Carrion Crown PFS
The PCs come to Ravengro to attend the funeral of an old friend, Professor Petros Lorrimor, only to become embroiled in the village’s problems—the ghosts of the haunted prison on the hill are spreading down into the town
Some small towns grow up around a university, their shops and other offerings catering to a scholastic clientele. Others boast famous festivals or specialized industries that draw skilled artisans and craftsmen. But in the sad case of Ravengro, the town’s claim to fame is a prison. And not just any prison, for Ravengro supported one of Ustalav’s most notorious jails—Harrowstone. Twice a year, a prison convoy rounded up the worst of the worst from smaller, less secure jails across the principality and transferred them to Harrowstone, often to await death by hanging, but always to live out the rest of their lives as prisoners.
Already the home of dozens of notorious criminals, the mid-year prisoner convoy of 4661 ar brought a particularly horrendous batch of criminals all at once. Among them were five particularly notorious convicts: the Lopper, the Piper of Illmarsh, Father Charlatan, the Mosswater Marauder, and even the infamous Splatter Man. Not even Harrowstone was adequately equipped to handle these criminals, and as their execution dates drew near, the Lopper and the Splatter Man, working together, picked their moment and staged a desperate attempt to seize control of the prison and, perhaps, escape.
Yet while they managed to turn the tables on Harrowstone’s guards and, for a few minutes, held control of the prison, they did not anticipate an act of self-sacrifice by Harrowstone’s head warden, Lyvar Hawkran. Only a few minutes after the prisoners seized control of Harrowstone’s lower level, Warden Hawkran triggered an emergency deadfall that sealed the dungeon and trapped everyone (including himself and most of the prison guards) within the prison’s dungeon, leaving the only way out a supply lift that couldn’t be activated from the dungeon level.
It was via this lift that the Warden and other trapped guards initially thought to escape, but before they could make it to safety, they were overpowered by the rioting prisoners and taken hostage. The prisoners attempted to use their hostages to force the few guards who remained on the floor above to lower the lift, but the guards were too well trained. Even with their warden and most of their friends trapped below, they continually refused to lower the lift—further, they set guards around the lift’s shaft above so that any prisoner who attempted the nearly impossible climb would have to contend with crossbow bolts raining down from above. Eager to avoid sparking a panic in Ravengro, the guards holed up and did a masterful job keeping the truth of the riot contained while they desperately tried to work out a plan.
Yet several hours later, after Lyvar failed to return home for his customary dinner, the warden’s wife Vesorianna crossed the prison grounds from her home to the central prison. In their panic, the guards had left the main entrance to the prison unlocked, so Vesorianna was able to enter the prison with ease, only to find it strangely empty. Following the sound of shouting, she came to the training room where the remaining guards were gathered near the lift shaft to the dungeon.
When Vesorianna learned from the increasingly frantic guards that her husband was trapped with the madmen below, she pleaded with the guards on the ground level to remove the deadfall and stage a rescue. When they repeatedly refused, she went into hysterics. She managed to dodge the guards, run to the lift’s winch, and throw the release, causing the heavy wooden platform to plummet into the dungeon below in the hope that her husband could leap onto it and be pulled to safety. In actuality, the lift crushed several guards and a few prisoners who had been standing directly below it—the horrified Vesorianna was convinced her husband was among them. Taking advantage of her shock, several guards managed to finally apprehend her and swiftly bustled her off to the prison workshop at the other end of Harrowstone, locking her inside for her own safety.
The remaining guards worked frantically to keep the prisoners from escaping—with the lift below swiftly filling with eager prisoners, they couldn’t simply pull it back up. And as other prisoners began climbing the chains that connected the fallen lift to the upper level, the guards grew desperate. Knowing that they were about to be outnumbered by lunatics, they made a fateful decision— they began rolling barrels of lamp oil from the nearby storeroom into the hole, hoping to dislodge prisoners from the lift and dissuade them from climbing. But when one of Harrowstone’s most notorious prisoners, the spellcasting murderer known as the Splatter Man, stepped into view and began using his magic against the guards, desperation gave way to blind panic and one of the guards threw a lit torch into the oil-soaked depths, figuring that if the lift were burned, order would be restored.
Unfortunately, the resulting conf lagration was much bigger than anyone could have expected. The huge oil slick below caught fire and spread throughout the lower cellblock. The ensuing flames incinerated both the screaming prisoners and surviving guards below, while thick plumes of smoke swiftly worked to suffocate those above. The remaining guards on the ground level fled, only realizing much later to their horror that no one had bothered to release Vesorianna Hawkran from the workshop. The town of Ravengro mobilized to extinguish the fire before it spread, but the damage had been done. One of Ustalav’s most notorious prisons was no more.
In the 50 years that followed the Harrowstone Fire, the town of Ravengro moved on to become a pleasant (and perhaps even boring) farming community. Yet the town’s old-timers remember well the eerie prison caravans that carried monsters through the town. And none in Ravengro can ignore the brooding, dark ruin of the old prison that looms on the hill overlooking the town. Tales of the prison being haunted are traded by Ravengro’s youths, and on certain dark nights they taunt each other to touch the rusting bars on the prison windows. Dares to spend the night in the edifice are routinely posed and never accepted.
