DIAMOND LAKE’S HINTERLANDS
Beyond the streets of Diamond Lake is a jagged expanse of wilderness. Wandering bands of militia patrol the region, keeping it mostly safe for the merchants, pilgrims, and travelers heading to and from the Free City. The following locations, while technically outside the town limits, play important roles in local affairs.
The Twilight Monastery
About two hours north of Diamond Lake, a towering crag called the Griffon’s Roost casts a dark shadow over the muddy road to Elmshire. From a perch hundreds of feet above looms the cat-infested Twilight Monastery, a three-towered monument to an obscure philosophy of the Distant West. Two score monks dwell within the monastery, dedicating themselves to a litany of exercises meant to perfect the body and spirit. The secretive monks hold dusk as the holiest of hours, and sonorous chants emit from the Twilight Monastery’s central courtyard when the night sky appears in the heavens.
Foremost among the monks is Izenfen the Occluded (LN female human monk 7), a peerless masked combatant thought to be one of the wisest figures in the hills. Travelers frequently seek her council, but most leave Diamond Lake without ever having gained access to the Twilight Monastery, for Izenfen deigns to speak with only a handful of pilgrims foretold to her via the agency of the night sky and an immense mirrored lens called the Censer of Symmetry. The Censer, which dominates the monastery’s central courtyard, grants any who gaze upon it a +10 bonus on Profession (astrologer) checks made during a clear night. Junior monks polish its smooth surface throughout the day, and the whole of the order is prepared to defend it with their lives.
When word of the Censer’s predictive prowess spread to the miners of Diamond Lake 20 years ago, a desperate contingent petitioned Izenfen to predict the location of the richest unclaimed local ore deposits, appealing to her compassion with tales of starving children and dangerously unpaid debts. The masked mistress of the Twilight Monastery rebuffed their pleas, triggering the miners’ contingency plan—an ill-fated invasion of the monks’ compound that left seven miners dead. Only a single member of the order perished—Imonoth, Izenfen’s beloved daughter.
Immediately thereafter, Izenfen gathered a cadre of stealth assassins from the ranks of her best warriors, and silently set them upon the surviving invaders who still milked wounds in the petty shacks along Diamond Lake’s waterfront. At an annual celebration called Darkstar’s Kiss, the monks of the Twilight Monastery recite from memory the names of all fifteen miners murdered on that night, reminding themselves to always remain vigilant to the encroachment of outsiders. Rumors suggest that Izenfen’s masked silent killers remain active to this day, citing the disappearance or mysterious deaths of nearly a dozen political enemies within the town.
Although the monks of the Twilight Monastery keep mostly to themselves and desire only to lead lives of undisturbed contemplation, they frequently appear on the streets of Diamond Lake to reprovision or to engage in the trade of kalamanthis, a rare psychotropic plant grown regionally only on the slopes of the Griffon’s Roost. Proceeds from this trade account for all of the monastery’s activities, but initiates of the order are forbidden from taking it in all but the most controlled ritual circumstances. Kalamanthis is popular among all classes of Diamond Lake, but the real business is centered in the nearby Free City. Potential buyers frequently meet with elder monks in a secluded corner of Lazare’s House along the Vein’s central square to arrange payment and distribution to the neighboring metropolis. Both the wagons loaded with kalamanthis and the returning coaches loaded with city coin go unmolested in Diamond Lake, for all fear Izenfen’s relentless invisible killers.
The Bronzewood Lodge
The ring of crumbling menhirs on the bluff overlooking Diamond Lake is a remnant of an ancient human druidic culture that once inhabited the region. They too came to the hills for the ancient cairns, seeing them as monuments to great ancestors of the invisible past. Although modern humans displaced the native druids during great migrations over a thousand years ago, pockets of indigenous architecture and culture remain. Foremost among these near-forgotten practices is veneration of Obad-Hai, the Shalm, the brooding patron of wilderness and natural order.
Druids and rangers who honor the Shalm and a host of minor nature deities and fey spirits (the so-called Old Faith) routinely congregate in great moots three hours northeast of Diamond Lake, at an ancient megalithic structure called the Bronzewood Lodge. Devotees of Ehlonna or the elven pantheon are welcome at these meetings, if a bit gruffly, but all other attendees must be invited personally by someone already within the circle of trust. At these great moots, the woodsfolk observe rituals from long ago, celebrate with great contests of strength and wit, and debate policy regarding the natural affairs of the region.
A small permanent community inhabits the Lodge itself and the wooded copse surrounding it. Perhaps 30 assorted druids, rangers, and scouts protect the sacred site and keep watch on the nearby roads and valleys. Occasionally, they step in to rescue a traveler from some natural menace, but just as often they warn explorers to stay on the roads and let the wilderness take care of itself. Their leader is Nogwier (N male human cleric of Obad-Hai 6), an aged proponent of the Old Faith who strives to keep the focus of his community on preservation of a near-extinct way of life and away from anger at the Free City and its operatives in Diamond Lake, whose avariciousness continually rapes the land. Nogwier urges cautious cooperation with Lanod Neff via a former Bronzewood man named Merris Sandovar, who now works as the garrison’s chief scout, but he wishes that the Free City would have given him a more reasonable governor-mayor than Neff, and knows he won’t outlive him.
The Lodge itself is a twelve-chambered structure composed of piled megaliths covered by earth. The cairn’s central gallery contains a huge uprooted petrified bronzewood tree planted upside down so that its roots are exposed. Nogwier and his three servitors (N female human cleric of Obad-Hai 3) use the tree as a massive altar. Other chambers contain the sorted, commingled bones of generations of druids as well as priceless natural treasures accumulated over the course of centuries.
The Cairn Hills
A few hundred years ago, intrepid explorers discovered a fantastic cache of priceless artifacts entombed in one of the hundreds of ancient burial complexes hewn into the crags surrounding the Free City. The trove attracted legions of treasure-seekers to the Free City (then a mere trading post), and unbelievable wealth plundered from the tombs. The wealthiest explorers became the city’s first nobility, and the Free City quickly became associated with easy wealth and fabulous archeological artifacts from long-dead civilizations that appeared to predate the emergence of gnomes and dwarves in the region. But the wealth didn’t always come easy, as many of the forlorn tombs provided deadly surprises in the form of bound demon guardians, relentless constructs, and ingenious magical wards and traps. The hilly lands surrounding the City became known as the Cairn Hills, and the hunt for lost treasure became an important part of the region’s cultural heritage.
But the treasure didn’t last forever. Eventually, the cairns dried out, and unplundered tombs became more and more difficult to locate. Every decade or so a lucky explorer managed to strike it rich, but even more came away from their endeavors with nothing more than broken ankles and clothes singed by the fires of ancient protections. Several vanished entirely. Over the years, the Cairn Hills began to lose their allure, and the City fell upon difficult times.
Although abandoned cairns host no few bandit troupes and savage humanoid enclaves, two nonhuman communities play an important role in the Free City’s economy, so much so that they impact even the remote mining town of Diamond Lake. These are the gnome warren of Grossetgrottel and the dwarven stronghold of Greysmere.
Three days (by coach) northwest of Diamond Lake, the Cairn Hills Trail enters a region of steep crags pocked with natural caverns. Five of these caverns lead to an interconnected series of gnome villages called Grossetgrottel. The gnomes of Grossetgrottel specialize in rare gems rescued from the subterranean depths, but each of the five villages focuses on a different trade or specialization. All told, some 800 gnomes call the place home, though about a quarter as many “expatriates” live in the Free City itself or in the mining towns surrounding it. Able gnome wardens and gem-encrusted constructs stand vigil over the surface entrances to each community, and nongnome visitors are subject to the legendary gnome suspicion.
South of the immense Mistmarsh, the Cairn Hills jut up to become the Abbor-Alz Mountains, and in a tight valley stands the imposing dwarven fortress of Greysmere, its impressive stone-carved façade reflecting in the still waters of a placid mountain lake. Tall mountains completely surround the valley, making the citadel one of the most easily defended locales in the region. Unusually for the dwarves, Greysmere stands open to all visitors, who are welcome in the enclave’s upper markets and vast, agoraphobia-inducing galleries. More than 400 dwarves dwell within Greysmere, under the guidance of Fionor the Rude (LN male dwarf fighter 12), a downright mean little fellow who invites all new guests to his dinner table in hopes that they might provide a moment’s entertainment. Despite his boorishness, Fionor respects those who command respect, and is a trustworthy friend.
Far less welcoming are the brooding inhabitants of the Cairn of the Green Lady, a reclaimed tomb on the opposite shore of Diamond Lake itself. Cloaked in robes of green and quick to threaten outsiders, these two-score devotees of the death goddess Wee Jas honor a fallen saint of that deity with mournful prayers to departed spirits and mysterious explorations of the hills nearby. They base themselves in the tomb of this departed servant of the Dark-Eyed Lady, whom they believe died during a great migration of humans across the treacherous hills more than a thousand years ago. Diamond Lake’s Governor-Mayor Lanod Neff trusts the cultists only because they protect the town’s boneyard from the sinister attentions of the community’s most depraved residents. The order’s leader, the enchanting Amariss (LN female human cleric 6), is always on the lookout for new recruits.