The great war-chief Takul leads his rotting kinsmen against the spears of Castellan Liu’s bodyguard, and every time all are slain in the end. The battle begins at dusk, and often runs straight to mid-afternoon of the next day.
War-Chief Takul: Once a bold keep on the Westmark borderlands, Vanguard Keep was the first conquest of the Witch-Queen Agrahti when she and her hordes rolled out of the Godbarrows. For too many decades, the mountain tribes had been quarrelsome and disorganized, easy prey for disciplined Xianese soldiers. With the Witch-Queen to unite them, their numbers and wild sorcery were too much for the high walls of the keep. The gates were shattered and the soldiers within slaughtered before they even knew what was happening.
Agrahti knew that haste was her best friend in crushing the Westmark, so she was profligate in hurling soldiers against the strong walls of the keep. Wave upon wave of Shou were sent forward to break upon the stones and to fill the trenches with mounds of their own dead. All the while, Agrahti’s witchcraft conjured elemental forces to shake the foundations of the fort.
When the fortress was broken and the Shou surged east, nothing was left behind but the unburied dead. The sudden, savage release of so much death and mystical energy left a pall over the ruined keep, one that slowly infected the bones of the dead. It was not long before they rose once more to repeat the battle, rusted swords and broken spears becoming spectral weapons in their hands. Each cloven skull and broken pelvis became whole with each new dusk, and the dead rose once again to repeat their battle.
Neither side can ever truly win. The patterns of mutual destruction are too strong and old destinies still cling to their bones. The great war-chief Takul leads his rotting kinsmen against the spears of Castellan Liu’s bodyguard, and every time all are slain in the end. The battle begins at dusk, and often runs straight to mid-afternoon of the next day.
Sundered Ghost of the Mother Below: The dwarves have ever been a godless people. In the dawn of the world, they were human slaves of the Mother Below, a goddess who cared only for gold and the abasement of her slaves. In anger, the ancients rose up against her and tore her into a thousand shrieking pieces. Ever since, no other god dares claim the dwarves for their own, and their afterlife is a gray and sober realm of stone and their ancestors’ shades.
This afterlife is scourged by the vengeful shards of the Mother Below and the misshapen creatures she has made to torment her rebellious subjects. She is still subject to the power of gold, however, and so gold buried with dwarves may go with them in spirit to be forged into powerful ghost-weapons against the shades.
Dwarven Ghost: ?
Furious Ghost: ?
White-Faced Spectre: ?
Ludmilla, Ghost: Five years ago, Yevgeny’s young wife Ludmilla was assassinated by a band of dwarven Repenters who had slipped in by posing as a group of pilgrims. Hated by their brethren, the Repenters are a small sect of dwarven heretics who seek to placate the Mother Below with rites of self-torment and punishment of their rebel brethren. Several of them escaped in the aftermath of the attack, and Yevgeny grieved as he prepared his wife’s body for burial.
It was only then that he realized that her spirit was not present- the Repenters had stolen it away in one of their blood-runed picks. A secret message soon came to him advising him that if he wished his wife’s soul to be spared hideous torment, he would cooperate with the instructions that followed.
Poor Chen, Wraith: The man now known as Poor Chen brought his entire family to live in an abandoned stone manor house, but two weeks after he’d started his farm, his wife and every one of his children were killed in hideous fashion by angry ghosts. Their wraiths still haunt the farm in tormented confusion.
Undead, Restless Dead: When the Shou stormed out of the west in years past, many of these young cities and towns were put to the torch and ravaged by the furious humanoids. Men and women of later days tend to shun them for fear of the restless dead, still furious over unburied bones and an uncertain afterlife to come.
Once a bold keep on the Westmark borderlands, Vanguard Keep was the first conquest of the Witch-Queen Agrahti when she and her hordes rolled out of the Godbarrows. For too many decades, the mountain tribes had been quarrelsome and disorganized, easy prey for disciplined Xianese soldiers. With the Witch-Queen to unite them, their numbers and wild sorcery were too much for the high walls of the keep. The gates were shattered and the soldiers within slaughtered before they even knew what was happening.
Agrahti knew that haste was her best friend in crushing the Westmark, so she was profligate in hurling soldiers against the strong walls of the keep. Wave upon wave of Shou were sent forward to break upon the stones and to fill the trenches with mounds of their own dead. All the while, Agrahti’s witchcraft conjured elemental forces to shake the foundations of the fort.
When the fortress was broken and the Shou surged east, nothing was left behind but the unburied dead. The sudden, savage release of so much death and mystical energy left a pall over the ruined keep, one that slowly infected the bones of the dead. It was not long before they rose once more to repeat the battle, rusted swords and broken spears becoming spectral weapons in their hands. Each cloven skull and broken pelvis became whole with each new dusk, and the dead rose once again to repeat their battle.
Neither side can ever truly win. The patterns of mutual destruction are too strong and old destinies still cling to their bones. The great war-chief Takul leads his rotting kinsmen against the spears of Castellan Liu’s bodyguard, and every time all are slain in the end. The battle begins at dusk, and often runs straight to mid-afternoon of the next day.
In the days before the Ravaging, White Jade Hill was a prosperous quarry town nestled amid the low hills of the Galukan Wald. Where other masons sent heavy blocks of granite or limestone down rivers on wooden barges, the townsmen of Jade Peak sought rare stone- the precious jade that had so much value for Imperial sorcerers and so much beauty for other eyes.
Countless different kinds of jade were pulled from the low hills that surrounded the forest town: the spring-green luster of “green apple jade”, the brilliant green-flecked white of “moss-in-snow”, the golden luminescence of “sun jade”, and rarest of all, the flawless emerald translucence of celestial jade. The greatest archmages of the Ninefold Celestial Empire used this precious material for some of their most powerful artifacts, as the purest forms could endure the channeling of massive amounts of geomantic energy without shattering. Even aside from the deposits of gem jade were great slabs of creamy mutton-fat jade that could be cut out to adorn the walls of rich merchants’ houses and the palaces of daifus.
There was always a certain puzzlement at the hills, though. Elsewhere in the Isles, jade was a thing found in loose boulders and worn river stones, not in great masses beneath the earth. Still, who were they to kick at luck? The hillsides were stripped of their trees and became runneled with great strips of black earth torn to bare the white stone below.
This all ended when the Shou came. The Witch-Queen Agrahti and her horde burned Westmark to the ground, and White Jade Hill was no exception. The people were slaughtered and devoured, the buildings were toppled, and the hillsides were left to return to the forest’s green embrace. The roads that had led to the town were reclaimed by the Galukan Wald and its name became no more than a wistful memory.
Perhaps it was a consequence of the jade itself- a side-effect of such horror and slaughter committed in the proximity of such magically-potent mineral, but the dead did not rest easily in White Jade Hill. Slowly, fragments of jade dust and powdered stone crusted over the bones of the dead, mantling them in shrouds and layers to give them the seeming of perfect, pallid life. Were it not for their perfectly smooth skins and the pallor of their eyes and faces, the bodies that rose from their uneasy slumber would seem to be entirely normal men and women.
For decades, these unquiet shapes mimicked the lives they had led before the slaughter, pantomiming the tasks they had been about at the moment of their death. Outsiders were answered in vague, dreamy fashion, or ignored, or torn to bloody pieces if they threatened one of the townsmen. For many years, White Jade Hill lived on as a ghost of itself.
That changed fifteen years ago, when the wandering adventurer Nobu Kitano and his adventuring party came to liberate the ruins of their remaining fragments of wealth. The Galukan Wald treated the little band harshly, and only Nobu and three companions yet lived by the time they reached the ruins. One of these died not long after they arrived, and Nobu and his friends despaired of escaping the place alive.
It was then that Nobu discovered the power of the place, when his dead companion was crusted in creeping jade dust and rose as if alive once again. He remembered little of his past and cared nothing for more than contemplating the white hills and the soothing perfection of the jade. Nobu counted it a miracle, and became determined to discover the secret of the power that dwelled in the ruins of White Jade Hill.
With time, he became convinced that the ruin itself was the birthplace of a new god, a spirit summoned of the life of all who died here. He counts himself a priest of this new “Jade God”, and is determined to strengthen it with sacrifices of new life. With each wayfarer and kidnapped farm girl who perishes under his knives, a fresh minion of the Jade God is soon to follow after.
They spend their days searching for precious jade or studying the magical aura of the ruin, trying to find some way of replicating its undeath-inducing enchantment in a more practical form.
Wraith: The man now known as Poor Chen brought his entire family to live in an abandoned stone manor house, but two weeks after he’d started his farm, his wife and every one of his children were killed in hideous fashion by angry ghosts. Their wraiths still haunt the farm in tormented confusion.
Zombie: ?
Skeleton: ?
Ghost: In the hills around the town rise a patchwork of newly-founded farmsteads, most of them reasonably prosperous. Five miles away, however, at the furthest western edge of the territory claimed by the town, a thick scar of burnt-over earth and ruined stone buildings marks the remains of a former town. The Ravaging was more than a century ago, but such were the hideous torments inflicted upon the citizens there that their ghosts still taint the earth with echoes of suffering and loss.
Spectre, Specter: ?
Lich: ?
Labyrinth Lord
Shade: A great and magnificent battle took place in the ruins. Some such struggles involved substantial magical energies or the interference of some divine power, while others were simply the product of ferocious valor and exemplary martial courage. The shades of these heroic warriors remain present to a degree, and can be propitiated with the correct sacrifices and reverences to their memory.
Undead Archmage: ?
Undead Swarm: Some necromancers call up these mobs of mindless undead, while other packs are simply the undead detritus of some terrible massacre.
Angry Dead: The dead of the ruins are furious. Sometimes these spirits are angry for comprehensible reasons, such as the unburied and unlamented condition of their bodies or the terrible way in which they died. In other cases these angry dead seem to spontaneously erupt from incomprehensible causes and strange tides of evil fortune. Necromancers and other deathworkers are the most common sources of this plague of wrathful corpses.
Dead Legion: ?
Ancient Lizardman Priest Undead Shell: ?
Ghostly Defender: ?
Undead Shou: ?
Dwarven Undead: They are infesting the chambers of grave-goods, crazed with centuries of terror at their lonely and forgotten deaths. The dwarves of Hammersong are mortified at having somehow forgotten these dwarves, and seek outsiders to do the shameful work of putting their bodies to rest so that their spirits may be tended. Somewhere in the lost section is the awful reason why their names were forever struck from the rosters of the clan.
The Screaming Stones have many slaves within their halls, both to tend the fungal gardens and beetle-farms that feed the dwarves and to serve as sacrifices to their goddess. More wretched than the living, however, are the spirits of the dead. Dwarven prisoners are slain with consecrated, red-runed picks that pin their spirits to the mortal world. The Repenters use dark rituals to give these spirits fresh bodies of flesh, the better to inflict new agonies on the hated traitors to their Mother Below.
Mindless Undead: ?
Thinking Spirit: ?
Undead Miner: Rusty Gold Mine / Good Mine / Bad Feng Shui-5: Before the Ravaging, this mine was a rich and prosperous gold mine. The Shou witch-priestess who led the horde that sacked it was a powerful sorceress, and her magic collapsed several important tunnels, rerouting an underground river and slumping half a hill over the main entrance to the delve. Until workers are able to undo the damage to the site’s feng shui- and deal with the undead miners who have been trapped inside for a hundred years- the mine will suffer from luck so bad that even gold tarnishes in its vicinity.
Strange Undead Hybrid: The half-mindless servants of the Grass General have confused a massacre site’s nest of undead for a band of humans. They’ve captured the undead and fed them to a hungry cultivator, causing strange undead hybrids to grow and uproot themselves in search of human flesh.
Waiting One, Undead Serpent-Priest, Undead Lizardfolk Cleric 13: Ages ago, in the time when serpent priests ruled among the lizardfolk, one among them appalled even that harsh race with his thirsts and his cruel excesses. For a time he even seemed likely to ascend to rulership over all his kind until a pact among his rivals resulted in his sudden fall from glory. So great was his sorcerous might that his rivals feared to actually kill him, lest his blood bear a curse that they could not break. Instead, they stripped him of his regalia and arcane implements and imprisoned him deep within the mountain under nine great stone seals.
The better to keep watch on him, all five of his rivals moved their own lairs into the mountain. Their own apprentices and mates would serve as vigilant guardians over their hated foe. Within the mountain, they built laboratories and temples and serpentine pleasure-gardens for their delight. For centuries, the long-lived snake priests dwelled in tense harmony.
Such peace was ruined when one among them appeared to have the chance to ascend to the throne. The others dragged him down before all five became prey to a swift tangle of betrayal and counter-treachery. In mere months their peaceful lair became an abattoir, and none lived to escape the stone door.
Yet the Waiting One still lived, translated from living flesh to immortal corruption by the sheer, malicious hatred that boiled in his serpentine breast. He could do nothing within his living crypt, an undead serpent-priest condemned to eternal isolation beyond the wards and walls of his betrayers’ homes.
Mummified Undead Ancient Lizardfolk: ?
Castellan Liu, Mummified Xianese Officer: Once a bold keep on the Westmark borderlands, Vanguard Keep was the first conquest of the Witch-Queen Agrahti when she and her hordes rolled out of the Godbarrows. For too many decades, the mountain tribes had been quarrelsome and disorganized, easy prey for disciplined Xianese soldiers. With the Witch-Queen to unite them, their numbers and wild sorcery were too much for the high walls of the keep. The gates were shattered and the soldiers within slaughtered before they even knew what was happening.
Agrahti knew that haste was her best friend in crushing the Westmark, so she was profligate in hurling soldiers against the strong walls of the keep. Wave upon wave of Shou were sent forward to break upon the stones and to fill the trenches with mounds of their own dead. All the while, Agrahti’s witchcraft conjured elemental forces to shake the foundations of the fort.
When the fortress was broken and the Shou surged east, nothing was left behind but the unburied dead. The sudden, savage release of so much death and mystical energy left a pall over the ruined keep, one that slowly infected the bones of the dead. It was not long before they rose once more to repeat the battle, rusted swords and broken spears becoming spectral weapons in their hands. Each cloven skull and broken pelvis became whole with each new dusk, and the dead rose once again to repeat their battle.
Neither side can ever truly win. The patterns of mutual destruction are too strong and old destinies still cling to their bones. The great war-chief Takul leads his rotting kinsmen against the spears of Castellan Liu’s bodyguard, and every time all are slain in the end. The battle begins at dusk, and often runs straight to mid-afternoon of the next day.
War-Chief Takul: Once a bold keep on the Westmark borderlands, Vanguard Keep was the first conquest of the Witch-Queen Agrahti when she and her hordes rolled out of the Godbarrows. For too many decades, the mountain tribes had been quarrelsome and disorganized, easy prey for disciplined Xianese soldiers. With the Witch-Queen to unite them, their numbers and wild sorcery were too much for the high walls of the keep. The gates were shattered and the soldiers within slaughtered before they even knew what was happening.
Agrahti knew that haste was her best friend in crushing the Westmark, so she was profligate in hurling soldiers against the strong walls of the keep. Wave upon wave of Shou were sent forward to break upon the stones and to fill the trenches with mounds of their own dead. All the while, Agrahti’s witchcraft conjured elemental forces to shake the foundations of the fort.
When the fortress was broken and the Shou surged east, nothing was left behind but the unburied dead. The sudden, savage release of so much death and mystical energy left a pall over the ruined keep, one that slowly infected the bones of the dead. It was not long before they rose once more to repeat the battle, rusted swords and broken spears becoming spectral weapons in their hands. Each cloven skull and broken pelvis became whole with each new dusk, and the dead rose once again to repeat their battle.
Neither side can ever truly win. The patterns of mutual destruction are too strong and old destinies still cling to their bones. The great war-chief Takul leads his rotting kinsmen against the spears of Castellan Liu’s bodyguard, and every time all are slain in the end. The battle begins at dusk, and often runs straight to mid-afternoon of the next day.
Sundered Ghost of the Mother Below: The dwarves have ever been a godless people. In the dawn of the world, they were human slaves of the Mother Below, a goddess who cared only for gold and the abasement of her slaves. In anger, the ancients rose up against her and tore her into a thousand shrieking pieces. Ever since, no other god dares claim the dwarves for their own, and their afterlife is a gray and sober realm of stone and their ancestors’ shades.
This afterlife is scourged by the vengeful shards of the Mother Below and the misshapen creatures she has made to torment her rebellious subjects. She is still subject to the power of gold, however, and so gold buried with dwarves may go with them in spirit to be forged into powerful ghost-weapons against the shades.
Dwarven Ghost: ?
Furious Ghost: ?
White-Faced Spectre: ?
Ludmilla, Ghost: Five years ago, Yevgeny’s young wife Ludmilla was assassinated by a band of dwarven Repenters who had slipped in by posing as a group of pilgrims. Hated by their brethren, the Repenters are a small sect of dwarven heretics who seek to placate the Mother Below with rites of self-torment and punishment of their rebel brethren. Several of them escaped in the aftermath of the attack, and Yevgeny grieved as he prepared his wife’s body for burial.
It was only then that he realized that her spirit was not present- the Repenters had stolen it away in one of their blood-runed picks. A secret message soon came to him advising him that if he wished his wife’s soul to be spared hideous torment, he would cooperate with the instructions that followed.
Poor Chen, Wraith: The man now known as Poor Chen brought his entire family to live in an abandoned stone manor house, but two weeks after he’d started his farm, his wife and every one of his children were killed in hideous fashion by angry ghosts. Their wraiths still haunt the farm in tormented confusion.
Undead, Restless Dead: When the Shou stormed out of the west in years past, many of these young cities and towns were put to the torch and ravaged by the furious humanoids. Men and women of later days tend to shun them for fear of the restless dead, still furious over unburied bones and an uncertain afterlife to come.
Once a bold keep on the Westmark borderlands, Vanguard Keep was the first conquest of the Witch-Queen Agrahti when she and her hordes rolled out of the Godbarrows. For too many decades, the mountain tribes had been quarrelsome and disorganized, easy prey for disciplined Xianese soldiers. With the Witch-Queen to unite them, their numbers and wild sorcery were too much for the high walls of the keep. The gates were shattered and the soldiers within slaughtered before they even knew what was happening.
Agrahti knew that haste was her best friend in crushing the Westmark, so she was profligate in hurling soldiers against the strong walls of the keep. Wave upon wave of Shou were sent forward to break upon the stones and to fill the trenches with mounds of their own dead. All the while, Agrahti’s witchcraft conjured elemental forces to shake the foundations of the fort.
When the fortress was broken and the Shou surged east, nothing was left behind but the unburied dead. The sudden, savage release of so much death and mystical energy left a pall over the ruined keep, one that slowly infected the bones of the dead. It was not long before they rose once more to repeat the battle, rusted swords and broken spears becoming spectral weapons in their hands. Each cloven skull and broken pelvis became whole with each new dusk, and the dead rose once again to repeat their battle.
Neither side can ever truly win. The patterns of mutual destruction are too strong and old destinies still cling to their bones. The great war-chief Takul leads his rotting kinsmen against the spears of Castellan Liu’s bodyguard, and every time all are slain in the end. The battle begins at dusk, and often runs straight to mid-afternoon of the next day.
In the days before the Ravaging, White Jade Hill was a prosperous quarry town nestled amid the low hills of the Galukan Wald. Where other masons sent heavy blocks of granite or limestone down rivers on wooden barges, the townsmen of Jade Peak sought rare stone- the precious jade that had so much value for Imperial sorcerers and so much beauty for other eyes.
Countless different kinds of jade were pulled from the low hills that surrounded the forest town: the spring-green luster of “green apple jade”, the brilliant green-flecked white of “moss-in-snow”, the golden luminescence of “sun jade”, and rarest of all, the flawless emerald translucence of celestial jade. The greatest archmages of the Ninefold Celestial Empire used this precious material for some of their most powerful artifacts, as the purest forms could endure the channeling of massive amounts of geomantic energy without shattering. Even aside from the deposits of gem jade were great slabs of creamy mutton-fat jade that could be cut out to adorn the walls of rich merchants’ houses and the palaces of daifus.
There was always a certain puzzlement at the hills, though. Elsewhere in the Isles, jade was a thing found in loose boulders and worn river stones, not in great masses beneath the earth. Still, who were they to kick at luck? The hillsides were stripped of their trees and became runneled with great strips of black earth torn to bare the white stone below.
This all ended when the Shou came. The Witch-Queen Agrahti and her horde burned Westmark to the ground, and White Jade Hill was no exception. The people were slaughtered and devoured, the buildings were toppled, and the hillsides were left to return to the forest’s green embrace. The roads that had led to the town were reclaimed by the Galukan Wald and its name became no more than a wistful memory.
Perhaps it was a consequence of the jade itself- a side-effect of such horror and slaughter committed in the proximity of such magically-potent mineral, but the dead did not rest easily in White Jade Hill. Slowly, fragments of jade dust and powdered stone crusted over the bones of the dead, mantling them in shrouds and layers to give them the seeming of perfect, pallid life. Were it not for their perfectly smooth skins and the pallor of their eyes and faces, the bodies that rose from their uneasy slumber would seem to be entirely normal men and women.
For decades, these unquiet shapes mimicked the lives they had led before the slaughter, pantomiming the tasks they had been about at the moment of their death. Outsiders were answered in vague, dreamy fashion, or ignored, or torn to bloody pieces if they threatened one of the townsmen. For many years, White Jade Hill lived on as a ghost of itself.
That changed fifteen years ago, when the wandering adventurer Nobu Kitano and his adventuring party came to liberate the ruins of their remaining fragments of wealth. The Galukan Wald treated the little band harshly, and only Nobu and three companions yet lived by the time they reached the ruins. One of these died not long after they arrived, and Nobu and his friends despaired of escaping the place alive.
It was then that Nobu discovered the power of the place, when his dead companion was crusted in creeping jade dust and rose as if alive once again. He remembered little of his past and cared nothing for more than contemplating the white hills and the soothing perfection of the jade. Nobu counted it a miracle, and became determined to discover the secret of the power that dwelled in the ruins of White Jade Hill.
With time, he became convinced that the ruin itself was the birthplace of a new god, a spirit summoned of the life of all who died here. He counts himself a priest of this new “Jade God”, and is determined to strengthen it with sacrifices of new life. With each wayfarer and kidnapped farm girl who perishes under his knives, a fresh minion of the Jade God is soon to follow after.
They spend their days searching for precious jade or studying the magical aura of the ruin, trying to find some way of replicating its undeath-inducing enchantment in a more practical form.
Wraith: The man now known as Poor Chen brought his entire family to live in an abandoned stone manor house, but two weeks after he’d started his farm, his wife and every one of his children were killed in hideous fashion by angry ghosts. Their wraiths still haunt the farm in tormented confusion.
Zombie: ?
Skeleton: ?
Ghost: In the hills around the town rise a patchwork of newly-founded farmsteads, most of them reasonably prosperous. Five miles away, however, at the furthest western edge of the territory claimed by the town, a thick scar of burnt-over earth and ruined stone buildings marks the remains of a former town. The Ravaging was more than a century ago, but such were the hideous torments inflicted upon the citizens there that their ghosts still taint the earth with echoes of suffering and loss.
Spectre, Specter: ?
Lich: ?
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