The Vaungerand Manor
A few miles northeast of the city of Amaranthine is the now abandoned estate of the once prominent Vaungerand family. Rumors abound about the family's downfall are rife with talk of demons and black magic, but truly no one knows why the family disappeared and how the estate fell into ruin.
The estate has become a bit of a local legend in recent years after the isolated disappearances of several different thieves and scavengers who went to the manor looking for treasure and never returned. For months on end the taverns were ablaze with innumerable ghost stories. And the local populace tells tales of the old lady of the house having given her passions and soul to a demon prince and that the estate remains cursed as a result.
Architecture
The Vaungerand family are decedents of the original Land Bridger blood that settled the Summervine river valley, and as such the architecture of their estate reflects traditional patterns found commonplace in the Land Bridge. In particular that denotes the use of terracotta clay tiles and stucco siding formed around a hardwood frame as opposed to the Aldiran customary limestone structures with stone shingled, or thatch roofing.
History
The Vaungerand estate was constructed nearly a century and a half past when the noble family's progenitor, Reynard De Vaungerand was knighted by the Aldiran king for heroic acts during the then constant border wars with Gresha. The estate was passed down from sire to heir until being passed down to its final owner, Reynard's great, great grandson Ogren De Vaungerand.
For the past half a century prior to the estate passing down to Ogren, the family's wealth and influence had been slowly diminishing and Ogren's inheritance was less than even he had expected it to be. For nearly a decade, unknown to Ogren, his family had been on the verge of bankruptcy with no hope of reprieve given the current political and economic climate of Aldir. His father had been doing little more than keeping up appearances, and hemorrhaging money in the process.
By the time Ogren learned of his family's precarious financial state, it was already too late for any wise investment or windfall to save them from obscurity. Instead, Ogren took the only option he felt he had left to him: he scratched together a substantial dowry and secured a marriage with a wealthy merchant family from Gresha. There is a lot of rumor and speculation surrounding where exactly he acquired the funds for the dowry, but all that can be said definitively is that the marriage solved the Vaungerand family's initial problems.
This point in the story is where things become less fact and more hearsay. Many visitors to the estate report that Ogren had changed shortly after the wedding and gone into a depressed state over the entire affair, and turned to excessive drinking and gambling often being seen in taverns and dive bars throughout northern The Stem. Meanwhile reports were heard that Lilith De Vaungerand, his bride, began becoming more and more of a recluse locking herself in her room and painting studio for hours and sometimes even entire days at a time.
No more than a year after the wedding the Vaungerand estate began falling into disrepair as their financial situation began declining once again. Servants were unceremoniously released from service without severance and several of the family's more valuable possessions turned up in auctions in Autumn's Landing. In the end, rumors began spreading that Ogren had abandoned the estate and his wife to live the life of a bandit and road pirate, while Lilith locked herself in the crumbling mansion and turned her attention to darker sources of knowledge and power.
The truth of what happened may never be known, but with six months of no one in the mansion being heard from and the family defaulting on taxes and morgage payments during that time the Red Beryl Holding Company declared the property foreclosed and sent men to evict any squatters from the property for it to be reclaimed. Those men returned claiming that the property had become infested with terrifying and powerful demons and ghosts and that the property was surely to be uninhibited otherwise. In response, Red Beryl hired a party of adventurers to exterminate the monsters on the property, and they were never heard from again. This was followed up a few months later by several reports of thieves and scavengers who'd gone to the estate looking for abandoned valuables going missing as well. In response to all of this, Red Beryl declared the property a lost cause and a local hazard and enlisted local law enforcement to put a trespassing ban on the property.
The estate has currently sat empty and abandoned for almost five years, and it is considered unlawful to trespass on the property subject to penalties of up to a month in prison and or fines in excess of 500gp. This has, of course, not stopped everyone desperate enough to risk the penalties, and several people have been listed as missing after traveling to the estate.
12th of Nira of 1229 AP
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