Эренланд: Море Пеллурии

Море Пеллурии

The Sea of Pelluria is as varied as those who make their home among its coves and make their living from its waters. It is stormy and chill in winter and blustery and cool in the summer. The northern waters are deep and iron gray, with spiteful, unpredictable tempers. Storms are common, and the worst of them turn the very water black in their rages. The southern shore, in contrast, borders a gentler, shallower sea. The southwest winds are consistent, the summers are warm, and the winters mild. The sea is more predictable in the south and is seldom anything but the richest of blues. In the west, the easternmost reaches of Erethor line the shore and the large wetlands drain into the sea. In the east, the high peaks of the Kaladruns are reflected in the water’s surface, and foothills rise right from the shore. There are countless islands scattered across the Pelluria, but few of any size. The Corbron Isles are the largest and are rumored to be the secret haven of the Pirate Princes.
Myriad animals make the Pelluria their home. Most are natural, but many are otherwise. Fish, of course, are abundant, as are sea birds, otter, and freshwater seals. There are also more dangerous creatures like island lizards, lesser sea drakes, and the arguably mythical greater sea dragon. The sea is also home to countless nature spirits and supernatural entities of a less benign sort. At times, more fearsome creatures that usually haunt the land take to the waters. The Fell are always a problem, but along the shores of the Pelluria, these abominations take on a more insidious nature. They have learned to hide from the daylight and city watches by lurking in the shallows of the sea. During the day, they cling to the mud and rocks of the seafloor, only to rise wet and weed-covered to lumber into town on their deadly hunts. Many seacoast towns have had to establish boat watches that patrol the nighttime shallows on alert for these amphibious horrors.
The story of the Sea of Pelluria is also the story of the Great Houses of the Dorns that made their keeps on her southern shores. In so doing, they gave up a chance at the greater glories of war in their peoples’ histories, unable to claim that they defied the evil that poured forth from the north at the end of the First Age.
But like any caretakers, theirs is a pride more mundane, more practical. They kept the trade routes open while their northern kin looked ever to the gloomy and rugged Northern Marches; they were staunch defenders, and eventual peacemakers when the unlooked-for Sarcosan invasion made its way up from the south. They remained the bridge with which the Dorns could communicate with these new comrades and with their own descendants, the Erenlanders.

История

The gnomes were the first to explore the Pelluria, which at that time was known to the younger fey as the Ebon Sea. They settled its shores and lived off its bounty as fishers. They became traders, first on the rivers and then braving the broad sea itself, ferrying their goods from one end of Eredane to the other. The gnomes eventually gave up their shorebound lives and took to the sea and rivers permanently. When the Dorns invaded and settled the Northlands, the clever and hardy gnomes were quick to adapt and gave the seafaring humans reign over the sea, forsaking it for a quieter, easier life on the rivers and along the shores.
The Dorns renamed the great stretch of water the Sea of Pelluria as a remembrance of their lost homeland, and their Great Houses settled its shores. Dornish sailors quickly became masters of the sea’s many moods, and the humans prospered as their cities grew and shipping routes became the economic lifeblood of their people. Every house maintained trade fleets and small navies to protect them. Even through the Sarcosan conquest and the founding of Erenland, the Pelluria remained the tie that bound the lands of the old Dornish monarchs together. That is, until Izrador’s insidious agents severed this bond with foul magic and vile betrayals. Now the Pelluria is a sea of war where the blackened wreckage of broken ships mixes with the blood and tears of the Dornish people.
In many ways, the geography of the Pelluria has been a great boon to southern Eredane. Most of Izrador’s orcs are poor and unwilling sailors, and though they use the sea to transport troops, they have no love or skill for the craft. They have so far not used the sea or rivers to their potential, and their drive south of the Pelluria was not as forceful or well supplied as it might have been. Consequently, Izrador’s forces are not as agile, as well equipped, or as often reinforced as they could be. Unfortunately, the pause the Pelluria affords the Shadow’s legions means that the Northlands suffer under the weight of ever-increasing masses of Izrador’s orcs, eager to kill and pillage but prevented from doing so. This stagnant pool of soldiers is inevitably trampling into oblivion the last vestiges of Dornish culture. Meanwhile, the growth of legions of villainous humans in Izrador’s service means the Pelluria shall not serve as a barrier forever.

Население

The only ships that freely sail the Pelluria are the meager remnants of the great Dornish trade fleets, now under the control of the traitor princes or converted to the use of the orc armies. A few small gnome barges ply the sea under orcish charter, but the majority of gnome vessels keep to the major rivers. The limited trade that goes on supports Izrador’s war effort or serves to fill the warehouses of his traitor princes. There are other vessels that sail the inner sea, not quite so openly, and the trade they seek is that of smuggling or piracy. Under the restrictions of the Night Kings, Erenlanders and gnomes alike have been forced to establish large smuggling networks across the Pelluria, both to make a profit and to support the resistance. Pirates of every stripe, privateers as well as noble sea captains, hunt the Shadow’s vessels with the skill and single-mindedness of some of the deepwater predators that lurk in the Pelluria’s deeper reaches.
All told, a few thousand humans, orcs, gnomes, and goblins would consider themselves permanent residents of the Sea of Pelluria itself, but for the most part, the populace comes from the shores that surround it. Of these, the southern shores boast 225,000 Dorns, 100,000 Erenlanders, and no more than 15,000 Sarcosans. Most of these populations are focused on Baden’s Bluff and Erenhead, though there is a thin line of humanity stretching along the southern shore from the Green March in the west all the way to the Kaladruns in the east, making lives wherever the resources are available and the Shadow will let them. Additionally, Erenhead makes use of a small army of enslaved halflings to serve the needs of constantly rotating orcish troops. All told, as many as 10,000 enslaved halflings are held captive in Erenhead.
Each of the peoples that drift upon the open waters bring their own religions, trades, and traditions. Even their ships, the closest thing to settlements that sailors can claim, vary from iron-bolted dreadnoughts to proud Dornish three-masters to simple gnome barges.
Язык Trader’s Tongue is the language of choice on the broad sea, as the sea draws people from throughout Eredane. Even the goblin-kin sailors have picked it up, mingling their own harsh Shadow Tongue with the practical trader common to create a surprisingly appropriate seafarers’ argot. The Pirate Princes have learned the Trader’s Tongue as well, at first mockingly and so that they might interrogate their foes, but for their part, they have added Norther slang to the mix.

Правительство

The only law on the Sea of Pelluria is that enforced by the Shadow’s barely adequate navy. Luckily for the Pirate Princes and other insurgents, orcs make terrible sailors. They have an innate terror of deep water and an acute fear of drowning. As a consequence, the Shadow’s navy is crewed primarily by goblin-kin and humans and is not nearly as large or effective as it could be.
Most orc ship crews are made up of conscripts being punished for blasphemy, cowardice, or other serious crimes. Hobgoblins are not so fearful of the sea, and being strong and methodical, they crew many of the Shadow’s ships. Goblins, though more contentious, are also more intelligent and commonly serve as the navy’s lesser officers, along with human collaborators who act as captains and lieutenants. Renegade gnomes and a few of Izrador’s minions from rarer cultures also sometimes captain ships in Izrador’s fleet, among them a creature that seems to be more snake than humanoid and a beautiful but deadly being whose siren song draws insurgent sailors to their doom.
None of the Shadow’s minions are able ship builders, and most of the vessels in Izrador’s navy were commandeered from the Dornish fleets. Though the carpenters, mostly goblin-kin, try to keep them seaworthy, most are decrepit from age, wear, and neglect. Many have been lost to pirates, storms, accidents, and sabotage, and the few enslaved shipwrights working in Port Esben and Chandering have difficulty keeping up with the losses.
Still, despite its aging fleet and questionable seamanship, the Shadow’s navy is a growing menace. The crews and captains are learning from experience and beginning to understand the moods of the sea. Their tactics are improving, and the slow but steady stream of new ships entering the Shadow’s fleet are war galleys instead of old, refitted merchant vessels. Plank by plank and tack by tack, Izrador’s navy is becoming a more formidable force and a genuine threat to the pirate resistance.
The two port cities of Baden’s Bluff and Erenhead, meanwhile, suffer a unique attention from their conquerers. They are neither completely cut off from hope, like the communities in the Northlands, nor are they given over to corruption like the southern metropolises. Of the two, Erenhead seems to have suffered the more, being the landing point of the foul wave that fell on central Erenland at the beginning of the Last Age. Its body was broken, its towers toppled, the stone of its walls turned to liquid beneath the heat of dragonfire and made to run like icemelt into the moats beneath. Baden’s Bluff was well protected in a way that Erenhead could not be. Its ultimate defense began in circumstance, when the forces of the fallen god passed it by utterly, and ended in cleverness, for when its foes returned, they found a peaceful and accommodating town waiting to be taken, wholly abandoned by its ruling family and their knights. Its body therefore remains whole… though its soul is another matter.

House Torbault

House Torbault, governed from the city of Erenhead, has a long tradition of leadership and honor among the Great Houses of the Dorns. Its trading fleets dominated the southern coast of the Pelluria, and it built tremendous wealth as the gateway to trade with southern Erenland. The Torbault family was the first to take the oaths of fealty at the Conclave of Rulers that founded Erenland and the first to ally itself with the Sarcosans through intermarriage in the early years of the young nation.
The last monarch of the Torbault line, now called Hedgreg the Last, died on the deck of his flagship during the Last Battle. He was only seventeen years old and the last Dornish crowned prince to stand against the Shadow. He burned to death in the breath of a dragon.

House Baden

House Baden ruled its lands from the south-shore city of Baden’s Bluff. The Badens were a small clan, but clever and resolute. They ran a profitable shipping fleet and courted elven and Sarcosan traders. Their capital became a cosmopolitan city to rival Highwall, and when the end came, House Baden sent its children to battle.
Agents of House Baden had long been living in secret in the capitals of its rivals, and though the final betrayals came too quickly for the Baden clan to intervene, they did escape the purges of the traitor lords. The Baden heirs and their loyal agents now hide within the occupied cities, working to support the resistance and seeding hope where they can.

House Orin

House Orin was a small but proud Dornish house. Its ancestral castle was in the coastal foothills town of Low Rock, in the shadow of the Kaladruns. Situated at the mouth of the Torbrun River, Low Rock became the natural port of trade with the dwarven cities of Idenor and Calador. Over time, the Orin clan became the dwarves’ closest human allies, and Low Rock became known for its high dwarf population.
Now, Low Rock lies in ruins, and the heirs and loyal followers of House Orin have retreated into the mountains, where they fight off invaders side by side with the Kurgun. Many have even been accepted as full members into Durgis Clan and have begun adopting the tattoo markings of the Kurgun.

Против Тени

The war against the Shadow has never ended in the Sea of Pelluria. The free peoples who ply the waves take advantage of their foes’ lubberly traditions and continue to sink ships and choke the enemy’s supplies at every opportunity.

The Pirate Princes

The Pirate Princes, as they are called, are all heirs of the Norfall royal family: two brothers, one sibling, one sister, three cousins, and an uncle. This fleet of pirates is led by Prince Jaden, the eldest of the siblings, and the orcs consider her the scourge of the Pelluria. The orc fear of drowning is so acute that even the mention of these sea raiders makes them nervous. The Pirate Princes spend most of their efforts hunting and sinking troop carriers and taking supply ships as prizes. For each ship they lose, they take three, and slowly their tiny fleet has become a sizable flotilla. Still, they are outnumbered, and they are forced to depend on surprise and their hidden harbors in the Corbron Isles to avoid the orc oar galleys sent after them.
Jaden Norfall is third eldest of the seven Norfall heirs who captain the fleet of the Pirate Princes, but she is the unquestioned leader. To those who do not know her, she appears every bit the handsome, arrogant, foppish, good-for-nothing heir apparent of a oncegreat noble house. On the open water, however, she is a sea captain of unmatched skill and cunning. Countless times she has outmaneuvered superior numbers of orc and collaborator vessels, always coming away victorious, enemy ships aflame in her wake. Jaden has forged her love of the sea and knowledge of its ways into a powerful weapon for resistance and revenge. Though the woman seems charmed and all but invincible, Jaden’s kin fear that her increasingly bold actions and hunger for vengeance may soon be her undoing.

Baden’s bluff

In a selfless, strategic move that likely saved the lives of thousands of his subjects, Fedrick Baden ordered his people not to openly resist the orcs but to live on as best they could. He bid them strike from the shadows but only when certain of both a deadly blow and a sure escape. The king and his court then abandoned the family keep and melted into the populace of the city. Since then, the heirs of House Baden and their agents have spread out into the remaining cities of the Northlands, where they lead a hidden war against the forces of the Shadow. It is likely that the ships they set ablaze, the officers they assassinate, and the information they gather has a greater impact than all the bloody raids and lauded last stands of the other insurgent Dornish outlaws combined.
The quiet and underground resistance of the populace of Baden’s Bluff has served to make the city a sanctuary of sorts for outlaws and smugglers working against Izrador. These insurgents know not to make open war in the city and use it instead as a refuge for rest and resupply. Baden’s Bluff’s proximity to Erethor also makes the city an important staging point for smugglers who parley with the elves, trading raw ore, foodstuffs, and information for elven blades, arrows, and magic. As a result, gnomes are common in the city and even elven agents occasionally come to Baden’s Bluff, knowing it is the only city in the Northlands where they will not be quickly betrayed to Izrador’s minions. The members of House Baden are many, and they largely escaped the purges of the traitor princes. When the final attacks began, they ordered their people to resist the Shadow, but carefully and in secret. The heirs themselves ghosted into the population at large, and now their descendants and their agents work in the shadows, fighting a clandestine urban war against Izrador.
Today, none of King Fredrick’s decedents are publicly known as such, for such a label would be a death sentence. However, many insurgents suspect that Tora One-Eyed, a cobbler plying their trade in the remnants of Baden’s Bluff’s market district, is actually Prince Tora Baden, spymaster of the house. Though the shoemaker is a cheerful and unassuming person who is just as willing to fix a legate’s riding boot as a barge captain’s clogs, Tora tends to know exactly what the Shadow is up to in their city, and more than a few agents of the legates have vanished while investigating them. 

Места и особенности

Several notable locations can be found around the Sea of Pelluria.

Baden’s Bluff

The Baden family keep is built on a low bluff at the head of a wide peninsula that hooks out into the blue waters of the southern Pelluria. The heart of the city occupies this point and is cut off from the mainland by a high wall that runs east to west across the base of the small cape. In the earliest days of the city, many canals were dug into the peninsula to serve as both protected harborage and waterfront docks. Over the intervening centuries, the channels were further excavated to provide more building stone, and now the city is a maze of water-filled canals spanned by countless foot and cart bridges. The canals make for convenient transportation of goods and passengers by small flatboats, but they create a confusing cityscape for any visitor unfamiliar with their layout.
The city was left relatively untouched by the immediate ravages of the Shadow invasion and has weathered the intervening years well. Currently, an uneasy, unspoken truce exists between the traitorous count who rules there—supposedly a bastard of Baden blood—and the insurgent resistance, who seem to know just how far they can push the local puppet lord and his legate keepers. As the most direct supply point to the offensive on Erethor, the rebels who make their homes in Baden’s Bluff seem able to deal more direct blows to those who displease them than is possible elsewhere. Rather than razing an entire neighborhood in retribution for the killing of one of Izrador’s legionaries, the masters of Baden’s Bluff simply chock the loss up as a casualty of war and go about their days. Additionally, the bounty of the sea helps to curb the economic devastation that plagues surrounding lands. Though still hard, life in Baden’s Bluff is much better than it is in any of the Northlands’ other large cities.

The Corbron Isles

The Corbrons make up a large archipelago of treacherous reefs and rocky, heath-covered islands that were once home to little save fisherfolk and shepherds. Now, a century after the fall of the north, the islands are the secret harbor refuge of the Pirate Princes of House Norfall.
The navy of House Norfall was always one of the largest and most powerful of the Dornish fleets, dominating the Pelluria for centuries. As part of the Norfall fiefdom, the Corbrons were a strategic port and key to Norfall naval strength. The fleet’s captains carefully charted the seemingly impenetrable reefs surrounding the islands, and House Norfall eventually established a base there, expanding a series of caves running through the low bluffs in the heart of the archipelago. Known as the Waterkeeps, the warren of caves would eventually become a safe haven for the Norfall resistance when the Great Houses fell. The complex and treacherous reefs serve as natural barriers to the largely inept orc and goblin sailors; though there have been many attempts to land orc troops on the islands, they have so far met with disaster, a fact to which shipwrecks scattered across the reefs offer mute testament. Even those who land safely are unable to divine the caves’ whereabouts, as many entrances are underwater most of the time, and those that are not are kept well concealed.
The greatest threat to the Waterkeeps and the Pirate Princes is the great dragon known as Zardrix, the Wrath of Shadow. If Zardrix were to commit time and effort to hunting down the Pirate Princes’ harbors, she would undoubtedly find them and kill all within. Luckily for them, she seems to have other priorities, whether it is to burn the elves from their home in Erethor or to squat atop Theros Obsidia as Izrador’s most trusted guardian. To protect the pirate fleet from the dragon, magical attacks, and even sabotage, the Pirate Princes never allow more than a handful of ships to moor in the islands at any one time.

Dragon Island

While the Corbron Isles are a refuge for the brave and the living, Dragon Island and its nearby isles are the resting place of the evil and the dead. This group of wide but barren shoals, sandbars, and stony islands is devoid of vegetation and shrouded in perpetual mists.
Scattered across the archipelago are the broken and tattered remains of dozens of destroyed ships—ones that limped there for refuge when the fallen god’s fleet set sail and then found only death. Expecting survivors from both land and sea to seek refuge at Dragon Island, one of Izrador’s Night Kings wove foul magic into the mists there that captured the will of all who
came within their grasp. In the midst of forging plans of resistance and plotting rescue operations, loyal sailors and soldiers began to slaughter their shipmates. The slaughter spread like a plague, and soon the islands and their would-be insurgents had become nothing but a nest of Fell.
As the Last Age dawned, others sought shelter there or went in search of kin they knew to have headed in the islands’ direction. Though the spell that caused the wanton murderousness had departed, many travelers did not realize until too late what their allies had become.
The shoals and islands are now awash with countless bones, bleached white by water and sun. Some of the bones are ancient and others still bear rags of flesh, but none is of a wild creature—animals smell the death of this place and avoid it. These skeletal remains of humans and fey cover the beaches in thick wrack lines and are scattered inland by storm waves and winds. Rummaging among them, subsisting on marrow instead of meat and constantly degrading into weaker and more mindless husks, are varying stages of Fell. Shadow forces sailing from Davindale are occasionally allowed to bring along prisoners so that they might throw them to the island’s inhabitants, and the dismal mercenaries stationed on the Pelluria have been known to keep themselves entertained by throwing the ill or wounded onto the islands’ shores. In this twisted way, the island’s curse continues to claim new victims.

Erenhead

Erenhead is built around the headwaters of the Eren on the shore of the Pelluria. A massive stone causeway called the Peredon bridges the river in the middle of the city, connecting the riverfronts of the two halves of the settlement. The buildings are predominantly Dorn in construction, made of large limestone blocks, though the most recent prewar construction is Sarcosan in style.
Erenhead is now an occupied city, and though most of it still stands, much of its original human population fled south ahead of Izrador’s invasion. Izrador’s armies use the city as a naval port and staging area for southbound supplies and troops. At any given time, Erenhead houses ten to thirty thousand orc, goblin, and human minions of the Shadow. Three to four thousand human civilians, mostly Erenlanders, still try to eke out an existence in Erenhead, and in the city and surrounding lands perhaps ten thousand enslaved halflings labor under primarily goblin supervision. A rotating population of one to two thousand gnomes in the city support various aspects of troop and supply transport for the orc legions.

The Maw

During the pitched fleet engagements that preceded the Last Battle, an elven merchant ship was set upon by a trio of orc galleons. What the galleons’ crew did not realize was that an avatar of the Witch Queen was aboard the Erethor vessel. Knowing there was no escape for the elven ship or its crew, Aradil channeled a powerful spell through her avatar, creating a terrible and vast whirlpool that pulled all four vessels down to their doom.
Perhaps it was the abject fury of the Witch Queen, or maybe it was the sacrifice she made of her own people, but whatever the reason, the power she cast into the spell had unexpected and permanent consequences. One hundred years later, the massive whirlpool she created still roams the Pelluria, an elemental force that strikes fear into the hearts of all sailors.
The gnomes call the frightful hole in the sea the Mouth of the Pelluria. The human pirates simply call it the Maw, and the orc name for it translates as “Down to Death.” The pool varies in size but is usually over 200 feet across. A horrible, sucking roar howls continuously from its depths, and its dark, wet throat reaches all the way to the seafloor. The whirlpool moves more or less with the prevailing currents, but it has been known to make sudden, unexpected changes in course. Because the vortex reaches to the seafloor, its violent action continuously tears at the muddy bottom. As a result, the pool usually leaves a wide tail of suspended sediments drifting in the water behind it. The tail is sometimes over a league in length and is often the only sign to passing ships that the errant spell is dangerously close.
The pool inescapably draws in any vessel or other floating object that comes within 100 feet of its edge, and ships are sometimes endangered at even greater distances. Anything sucked into the Maw is dragged to the seafloor and spit into the depths, where it is instantly crushed, its occupants all but sure to be drowned.