Southland: Cairns

THE SOUTHLAND

A Fantasy Core Setting

© Jerry Harris 2014

Published here as Open Game Content.

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Cairns (The Lost Settlement)

[This would be a good place to put your favorite haunted village.]

Commonwealth colonists found their northern limit along the east coast the hard way.  Cairns was a major settlement attempt near the Cape York swamps as primarily an agricultural township.  It was fertile farmland, but far too close to Lizardmen territory, not to mention the Gillmen Kingdom offshore, and occasional marauding Humanoids coming around the mountains. 

The settlement was progressively weakened by attacks over several months until one horrific night raid.  In a nearly unprecedented alliance, three different Humanoid groups (Orcs, Lizardmen, and Gillmen) encircled the town and destroyed it to the last man.  A relief column arriving two days later could do little more than bury the dead. 

There was not enough potential wealth in the area to justify restarting the settlement, not that you were going to find any volunteers to do so anyway.  Reprisal raids would be carried out (the Orcs were tracked down and destroyed, the nearest swamp with a known Lizardmen settlement was ignited with Alchemist/Greek Fire, and the nearest known Gillmen city was hit with primitive depth charges).  The town site was abandoned, though not forgotten. 

Particularly, it wasn’t forgotten by the so-called “Necromancer.”  There are actually few haunted areas in the Southland, in spite of all the mass deaths of the Ancients.  A strange byproduct of the Catastrophe is that it absorbed nearly all of the souls on the continent, including those of the dead still “chained” to reality for whatever reason.  Cairns, as a site of a recent mass murder, would be an irresistible “laboratory” for a Necromancer.

After un-hallowing the site, hostile spirits rose to haunt the former town.  The Necromancer then brought up a legion of corporeal dead.  These undead are usually hidden and only come out if the living are trespassing nearby.  They are hostile to both humans and Humanoids.  The Necromancer has lairs across the continent, but this is his main lair.  The worst of it, there’s been plenty of other massacred colonial villages, outposts, mines, and caravans for him practice his craft.

Officially, Cairns is quarantined by the Colonial government.  While everyone is aware that the town is currently haunted, there are only rumors that the Necromancer is involved.  Unofficially, Cairns is under constant surveillance by the Rangers.  Adventurers have been well paid to make quick raids into the place, which is interesting, since there’s nothing worth looting left in the town.  They’ve also been paid to keep quiet about what they were sent for. 

The most common undead present are listed here.  The violence done in Cairns would naturally give rise to probably a few ghosts, but it was the Necromaner’s unhallowing of the grounds that has created so many undead here.