Ravengro

Ravengro NG small town Corruption +0; Crime –1; Economy +0; Law +1; Lore +0;

Society +0 Danger +0

Qualities insular, rumormongering citizens

Disadvantages cursed (haunted, –4 Society)

Demographics Government council

Population 311 (281 humans, 12 halflings, 8 elves, 7 dwarves, 3 half-elves)

Detective Viorec's Dossier

Council of Ravengro:

Councilman Vashan Hearthmount- Retired military. He was granted his position in Ravengro by the Palatine of Canterwall for outstanding service. Vashan is the head of Ravengro's council.

Councilman Mirta Straelock- Native of Ravengro. Former owner of the Outward Inn. The voice of the common man in the town.

Councilman Shanda Faravan -A former royal accuser for the courts of Caliphas. She was disgraced and removed from the courts for allowing a guilty man go free.

Councilman Gharon Muricar- Another ex-military officer under Hearthmount's command. He has ties in Tamrivna and Lepidstadt. A gossip and a "mostly harmless" rake.

Sheriff Benjan Caeller- An honest man and a native to Ravengro. He may have some military scout training. He has an odd fascination with the alchemist Jominda Fallenbridge.

Professor Alendru Ghoroven - Teacher and scribe from Tamrivena, he teaches a small class of local children. he worked closley with Prof. Lorrimor in decoding texts.

Father Vauren Grimburrow- A typical Pharasmin Penitence priest, he has several acoltes to do his day to day affairs. He has also been known to drink far too much.


Ravengro at a Glance
Ravengro was founded in 4594 ar to support Harrowstone, a prison built to answer the growing need for a centralized repository for criminals in the county of Tamrivena (now known as Canterwall). Count Eigen Lorres, one of the last counts to rule Tamrivena before the county switched to its current government, was not a well-liked ruler. In an attempt both to bolster his failing reputation and  bring money into Tamrivena’s coffers, he announced the construction of Harrowstone, a prison that would not only house all of the county’s prisoners (thus removing them from being incarcerated locally), but that for a price, would house dangerous prisoners from all over Ustalav. Count Lorres’s plan worked perfectly—not only was the transfer of criminals out of local jails seen as a boon throughout the county, but other counties also responded well to the invitation, se nding caravans of payments to Tamrivena and caravans of prisoners to Ravengro. The town of Ravengro itself was always intended to be little more than support for the prison. Not only would Ravengro provide a place for the prison’s employees to live, but it would also provide all of the supplies needed by the prison—food, water, tools, weapons for the guards, and anything else necessary.

Historians often point to Harrowstone’s unfortunate destruction in the fire of 4661 as one of the trigger
events that eventually led to the entire region’s bloodless uprising in 4670—the prison’s loss, combined with the government’s inability to rebuild the site (or, more likely, its lack of interest in doing so), certainly disenfranchised the citizens of Ravengro, who by the time the region was ready to abandon hereditary rule were all too eager to accept the new democracy. Since that time, while Harrowstone has remained a constant reminder of darker times, the town of Ravengro has recovered remarkably. Today, the town is a quite healthy farming community blessed with fertile fields and orchards. The town’s chief products are wheat, barley, and corn. Because the town is close to the shore of Lake Lias (“The Great Blue Dot”), Ravengrians can supplement their food stores with fish, but fishing is not sustainable as a commercial enterprise.

Despite their success, Ravengro’s citizens are the town’s greatest hindrances to expansion. Insular, they take some time to warm to strangers and often damage new opportunities for trade with their standoffish attitudes. Yet as hesitant as the townsfolk are to talk to strangers, they are all too eager to talk about them. Rumormongering and gossiping are traditional pastimes among the townsfolk, especially when it comes to strangers. Without a steady supply of unusual visitors to town, they’d be limited to whispers about illicit affairs, unwanted pregnancies, and speculations upon their neighbors’ prosperity—the arrival of strangers in town puts folk in an awkward state, in which their desire to avoid contact with possible troublemakers comes into direct conf lict with their curiosity about new faces. As a result, visitors who make plain their intention to stay in town for more than a day typically receive the bulk of Ravengro’s hesitant curiosity.

Ustalav Overview

The Immortal Principality of Ustalav lies on the northern shore of Lake Encarthan, a grim bastion of civilization amid the barbarian north, where a harsh landscape and a history rich in tragedies inspire a wary population with skepticism, religious devotion, and superstition. A conglomeration of loosely affiliated counties, each run by feuding nobles vying for power and inf luence, Ustalav is a pitiful shell of its former glory, before it was subjugated to centuries of slavery at the hands of the Whispering Tyrant’s undead armies. While the nation’s upper classes struggle to compete with the very nations that abandoned them to fend for themselves after the Whispering Tyrant’s defeat, the average Ustalavic citizen has it much worse.


Hundreds of years of subjugation and the residual horrors that plague the countryside have left the people of Ustalav suspicious of magic, religion, foreigners, and their fellow citizens. Beyond their eccentric and insular qualities, Ustalavs often have a dour worldview. They resign themselves to lives of suffering, seeing nothing in their people’s history to suggest there is any hope for a better life. Despite the physical and psychological strains upon its populace, Ustalav nevertheless fosters extremely hardy and tenacious stock: men and women who firmly believe that no matter how bad it gets, history shows it could always be worse.

Although Ustalav has little to offer its rural peasants, inhabitants of its many metropolitan cities fare somewhat better, and the centers of learning and culture they provide draw trade and travelers from throughout the Inner Sea region. The capital, Caliphas, stands on the banks of Lake Encarthan, and its fog-shrouded streets host some of the nation’s most esteemed centers of trade and academia. In the north, the city of Karcau boasts a thriving culture of music, theater, and other fine arts, and its opulent architecture rivals the excess of even the most exotic Taldan palace. Meanwhile, Ustalav’s northwestern counties have broken from aristocratic rule and formed their own local, democratic government without nobles, calling themselves the Palatinates and providing a glimmer of hope for the downtrodden people of provincial Ustalav.