Connects to: 16.16.05 and 22.18.
This stone round-house squats at the edge of the swamp that forms Thring’s eastern border. The great hall is musty and cold year-round. Mold stains creep across the tapestries and bedsheets. The dungeons are carved from raw earth, and rife with gnarled roots and lolling fungi. Every dark recess is a newt, frog, toad or salamander’s nest.
The Court at Spiriwin
Lord Spiriwin the Cruel presides over this castle and the three dozen peasant families who live clustered around it. He is an enormous man who gorges himself on meat and brandy. Advisers who disagree with him are silenced by roars and stomps. His judgments and decrees are arbitrary. Administrative duties confuse and irritate him. He has not even been able to produce a child. Many, especially his wife and heir, Agnessa, are waiting for him to eat himself to death. He has survived several poisonings, a feat which he attributes to living among amphibians.
Spiriwin’s sole vocation seems to be breeding and raising war boars for Castle Tarengael (16.16). The castle’s talented huntmaster, a half-elf named Soveliss sentenced to serve the disgusting man-child, hunts the forests and swamps of Thring for prime studs and sows. Spiriwin breaks the boars himself with sheer malice. He feeds them human meat whenever possible, often paying peasant families to take bodies of their relatives when he cannot find anyone to execute.
Hooks
- How does Lord Spiriwin survive so many poisonings? Who has been behind most of the attempts? His wife, other lords, disgruntled servants?
- What crime did the half-elf huntmaster, Soveliss, commit to justify his sentence of serving Spiriwin?
- What kind of things can get you executed in Spiriwin’s demesne?
Red-Feathers
A band of crowfolk outlaws led by Red-Feathers has taken advantage of the land’s misrule and operates in the marshes around Castle Spiriwin. The peasants who harbor them are rewarded with loot that does not interest the crowfolk, usually anything insufficiently shiny.
Connection:
- Red-Feathers has been raiding boats that have run aground since the levee broke (22.18).
Hooks:
- Alchemists and herbalists are interested in what grows in the earthen maze beneath the castle. Oblivion moss, which absorbs and modifies memories, was once collected from the walls of a deep tunnel. What else could be down there?
- Tell me the exploits of the Red-Feathers gang. What kind of things do they give their peasant sympathizers?
