The Picaroon Peninsula, Dismal Sea, Bloodstained Prince and More
Welcome to the Sunday Supplement, Raging Swan Press’s weekly email for GMs. This week, we have one free download, one piece of legendry, one piece of lore and three miscellaneous campaign components for your game.
(I’d love to know what you think of this new format for the Sunday Supplement; please leave a comment below.)
01: The Picaroon Peninsula at a Glance
Download
Set sail for adventure on the Picaroon Peninsula! Stretching from the isolated pirate stronghold of Deksport in the west with its three violent, feuding rulers, to the mysterious Forest of Gray Spires in the east, the Picaroon Peninsula is home to ruthless buccaneers, cannibal cults, crumbling tree-choked ruins and pirate curses.
02 The Dismal Sea
Ashlarian Legendry
Old mariner’s tales tell of the Dismal Sea—a seaweed-choked morass said to lie somewhere in the far reaches of the Bitter Sea. Vast swaths of seaweed and perpetual gloom cloak the aptly named Dismal Sea. It is a place of near-certain madness and slow death. Once a ship floats into the near-windless Dismal Sea, it inevitably becomes ensnared in the vast, endless banks of seaweed choking the place’s turgid, dark water. Ships can remain trapped for days, months, years or even decades before the sea's sluggish, ever-shifting currents open a swath of navigable water. Marooned crews slowly starve, go mad or fall prey to the sea’s many terrible, savage predators. Amid the noisome morass lurk vast swarms of ravenous crabs, intelligent octopi, alien plant-like creatures and other indescribable horrors.
Islands—replete with bizarre forest-like fungoid growths—rear from the sea’s weed-choked waters. Ruins of foul aspect, raised long ago by unknown hands, profane many of the isles with their blasphemous presence. Tribes of degenerate crabfolk often lurk in the surrounds and battle their sworn enemies—savage sahuagin who dwell throughout the sea in sunken pyramids of primaeval artifice.
Few mariners escape the Dismal Sea. None willingly return.
03 The Bloodstained Prince
Ashlarian Lore
Crown Prince Ilasual Nenonen—the Bloodstained Prince—is a notorious figure in Ashlarian history. Pretender to the throne, Ilasual challenged his sister’s right to rule after the death of their father—Arndul Nenonen.
When Arndul Nenonen died in NR 196 (almost 400 years ago), the throne passed to his eldest child—his daughter, Aelliah Nenonen. Ilasual was a troubled, petulant child. His lust for power blinded him to all other things. The throne was his birthright. The prince gathered a like-minded collection of rogue adventurers, dissatisfied nobles and mercenaries to his banner and declared himself duke.
This was The Time of Two Crowns.
After a short, bloody war, Aelliah crushed Ilasual’s forces at the Battle of Selka River (fought to the north of present-day Ashford). Ilasual’s fate remains unknown. His body was not found among the dead, and he has not been seen since the battle. He is widely assumed to now be dead—either slain during the battle’s final moments or since fallen to time’s inevitable onslaught.
The Ballad of the Bloodstained Prince recounts Ilasual’s treachery and tells of his painful death in lurid detail. It remains a popular song in Ashlar’s taprooms to this day. Several versions of the song exist; singing the more seditious version, which casts Ilasual as a doomed, romantic prince, is still punishable by death.
04 The Crown of Cth
Campaign Component (Artifact)
The Crown of Cth is an artefact of ancient, malignant power associated with the primordial power, Cth. Supremely rare texts—copies of older, pre-human writings scribed by unknown hands from a forgotten civilisation—theorise that the arrangement of the crown’s points mirrors a unique conjunction of the planets thought to herald some terrible and inescapable doom. On the nature of this doom, the ancient texts are maddeningly silent.
The Crown of Cth has surfaced from time to time throughout recorded history. Its appearance heralds devastation, disaster and doom. Wars have been fought, and kingdoms have been sacrificed to possess the crown. Few individuals have managed to keep the crown for long; those wearing it are typically consumed by its power or slain by their fellows.
The crown is a dull, jagged thing forged of otherworldly black metal set with glimmering red, yellow, and purple stones of unknown types. It was not wrought for a human head.
05 The Mirewood
Campaign Component (Adventure Locale)
The Mirewood—a sunken, boggy, gloomy forest of glutinous mud and rotting trees—fills a wide, shallow valley cutting through a range of high, rain-drenched hills.
The aptly named River Ooze meanders through the valley. Fed by innumerable tributaries flowing down from the surrounding hills, the low-banked and wide river often floods, inundating the valley.
Foul things dwell in the sodden gloom of the Mirewood. A young black dragon is said to lair in a sunken hollow in the depths of the noisome swamp while the spirits of all who have drowned in the Mirewood rise at night to float through the dismal, sodden dark of the valley's depths. Inevitable rumours of the dragon's wealth—looted from the crumbling ruins of a forgotten kingdom dotting the surrounding, rain-lashed hills—draw a trickle of adventures to the Mirewood. Some emerge filthy and exhausted, vowing never to return to such an enervating, dismal place; others do not emerge at all.
06 The Rotting Manor
Campaign Component (Adventure Locale)
The so-called Rotting Manor was once the home of an old merchant captain famed for his seemingly inexhaustible supply of strange gold coins. Now, this grand manor stands abandoned and forsaken amid a tangled, overgrown garden surrounded by high, crumbling walls.
A vampire once laired in the house but has not been seen for a century or more. Some locals believe the vampire is dead or fled, but most whisper that it yet lurks within but is confined in some unspecified, magical fashion so that it cannot prey on those dwelling without the garden’s high walls. These locals believe that the wards holding the vampire prisoner within the Rotting Manor weaken every year on the Winter Solstice and that on that one night, it can steal forth to feed. On such nights, the surrounding streets are abandoned—the peasants huddle in their homes or seek sanctuary in the local churches, such is their intense fear and unswerving belief in the old legend.
No one enters the Rotting Manor’s gardens—ever—and the locals keep watch for and actively discourage adventurers and the like from doing so. They believe that intruders may accidentally—or perhaps deliberately—sunder the wards keeping the vampire within, freeing it to hunt without restraint.
Ashlarian (proper noun) of Ashlar; Campaign (noun) a connected series of adventures; Component (noun) a constituent part; Legendry (noun) a collection or body of legends; Lore (noun) knowledge and stories about a subject
Thank you for reading the Sunday Supplement; I hope some of the above material makes it into your game or sparks your creativity.
Remember, Everything is Better with Tentacles!