Sternwater
a Bleak Hamlet of Therianthropy
A lone, mud-caked road, like a gnarled goblin arrow, cuts through the charcoal mists and peat stinking hamlet of Sternwater.
Around the small puddle-pocked, manure sodden market square clings tightly a handful of low-roofed, ramshackle thatched abodes, like jaundiced, balding golems huddled about a measly, rain-soused fire.
The only sounds you hear are the lacklustre clanks of a blacksmith’s hammer, the grim call of crows in the damp leafless trees, the rhythmic back-and-forth of a carpenter’s saw through a sodden log, and the vile squealing of half-starved boar that wander aimlessly from muck-caked doorstep to boot trampled yard.
The ragged, filthy locals eye you with suspicion as you arrive, their worn and pox-scraped faces scowling as they hurry their pale, curious children indoors.
Nearby a gaggle of rake-thin farmers struggle to push a hand-cart loaded with half-rotten turnips through the boggy mud, stopping only to sling curses at the lone individual bruised and bound with hempen rags to a broken cartwheel at the hamlet’s edge.
A scrawled wooden plank about their jaundiced neck proclaims the criminal guilty of 'foulness with a hound most bedraggled, and the theft of one onion.'
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A filthy, diseased little Village where tensions boil between those “blessed” with therianthropy (the ability to transform into beast-form), and those who are not.
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Use this section as a quick reference during play, or at the start of a Session to refresh your GM senses!
Sights
MuckFilthy, haggard villagers attired in rags
Pigs and chickens wandering aimlessly
Squat wattle & daub thatched cottages
Dead & rotting crops
Sounds
CrowsPigs and chickens
Shouts of children
Clanking of a blacksmith’s hammer
Rain
Smells
Dung & manureCharcoal smoke & fire
Damp
Mouldy potatoes
Rotting timber
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Locals subsist largely on a barter and exchange system of trade, offering a mended rake for a half-loaf of rye-bread, or a bundle of holly branches for a pitcher of tar.
Very little in the way of coin sways any beyond the Tavern Keep and the hamlet’s Reeve.
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Simple cloth and fabric, unsuspecting outsiders and lost, weary travellers, as well as the occasional travelling merchant bringing small wares to trade.
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Lycanthropy of the rodent kind.
Mud, Disease & Disdain.
Turnip Ale tainted with something … strange.
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Single-storey, one room cottages with low thatched roofs, bordered by narrow, moulding kitchen-gardens in which residents struggle to grow anything beyond bedraggled weeds and stinking mulch.
One residence, however, stands tall - that of the Reeve whom, from his second-storey balcony, watches all and yet sees very little.
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A single figure, the Reeve, appears to lord over the small hamlet.
His portly belly tells of a plump pantry, and his many medals and rosettes display his grim pomp for all to see.
There is no guard, nor soldiery, and the hamlet’s residents dole out their own bedraggled justices as either their bitter whims see fit, or as the cruel majority dictates.
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Residents are largely scornful and suspicious, and are steeped in all manner of strangenesses.
Expect to see doorframes riddled with scratched runes, crude trinkets and totems strung from fence-posts and worn about necks upon woollen threads stained and bound tightly with unusual knots.
A lone barn, boarded up and set away from the houses, perhaps once held the occasional feast or celebration; but no longer.
People spend their days either farming the surrounding sodden lands or else filling it with sickly looking livestock, to which they tend from dawn’s first light ’til dusken fall, returning in a hurry lest the twilight befuddle their meandering way home.
There is no music here, no religion nor entertainments, and most are illiterate; stubbornly so.
Once the sun recedes from the foggy-air it seems as though the Villagers themselves do likewise; disappearing from view until the dawn, no doubt exhausted from their day’s labour, and wary of the foul beasts and sickly spirits they are convinced roam through the black mists that loom all about them.
The only sounds one might hear in the night - aside from a waking infant’s occasional bawling - are the screams … -
This list is by no means exhaustive, and is intended simply to stir the pot of your own imagination. Use what follows as starting-points, or ignore them entirely in favour of your own Adventure Hooks!
- The Wererats need fresh recruits, and see the Party as fine and capable additions to their ranks!
- The Stern & Spittle Tavern is involved in a smuggling operation, of sorts; fine wine from another Town passes through Sternwater, where the contents are being watered down; some barrels even being mixed with a strange therianthropic inducing substance. The Hamlet's own Turnip Ale is being mixed in a similar way, ready for export to the nearest City.
- The Hamlet’s Reeve is using strange beasts in the surrounding woodlands to scare farmers into selling their land. The creatures are growing less and less satisfied with the bargain they have with the Reeve.
- Various residents are about to rise up and attempt to rid Sternwater of their opposite number, and it will not be long before a deadly conflict erupts that will change the Hamlet forever.
It is entirely up to the GM which side - therianthrope or otherwise - is keen to attack the other. -
Roll 1d6 for a Sternwater Encounter :
1 - Pigs have escaped their pen, and are trampling a pumpkin crop.
2 - Every window in the village simultaneously fogs over, and an unsettling chill descends upon all.
3 - A murder of crows has been harassing livestock in the surrounding fields.
On moonless nights, they coalesce into a single, humanoid form, slaughtering any marked with beak pecks.4 - Taxidermy rats are appearing in the pockets of residents; one of the Party members, too.
5 - Village children are missing, seemingly replaced by ghoulish scarecrow-lookalikes,
6 - The local criminal has escaped from the cart-wheel stocks, and has clambered to the rooftop of the Reeve’s cottage, brandishing a fiery torch.
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ROLL 1d20 for a STERNWATER TRINKET
1 - A single obsidian scale from the skin of a Kobold
2 - A dog's tongue
3 - A handkerchief tied about a bundle of maggots
4 - A small turnip carved to depict a grotesque and sickly individual
5 - A bundle of knotted rat's tails
6 - A wooden egg-cup overflowing with endlessly foaming mud
7 - A corn doll stuffed with writhing worms
8 - A small bundle of twigs bound with cat-gut
9 - A tooth from a Giant Spider
10 - A water-skin full of horse blood
11 - A taxidermy squirrel in a heroic pose
12 - Explosive mouse-droppings
13 - A pair of manacles made of thorny vines
14 - A freshly removed finger
15 - A clump of unusual fur caught in a rat-trap
16 - An eyeball stuck on a knitting needle
17 - A leather pouch of whispering gravel
18 - A pot of large doornails made of silver
19 - A candle that can never be extinguished
20 - Several scrolls, one containing the deed of ownership to the local cemetery
Residents of Note:
ancestries have not been allocated, allowing the GM to assign as appropriate.
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Dressed in tattered waist and frock coats, with a tall top hat, an enormous nose and equally bulbous belly.
He is often seen eating raw garlic as he anxiously picks his expensively booted feet across the filth and muck, bundles of scroll-paper and land-deeds beneath his arm as he goes.
Generally cowardly and sneering, whilst imagining himself to be lofty and highly cultured.
He is also an avid collector of dead & stuffed rodents, all of which are dressed and posed in various heroic dioramas within a glass case in his “Reeves’ Manor”; the only building with an upper floor in all of Sternwater.
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All of her teeth are wooden. She wears a long, loose brown smock, a stained leather apron, and wooden clogs.
She has a liking for nettle-tea and wild mushrooms, and regularly disappears into the woodlands and coppices nearby for days, sometimes weeks, at a time.
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One armed, and hardy. He stinks of the strong, dark liquor constantly brewed by his motherless daughter.
The two of them, together, fashion tools for the farmers, and keep their work-shop at the edge of the hamlet fenced off, mistrustful as they appear to be of all who reside here.
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A mess of hair and woollen rags. Feigns deafness by holding an old ox horn to his ear.
His potions, poultices and tinctures do very little, although he does - quite by accident, and only very occasionally - concoct something of worth.
At least, that’s what the toad whose back he cannot help but lick convinces him to is so.
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There is a single Tavern - “The Spittle & Stern” - a two-roomed hovel of a building that smells of horse hair and old damp.
Various clumsily made stools and tables of all manner and size litter the interior which is forever grey and gloomy.
The Tavern-keep, Cranneck, is a sour and grumpy sort, but will feign the most enthusiastic friendliness should a stranger pass through the low door of his grim tap-room.
He walks with one leg longer than the other, has ears riddled with old piercings and a face worn with faded tattoos, as well as a grim scar from ear to ear across a long nose cut from a blade that must have been as sharp as his teeth are now.
Cranneck keeps a helper, of sorts; a small and strange rock-like creature called Brick, upon whom he piles all manner of cruelties and disdains.
Brick does not talk, instead merely hobbling into view to be harangued and harassed as he goes about whatever menial task assigned, before being sent back to the damp and gloomy cellar beneath the Spittle & Stern.
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A small and strange rock-like creature, upon whom Cranneck piles all manner of cruelties and disdains.
Brick does not talk, instead merely hobbling into view to be harangued and harassed as he goes about whatever menial task assigned, before being sent back to the damp and gloomy cellar beneath the Spittle & Stern.
Some in the Hamlet believe Brick to be some spirit lingering in igneous form. Others recall the creature being created by a passing Mage, as payment for services rendered in the Hamlet.
In truth, none but Cranneck know of Brick’s origins.
