The Long Crawl

Not long ago, the Kingdom of Talvyrn tore itself apart in a brutal civil war: when King Aldric II died without a settled heir, half the realm rallied behind his younger brother, Prince Gerwald, while the other half stood with his daughter, Princess Maerwyn. For nearly four years, fields burned, villages were emptied, and neighbors turned blades on one another. In the end, the war came to a conclusion when Gerwald was slain in battle, and Maerwyn was crowned Queen Maerwyn Aeldric I. Peace came at last, but it changed nothing. The new monarch rules from the capital, but her hand is weak, her coffers empty, and her soldiers few; in truth, the Queen’s law is enforced only where the local lords choose to apply it. Feudatories and noblemen are left to keep order with whatever resources they still hold. Free companies have turned into robber-knights, old cults spread at the edges of civilization, and monsters creep closer and closer to vulnerable villages. Still, life goes on. Most folk will say that the realm holds together more by habit and stubborness than by strength, and everyone prays the Queen will soon reassert her grip. In such a time, wandering blades and hedge-wizards make a difference — sometimes for coin, sometimes for a worthy cause, and sometimes for themselves. In the end, the most unlikely figures might rise to save villages, slay beasts, topple lords… Or carve their own petty crowns.

The southern province of Morwyke lies far from the capital and the Queen’s reach. Though the armies that took part in the civil rarely clashed here, the war’s shadow reached the region all the same: caravans stopped coming through the Crown's Way, taxes rose, and young men were levied to march off and fight far from home. The farms of Morwyke were never scorched - but trade has withered, and the county's economy is in a precarious balance.

 

Morwyke itself is a land of broad plains and farmland, with plenty of tiny villages, mills, and small market settlements. To the east lies the Crown's Way - the kingdom’s artery of trade - which is now unsafe for the first time in generations, and thus less traveled than before. Beyond that road runs the River Veyra, once crowded with barges and now empty; its banks patrolled only loosely by tollmen, and infested by river pirates. To the west, the grassland turns into the Ealdwyn Forest, where lumberjacks and hunters still ply their trade but speak of strange lights and drums in the night. To the north, rise the Chalken Hills, where shepherds have stopped taking their flocks for fear of raiders. Southward, the fertile farmland stretches for many miles, following the river and reaching the marches bordering with Valmere, a neighboring kingdom that - in these dark hours - doesn't seem as peaceful as it once was.

 

The province is nominally ruled by Count Renald of Morwyke, sworn vassal to the Crown; yet, in the aftermath of the war, his grasp on the region is now lighter than ever, barely reaching a few days beyond the walls of his own settlement. The nobleman's household knights are too few, and his coffers are draiend after years of disrupted trade. Rumor says he keeps sending envoys to the border forts, to the south-west, weighing with care what he might need to do, should the kingdom falter any further. Meanwhile reeves and lesser lords quarrel over tolls, inheritance, mill-rights and ferries. And as they squabble, outlaws grow bold on the roads, half-pay mercenaries drift from town to town, and rumors of unquiet things in the woods and hills spread with every turning of the moon.

 

The war might have ended in name – that much is true – and yet, its consequences still linger. Old debts waiting to be repaid, grudges festering under a tense truce, and the Queen’s hand which appears weak and isolated. If order is to return in the realm, it will be the doing of people like the Count — or perhaps, the work of strangers willing to seize fortune in a land where the Crown’s gaze no longer reaches.