Ghornfell

Ghornfell

Ghornfell is a Power level 3-4 region in Ashenfall, in the north of the continent. Poison lies to its east and storms to its west, and General Velgar circles overhead.

Garou settlement

The garou were not native to Ashenfall. Their homeworld was Antumnos, where the moon goddess Lougrim arrived as an outsider and was hunted as prey. She overpowered her hunters, travelled to the garou capital of Magrawn, and defeated every reigning clan king in a single battle to take the mantle of High Queen. She brought her people to Ashenfall some time afterwards, and they settled Ghornfell. Their kings preserved a link to the old world through the tokens they wore, each holding a single pebble taken from Antumnos and passing from monarch to monarch. Those kings held their seats by the rite of challenge, and a leader who declined a challenge was judged unfit to rule.

The garou shared the region with the dragonkin. Brakka held land in the Fractured Plains, and he took garou as slaves to raise a tower there. Rasthin had granted him mastery over the earth, and he used that power alongside their labour to build a monument to himself.

Under garou custom, humans crossing their land were held to have consented to the hunt by trespassing, and the killings continued until a treaty was made with Lougrim that closed garou territory to the practice. That agreement held for several years, and in that time the garou of Ghornfell traded with the villagers of Bramblemead, a settlement in the neighbouring region of Brynmoor.

The war with Brynmoor

The agreement held until Bramblemead exhausted Brynmoor's iron deposits and sent militias north into Ghornfell to prospect for more. The garou watched them fell woodland as they searched and treated the incursions as a breach of the treaty. The garou found these militias harder to kill than earlier travellers, and their attacks became skirmishes rather than slaughters.

What the garou faced changed when Bandos offered the villagers a solution to the conflict, and the Saradominist priests agreed terms with his emissaries under which they would receive the mines of Ghornfell and Bandos would claim Lougrim's head. The garou defences broke under the ogres he brought with him. They then held their lines against goblins sent in continuous waves from fortified positions, killing them by the dozen while the replacements outnumbered them. Their two enemies fought for separate reasons. The Saradominist priesthood held Lougrim to be a false goddess whose followers had to be destroyed. Lougrim told her people that Bandos pursued them over a slight they had inflicted on him long before, on a world far from Ashenfall. Garou armour that had held against bronze failed when the humans introduced iron, and the militias razed their settlements and killed whole families. The garou held that advance at King's Pass, the route from the Whispering Swamp into Ghornfell, for months. however casualties kept mounting.

Lougrim answered by giving herself into the service of the dragonkin Cabal, and their dragons entered the war on the garou side. The garou gained the titan wyrms the dragonkin Lacrussa had bred, which had served as the heaviest units the dragonkin fielded. By 4213 the garou had been driven back to the point of defeat, and these new allies turned the war around.

During the war, a patrol of garou cubs hunting the kill that would mark their passage into adulthood ambushed the hunter Ulv, a close friend of the necromancer Ravanna. She answered his death by drawing on the souls of slain garou to raise a storm over the Stormtouched Highlands, and the garou living beneath it have been struck by its lightning ever since. Lacrussa's titan wyrms died in that storm, and their bones remain scattered across the Highlands.

Garou who wanted no part in the fighting withdrew to the eastern plains, where they sowed wheat and barley and settled there for the duration of the war.

Velgar's ascendancy

With the war turning, Bandos left the garou lines and took the fight to the dragons himself. He discarded his wards and armour and challenged the dragon Velgar to single combat at the tower in the Fractured Plains, where Velgar's hide turned the axe aside and his poisonous breath drained the god's strength until he withdrew from Ashenfall entirely. Following the victory, Velgar spilled his own blood across the wheat fields to the east, and the crops the garou had sown there collapsed into venom.

The goblins of Ashenfall read Bandos's defeat as proof that the dragon outranked their god, and they took Velgar as his replacement. They have held to that faith since, living longer under him than they did under Bandos. The garou gained a truce from the withdrawal, agreed on terms that each side keep to its own territory, and it held for decades.

Kuldra's reign

The truce ended when the dragon queen Kuldra devoured Lougrim and claimed the throne. Garou tradition records the succession as a challenge fought and won on equal terms, in keeping with the rite by which their own kings ruled. A Moon Garou scroll recovered in the Umbral Sands contradicts that account, holding that Lougrim had spent her power shielding villages from dragonfire and that Kuldra killed her without issuing a challenge at all. Most of the garou submitted to the new queen regardless, and those who refused left Ghornfell to become the Moon Garou. Their own account holds that Kuldra pressed the garou who stayed into wars they had no part in and trained their young as killers.

Her rule also changed garou hunting practice. Lougrim had taught her people to kill cleanly and had refused them poison on the grounds that it cheapened the hunt, and Kuldra instructed them to use every tool available instead. The druids, once held to tradition and to a narrow choice of prey, adopted harsher methods under her. She set humans as the standing quarry, and the thanes enforced that order in her name.

Kuldra afterwards killed Brakka at his own tower and took his mastery of the earth, granting it to Velgar, who claimed the tower as his lair and holds it still. From it he destroyed Blue Flame Keep, the Saradominist presence on the continent, and Bramblemead itself, the village his region had once traded with.

The garou of Ghornfell serve Kuldra in the present day while keeping the rites Lougrim taught them. Her priests still carry the moon as their symbol and continue to mourn Lougrim.

Geography

Ghornfell is divided into three subregions, each with a distinct environment.

Fractured Plains

Main article: Fractured Plains

The Fractured Plains are the hunting grounds of the resident garou. Unstable anima turns the local plants the colours of dragonfire, and Brakka's ruined tower stands at the centre of the region as Velgar's lair. A crystal on the mesa carries a mournful sound on the wind.

Stormtouched Highlands

Main article: Stormtouched Highlands

Ravanna's storm rages over the Highlands, and its lightning strikes those who travel the ground below. The bones of the titan wyrms lie across the region, and the garou camp beneath their ribs. A stone monument to a fallen garou king overlooks the area.

Bloodblight Swamp

Main article: Bloodblight Swamp

Bloodblight Swamp grew wheat and barley before Velgar's blood poisoned it. The water and the air both carry the toxin, and the garou living there have grown resistant to it at the cost of their tempers.

NPCs

• CathanReplaced by the Wise Old Man (After slaying Velgar)
• Vannaka
• Doric
• Slopfinger
• Manktongue
• Caratacus
• Doctor Fenkenstrain

Nodes

• Copper Ore Node
• Tin Ore Node
• Iron Ore Node
• Silver Ore Node
• Gold Ore Node
• Blurite Ore Node
• Dragon Tooth
• Sandstone Rock
• Granite Deposit

Trees

• Ash Tree
• Oak Tree
• Anima-Infused Bark

Plants

• Onion (plant)
• Dwellberry Bush
• Snapdragon (plant)
• Toadflax (plant)

Fish

• Raw Anchovies
• Raw Salmon
• Raw Herring

Aggressive

• GarouGarou BerserkerGarou HunterGarou DruidGarou ThaneGarou King
• WolfDire Wolf
• Chinchompa
• Ram
• Velgar
• Abyssal Demon
• Terrorbird

Non-aggressive

• Deer
• Sheep
• Magpie
• Gyrfalcon

Quests

• Dog Days
• Granite Mauled
• Heartstrings
• Cook's Assistant
• Animal Magnetism
• A Room With A Garou
• A Melody Remembered
• The Great Body Robbery

References

1. ↑ Journal entry of Garou King, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "She fell upon the capital of the garou nation, the city of Magrawn, where she called out a challenge to all the reigning kings of the garou clans. They answered the summons and she defeated each of them together in a single, decisive, battle."
2. ↑ Vannaka, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "I believe the garou lived there once, before their goddess took them here."
3. ↑ Journal entry of Tainted King's Token, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "Inside each token rests a single pebble taken from Antumnos, the Garou homeworld."
4. ↑ Journal entry of Garou Highborn's Cloak, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "A garou leader must be ready to face all challenges, because to refuse even one is a sign of weakness."
5. ↑ Journal entry of Fractured Cape, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "A single tower that rose as far as the eye could see. Forged through his own power, and the blood, sweat and tears of garou slaves."
6. ↑ Journal entry of Bronze Shield, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "They saw the humans as prey, willfully intruding on their land and therefore consenting to be hunted."
7. ↑ Journal entry of Ring of Pursuit, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "during the few years of peace between the humans of Bramblemead and the garou of Ghornfell, villagers could barter these trinkets for far more than they were worth to other villagers"
8. ↑ Journal entry of Iron Platebody, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "Their noise and bluster drew the ire of roving Garou, who saw the invasion of their forests as a violation of their treaties."
9. ↑ Journal entry of Bronze Shield, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "Battles that would previously have been a slaughter became skirmishes as the garou tested their might against these new bronze defences."
10. ↑ Journal entry of Iron Platelegs, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "The humans would claim the mines of Ghornfell, as long as Bandos could claim the head of the Garou goddess, Lougrim."
11. ↑ Journal entry of Zogre, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "It was Bandos who brought the ogres with him, in his crusade to destroy Lougrim and wipe out the garou."
12. ↑ Journal entry of Garou Writings, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "he sits in fortified battlements and sends an unending river of green-skinned warriors to smash against our defences. Even the smallest pup has slain a dozen of the vermin, yet their numbers seem almost endless"
13. ↑ Journal entry of Bronze Fire Arrow, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "Lougrim was a false goddess, in their eyes, and her followers had to be cleansed from existence."
14. ↑ Journal entry of Garou Writings, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "She says it is because he is jealous of us. Enraged by some slight we inflicted, some aeons ago, on a world far from here."
15. ↑ Journal entry of Iron Sword, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "As humans advanced, iron weapons in hand, they razed villages to the ground and wiped out whole families."
16. ↑ Journal entry of Iron Sword, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "As Lougrim bound herself to the service of the Cabal, all that would be left of the villagers would be puddles of molten metal."
17. ↑ Journal entry of Dragon Tooth, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "These dread creatures were once the pride of the dragonkin forces."
18. ↑ Journal entry of Scorched Journal, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "Our alliance forced them back into the shadows, and we were so close to removing their stain from this sacred land. Yet, somehow, they have plucked new friends from the shadows."
19. ↑ Journal entry of Ulv's Longbow, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "ambushed by a patrol of young garou, looking for the bloodmark that would grant them adulthood"
20. ↑ Journal entry of Ravanna's Ring, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "they build static charge that they unleash upon the garou that live below"
21. ↑ Journal entry of Stormtouched Cape, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "Lacrussa considered these monstrosities her finest work. Yet she shed no tears at their destruction."
22. ↑ Journal entry of Bloodblight Swamp, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "It was a resting place for a people that had been hunted for too long, a sanctuary at last."
23. ↑ Journal entry of Iron Greataxe, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "He never surrendered, but there was no victory for the big high war god. He sounded a tactical retreat, seeking superior tactics - far, far away."
24. ↑ Journal entry of Bloodblight Cape, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "In his jubilant rage, Velgar spilled his blood on the once fertile plains, corrupting them with his hate-filled poison."
25. ↑ Journal entry of Muddy Scrawl, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "Velgar is new big high war god. Glory be to Velgar."
26. ↑ Journal entry of Goblin Warrior, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "Velgar is a cruel and uncaring master, yet the goblins live longer lifespans under his watch than they ever did under Bandos."
27. ↑ Journal entry of Scrawled Diary Page, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "We called a truce and the garou accepted, as long as we each kept to ourselves."
28. ↑ Journal entry of Leathery Parchment, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "Her many heads tore the goddess limb from limb, swallowing down the pieces of her divine flesh until nothing of the old queen remained."
29. ↑ Lehran - The Archaeologist, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "The challenge wasn't issued at all! Lougrim had spent almost of all of her power shielding villages from dragonfire. Wounded and weak, Kuldra descended on her without mercy and simply devoured her."
30. ↑ Sand-worn Leather Tome, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "She enslaved our people, turned us into footsoldiers for wars we should never have been a part of. Took our young and trained them to be killers, murderers, not the hunters we should be."
31. ↑ Journal entry of Poisoned Iron Arrow, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "After Lougrim's fall it became clear just how foolish it was to seek such a merciful path, their new High Queen had made it clear that they should use all tools at their disposal."
32. ↑ Journal entry of Garou Druid, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "In the age of Lougrim, the druids were tempered by tradition and ritual. They were encouraged to focus only on the right sort of prey. But under the auspice of the dragon queen, they are more prone to cruelty."
33. ↑ Journal entry of Thane's Authority, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "Under Kuldra's leadership, the chosen quarry was human. The dragon queen had a deep hatred for the humans, she found them weak, petty and flawed."
34. ↑ Journal entry of Fractured Cape, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "She gifted Velgar, her most trusted general, with the elemental mastery of the fallen Nodon architect, and, to mock the dragonkin further, Velgar took Brakka's monument as his new lair."
35. ↑ Journal entry of Velgar's Head, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "The fall of Blue Flame Keep, Bramblemead village, and the Saradominist presence on Ashenfall, was orchestrated by Velgar's hand."
36. ↑ Journal entry of Grieving Moonstaff, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "They accept and revere Kuldra as their High Queen, yet they grieve the moon goddess that made them who they are today."
37. ↑ Journal entry of Fractured Plains, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "The dragon makes his lair in the remains of a dragonkin's hubris, a monument to an architect long since dead."
38. ↑ Journal entry of Stormtouched Highlands, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "Watching over the Highlands stands a great monument to a fallen garou monarch. A king who challenged impossible foes."
39. ↑ Journal entry of Bloodblight Swamp, RuneScape: Dragonwilds. "The garou here have grown resistant to the poison, though their minds are addled by constant exposure."

Update history

This information is based on the changelogs of the game.