What does Harga look like?

Sooner or later, if you’re running Raven’s Purge or otherwise running a campaign in the default Ravenlands setting, your players are going to come to Harga. If they’re humans they may well have started there; events otherwise might take them there, as five of the Key Players (Zytera, Krasylla, Merigall, Kartorda and Virelda) are active there at least some of the time; and the finale of Raven’s Purge is supposed to be in Vond, the capital city.

But while the game often assumes that players and their adversaries will be humans (and therefore Rust Brothers can be assumed to exist as constant threats), it also assume as a default setting the small human villages huddling behind their walls at night that dot the rest of the Ravenlands. But Harga is very different: a comparatively crowded fascist realm ruled by an immortal sorcerer, whose demon-worshipping enforcers could walk at will during the blood mist.

Armed only with the our trusty back of an envelope, can we work out Harga must look like?

How big is Vond?

One way is to start with one city that the campaign describes in detail.

The stronghold rules (Player’s Handbook, p. 176) say that the defence rating of a stronghold is 5 if it’s really well-defended (ramparts, portcullis, guard tower and moat), with an additional +5 for a maximum of 50 guards. Raven’s Purge says Vond’s defence starts at 12 (Raven’s purge, p. 179), so maybe “up a mountain” and “they’ve got all sorts of defences they’ve been working on for some time” account for the additional 2 points.

We can test this theory by looking at how many guards the book says will be on the ramparts if there’s an attack. On top of the starting 12 Iron Guards on the Rust Gate itself, another 4d6 guards from the Assembly Hall, d66 guards from the Barracks and 2d6 guards from the Training Grounds will move here, or on average 14 + 38 + 7 = 59, for a total of 71, which is pretty close, and could in fact account for the additional +2 to the defence. Alternatively, you could say that the +2 is from the additional fortifications, and rule that not all of those 70-odd people will fit on the battlements, but they’re ready to take over as replacement troops.

Elsewhere in Vond, ignoring powerful NPCs and monsters, we have 4 guards in the Demonarium, another 2 in the Training Grounds, 2+d6 in the Guardhouse (let’s say 6), 2 outside Krasylla’s Tower, d3+d6 in the Armoury (5), 2d6 in the Dungeons (7), d66 in the House of Chains (38), 3d6 in the Cauldron of Torment (11) and 2d6 in the Chapel of the Gods (7), for a total of 82.

The campaign is, rightfully, interested in PCs storming the gates of the fortress of Vond with a bunch of armies, maybe a dragon and a stone golem or two, and then going rampaging through the fortress bellowing for Zytera and/or Krasylla to come out and face them; or, alternatively, to set up a massive battle outside, and then sneak in while nobody’s looking. For the same reason that nobody ever goes to the toilet in films (apart from when it matters, e.g. in Pulp Fiction), the game isn’t interested in showing you all of the people who grow the food for all of these people, cook and clean for them, make or repair their clothes and weapons, etc., let alone the unproductive people like children, child-bearing women, or old people.

These people must exist, though. Let’s say that at an absolute minimum you need between 5 and 10 people to support one military person (and, face it, all of the people mentioned in the description of Vond are military, political or religious to some degree; certainly none of them are cooks, gardeners or tradespeople, let alone farmers). Let’s say it’s 5, because Zytera is a slave driver and has demonic magic available to them. That’s another 150 x 5 = 750 people, who have to live nearby because of how food transportation works, even if you didn’t have a blood mist making it impossible for all of those support people to travel. That puts the population of the fortress Vond and its supporting villages or other outbuildings, wherever they are, at something like 900 people.

What does the overall human population look like in Harga?

Of the overall 10,000 people in the Ravenlands, it’s safe to assume that the major population centres after the blood mist are the places where people weren’t completely isolated by it: in case of disease, famine or other natural disasters, help was available from other nearby settlements. This means the dwarven cities in Belderand and along the Coldwater, and the human settlements in Harga. The orcs absolutely were affected by the blood mist, but they were numerous before it hit and breed rapidly enough that most settlements can bounce back from setbacks, so let’s say that you’ve got 3,000 humans in Harga, 3,000 dwarves, and 2,000 orcs. For the rest, let’s suggest 1,000 humans and elvenspring in Moldena, Vivend and Margelda; 500 hobbits and goblins in Belifar; and some shrapnel elsewhere.

Looking at the map, and the map of kins, I count 12 settlements in Harga that should be under the control of Zytera and their Rust Brothers. Up-mountain from Alderstone there’s what clearly must be Vond, right next to Shadowgate Pass; Alderstone must itself be inhabited in some way, and from there it’s easy enough to get to a dungeon in the foothills of the Thynde Range, and then to two villages and a castle around the Blaudwater, with each site at most four hexes away from another (i.e. you can do it in a day if you know the terrain). Go the other way, up the Begrand, and there’s a dungeon site four hexes away, which is also fine. From there it’s five hexes and a couple of river crossings to the next adventure site, so you’re talking about a forced march unless there are Rust Brother forts not mentioned on the map; but from there on, there are another four sites along the Begrand that are all within two or three hexes of each other, and another that’s four hexes away (yes, you need to ford the Begrand, but it’s a tiny stream at this point so that’s not hard).

The four dungeons south of the Foolswater look too far away to be in easy travelling distance, so if Arvia wants to resurrect the ancient dwarf roads and prepare bases as part of preparing an attack on Vond, this is where she’ll go. (They’ve probably not all been taken over by ogres.) Similarly, there are two adventure sites in the Groveland Woods, plus a nearby dungeon right on the Rage Furrow, but the map of kins says that’s wolfkin land, and either way the distances are too large.

So, 3,000 people in 12 settlements. Settlement sizes tend to observe a power law, so plug those numbers into a power law calculator, tweak the settings until they look right, and you can get a range starting at around 100, moving slowly up to 120, then 130, 150, 175, 210, 250, 320, 475 and 900.

These are large numbers for the Ravenlands! The smallest sites are at best at the large end of the scale for hamlets (5 on a d6 on the table on p. 168 of the GM’s Guide). That’s basically the size of the Hollows, and much larger than most sites elsewhere, where you’d expect a hamlet with a median population of 30-40 people. Everything else is a village, which is 6 on a d6; two are 400 or more, which is supposedly impossible. Of course, most of those settlements are dungeons or castles; we previously decided to assume that they’d be surrounded by villages, but even so, those are large villages.

And of course that’s not surprising. While the size of the larger villages might rub up uncomfortably against Dunbar’s number, if the alternatives are (1) living in too-close proximity with too many people and (2) dying from the blood mist, the choice becomes pretty obvious, especially when the heavily-armed Rust Brothers make it very clear that the only people deciding who gets to live and die are them.

Still, it means that in the larger settlements, it’s going to be hard for Zytera’s troops to rule without opposition. Large numbers of people means more inequality unless you try to do something about it, and this doesn’t sound like anything Zytera would waste time on. You therefore almost certainly have at least a few powerful merchants, who acknowledge Zytera’s rule and attend Rust and Heme services impeccably, of course, but nonetheless have money and influence of their own.

The dwarven past of Harga

If you look at where there the mountains are, the direction of travel of the rivers, and the colour of the plains on the map, it becomes clear that Harga is high up: a plateau where even the flat land must be hundreds of metres higher in elevation than the plains of Moldena and Margelda, where rivers get wide and slow before sputtering out into deltas.

(Only a few hundreds of metres? Well, probably, yes. All of the Ravenlands are about a third of the size of England, or about the size of Ireland, and that doesn’t give you much room for significant elevation changes. Besides, Forbidden Lands doesn’t feel like the sort of epic fantasy campaign where you have something like Lake Titicaca thousands of metres above sea level after only a few hundred kilometres of travel from the sea, even if you had a few hundred kilometres to play with. Still, 500-800 metres of altitude is not to be sniffed at.)

And this perhaps explains why the dungeon and castle symbols are so common on this part of the map (only three of the adventure sites are villages, and two of them are lower-down around Lake Harga): because before the humans rudely barged in, this was prime dwarf territory.

So, sure, there are hundreds of humans living in mostly wooden houses, but these surround stone-built complexes of towers and great halls, linked by underground passageways. The Rust Brothers have whacked big bits of rusty iron on the front of all the major buildings, and they’ll have dismantled some of the buildings they didn’t particularly have a use for and reused the stonework for other buildings of their own, but anyone who knows dwarves and travels to Harga will take one look and say: that’s dwarf craftwork, that is. (Also: are the Rust Brothers sure that they’ve found all of the passageways?)

And: think of the various massive stone-singing efforts the dwarves are known to have done since the Shift. Even if you say that Raven / Wyrm / some other God moved the land around to divvy it out between humans and non-humans, the dwarves canonically raised Mount Bilica in 550 AS (GM’s Guide pp. 20-21), and built the Vond Wall in 620 AS (ibid. p. 21). It would not be unreasonable to say that they’d also done some more subtle stone-singing to cut off the human-occupied lands from the rest of the Ravenlands.

Look at the Blaudwater, and look at the mountain range immediately to its north, four hexes wide, roughly east-west. Then look at how the Begrand travels back and forth across Harga before flowing into the Blaudwater; but an unnamed river flows out of the other side of the same mountains, flows through the Groveland Woods, and joins the Wash in a quarter of the distance it took the Begrand to get there. Obviously this unnamed river – more of a stream at first, although it’s going to get wide pretty quickly from all of the water pouring off the Harga plateau and the Groveland woods – is getting downhill in a far more excitable way that the Begrand, overall. But what if this is because Harga isn’t just a natural plateau, but has been encouraged by stone-singing to be higher, more isolated, more cut off from the rest of the Ravenlands?

It makes all the sense in the world for the dwarves to decide to cripple the human economy by making it impossible for trade to go any further up the Wash than the Blaudwater. And being stone-stingers, the way they’ve done it is that the Wash doesn’t exit the Blaudwater in the usual unhurried way that rivers exit lakes, but by a hundreds of metres high Victoria-Falls-style waterfall. That in turn explains in turn why there’s a tower on the banks of the Blaudwater, and a village just one hex away on the confluence of the Wash and the unnamed river that’s been racing down from the south: normally you’d say that there should just be one adventure site here, but in terms of travel difficulty they’re a lot further apart than it looks. The tower overlooks the giant waterfall, and the village is at the bottom.

Similarly, why do we suddenly get forests in the Groveland Woods, just south of the mountains? Does the terrain similarly drop away unnaturally precipitously at this point? If Mount Bilica is the absolutely monstrous mountain at U50, that would make sense: the dwarves only raised the terrain in a handful of hexes, leaving the rest of the land at its original elevation.

The four regions of Harga

Looking at the map closer, it seems like there are four distinct regions to Harga, based on geography and adventure site distribution patterns, each with their own cultural quirks.

The uplands

The Begrand at its start isn’t much of a river. If we take the group of five adventure sites mentioned earlier, then by the time the Begrand reaches the final one, it’s had water flowing into it from 29 hexes, and it and its tributaries have travelled 30 hex vertices. Each hex is 10km across, so has an area of 5²π or roughly 80 km²; and a circumference of 2×5π or roughly 30, so each vertex is roughly 5km. That’s a catchment area of roughly 2,300 km², and a total distance of 150 km; so similar to the River Tweed but with half the water flowing into it, and the Tweed already doesn’t look that impressive.

This is the upland part of Harga, which in turn is upland from almost everywhere else. The soil isn’t good, and there’s not much water, so the most people can farm here is hardy livestock: sheep and goats, maybe llamas or alpacas, on a monoculture of grass (farming demands mean that most of the trees are long-gone). But the mountains provide some kind of shelter from the bitter winds that sweep other parts of the plateau; and while the blood mist made people live closer-together than they might have wanted, the closeness of other settlements acts as a safety valve for social tensions: rather than maintaining a deadly blood feud with the guy who looked at your sister funny twenty years ago, you can just up sticks and move to the next village over.

Still, these five settlements are isolated from the rest of Harga: (1) it might be easy enough to move between each other, but the trek to the settlement immediately north of the Iron Lock is too much for anyone to do easily, and (2) the Rust Brothers make sure to monopolise river traffic, or at least did during the blood mist (see later for what might have changed since then). Zytera’s propagandists have worked hard at building a sense of community here, of hardy folk who pride themselves in providing meat and wool for the rest of the humans downriver, and look down (literally!) at the soft people in Vond and Haggler’s House. A rebel from Alderstone thinking they could hole up here in the middle of nowhere and lose their pursuers is making a tragic mistake: there might not be many people here, and they might have a comparatively rubbish life, but they have historically been 100% loyal to the Rust Brothers.

The No Man’s Land north of the Iron Lock

As mentioned, there’s an adventure site here that’s five hexes away from the lowest adventure site in the uplands, and four hexes away from the centre of the ruined city of Alderland. As well as being a stopping point for all river traffic up and down the Begrand, it’s three hexes away from the Iron Lock, and almost certainly the second line of defence against anything coming through the Shadowgate Pass.

This will be prime Church territory, but with an almost deliberately rough feel. It’s the sort of place where any ambitious Rust Brother or Sister of Heme will be sent at a reasonably-early part of their career, to see how they cope in a comparative wilderness without any of their usual support networks. The spiel probably goes something like this: if you want to understand the people you hope to command, this is spiritually where they’re really from. Yes, yes, Zytera, Krasylla and Merigall in Vond, Kartorda in Haggler’s House, these are all important people and you need to understand them and their courts; and you can’t ignore the lowland towns that produce the wealth and warm bodies that the country depends on. But the beating heart of the Rust Brothers is here.

Far away from the daily distractions of court politics or population management, this is where people, if they can cope with being here (it’s the middle of nowhere and this is probably where a lot of demonic experiments end up making their home) have time to properly think about what it means to be a Rust Brother. Or a Sister of Heme, of course: there’s a patch of woodland on the map a day’s hike away, sheltered by mountains on most sides, which must be particularly sacred to Zytera’s druids.

This could be a centre of traditionalism, yes, but it could also be the source of a number of interesting heresies and half-forgotten ancient knowledge. If there’s a coup against Zytera, expect many of the people involved to have at least come through here in their career, and built up connections.

The grain basket

By the time the Begrand leaves Alderstone, we’ve had about 70 more hexes of basin and another 20 vertices since the uplands, so 7,100km² of basin and 250km in total. That’s similar to the Wye or the Trent, and the river must be easily-navigable by now. It looks like the terrain flattens out at this point: as the sudden flurry of adventure sites suggests, the left bank of the Begrand between Alderstone and the Blaudwater is probably the grain basket of the entire region.

Vond is close, and there must be significant numbers of people involved in getting food up the mountain every day to feed Zytera’s city. (You wouldn’t do this if you were designing population centres from scratch, but are you going to tell Zytera that they’re going to have to downsize or move?) Haggler’s House must also be here, acting as the religious and economic capital to Vond’s political capital, like e.g. Frankfurt to Berlin, or New York to Washington DC. If Vond isn’t in Alderstone, then Haggler’s House might be; or if might be spookier if Alderstone is now a wasteland inhabited by roving demons and a small cadre of Rust Brothers, and Haggler’s House is one of the more prosperous settlements on or near the Blaudwater.

If it’s on the Blaudwater, that might freak out Merigall, who still fears all lakes, but especially the one they were dissolved into. Zytera might even have founded it on the very spot Zygofer fished Merigall out of the lake, in which case there’s a lavishly-decorated chapel dedicated to Merigall and everything, which I suspect the demon makes a point of avoiding at all costs. This isn’t just an act of evil pettiness, but a clear statement of domination and humiliation by Zytera, to make it clear to his underlings who the big boss is.

If the largest settlements are here, then in the triangle between Alderstone, the village on the Blaudwater and the dungeon a couple of hexes away, there must be plenty of farms, and copious foot travel between the three sites; there’ll also be river travel (sanctioned and organised by the Rust Brothers) between Alderstone and the sites on the Blaudwater. Travel between Alderstone and Vond is likely to be more restricted, though, as it’s (1) up a mountain and (2) the place where Zytera lives, and the Rust Brothers are keen on impressing on people that they really don’t have a need to go there if Zytera hasn’t invited them. Then again, as mentioned previously, there must be regular deliveries of food and other sundries that Vond can’t make itself, so if any of your players have the Path of the Face, this might be an interesting way to get inside Zytera’s fortress.

All of this means that you have no idea who everybody is, which means that there’s a need for coins: if you can’t trust strangers, you have to trust currency instead, which is shiny and neutral. Coins with Zytera’s heads (yes, plural) on them are accepted throughout their realm, but this is where they truly come into their own. Yes, the drawback of placing value in small pieces of silver is that there are suddenly all sorts of crimes – theft, fraud, defacing the currency itself – that are impossible before value is intermediated; and Zytera now needs to fund all sorts of people to manufacture, transport and inspect coins.

But it also means that being able to just pay people to do things for you is now possible, which means that the sort of person who’s skilled at making weapons, armour or works of art, and does it as a side-gig almost everywhere else in the Ravenlands, can turn pro in Zytera’s Harga. Everywhere else, if you want a really nice sword made, or armour made from the scales of a Mire Drake, the answer will probably be “that’ll require an adventure in itself so I owe you a favour” – which to be fair is awesome if you’re a GM – or “maybe if I worked full-time for you in your stronghold, I could do it in my spare time”; and you still probably have to find the raw materials, like e.g. kill said Mire Drake. But here, if you turn up with enough coins, you’ve got the expert’s attention, and they quite possibly have all the raw materials to make whatever you ask them for.

The flipside of this apparent anonymity as subjects of an evil dictatorship, though, is that you can never be sure who’s listening in to your conversations, who’s following you, who’s reporting you to the authorities for thoughtcrimes. Does the expert routinely tell their Rust Brother handlers who’s commissioning unusual stuff from them? If there’s a bounty of coins for people reporting unusual activity, will the presence of strangers attract vultures prepared to swear blind that the PCs insulted Zytera’s honour, and swore a blood oath against the Rust Brothers? What about informants playing the long game, going for treachery’s One Big Score, where they behave like reasonable citizens who are slowly converted to the rebels’ cause, only to blow the whistle on the entire scheme at the last minute, so the apparently unlocked door or unguarded entrance to a fort reveals dozens of Rust Brothers in ambush?

The moors

On the right bank of the Begrand, south of the Blaudwater, where it says “Harga” on the map, there are no adventure sites at all.

There are other places on the map of the Ravenlands where it’s reasonable to not expect much in the way of settled population: the ancient dark forests, the plains of Moldena and Margelda where the Galdane Aslenes ride rather than settle, the uplands of Harmsmoor where the ogres roam, and the badlands immediately downland of Belderand which the dwarves never bothered building on top of. But why did the humans never build here?

The answer almost certainly lies in geography and elevation. If the land drops precipitously, and the forests only turn up when we’re hundreds of metres lower, the plains hexes east of the Blaudwater are exposed to winds that have been blowing in from the sea, and before that across a vast ocean, uninterrupted by anything other than the narrow range of mountains extending north of Mount Bilica that bisects the Groveland Woods and the Fangwoods.

Any trees here are stunted and bowed over, a metre in height at most, and the constant wind can eventually drive you mad. This is moorland, and you don’t want to be here. Especially because this is also the sort of place where people hide if they’ve got no better solutions: desperate rebels maybe, sure, but consider also what happens to that peculiar subset of Zytera’s experiments who don’t meet the required standards, but are too competent or dangerous to be killed out of hand.

And if anyone ever says “hey, I want to try out something experimental, but if it goes wrong it might upset the locals”, the answer is “try the moors, then; nobody lives there”.

What’s happening now that the blood mist is over?

Now that the Rust Brothers and Sisters of Heme have lost their monopoly on being able to travel at night, economic and political truths that held for two hundred years are now being threatened by human ingenuity and restlessness. This isn’t even about the number of humans expanding; that’ll take a decade or two to have any significant effect. This is about people moving: spreading out, expanding.

The uplands

The uplands were traditionally the conservative heartland of Harga, proud of supporting the rest of the country with their honest labour; but three trends are threatening this attitude.

It used to be that many of the Rust Brothers and Sisters of Heme around here were almost literally pastoral priests: if herds and flocks are your major source of income (milk, wool and meat), and they’re not threatened by the blood mist but most of you are, then the people who can walk unthreatened by the bloodlings are going to find themselves on herding duty a lot of the time. Maybe shepherd huts dotted around the high plateau can be blessed by priests somehow, so ordinary people can overnight here unthreatened by the blood mist; but when it comes to move the animals around from one grazing ground to another (horizontal or vertical transhumance), you need all of the true believers that you can get. This makes the Church a much gentler institution than the one you get around the Blaudwater, and explains why it’s so easy for the local populace to be grateful, unthinking followers of Zytera. But now that the blood mist is no more, there’s no more need to call in the priests.

The blood mist also kept people closer-together than they probably wanted. If the people up here are simple, salt-of-the-earth people, who will develop blood feuds at the drop of a hat, then as soon as it’s possible to get away from your hated rivals, leaving all of this fighting and bitterness behind, some of them are going to do that. Expect a number of additional settlements to start springing up, bridging the gaps between the existing settlements and especially downriver towards the No Man’s Land. This threatens the previously-benign control that the Rust Brothers had over the local populace, because now the Church has to be spread a lot more thinly if it’s going to keep track of everybody, and will have to resort to violence a lot sooner than it used to.

Finally, the uplanders’ established monopoly on wool and related animal products is threatened by two concurrent factors. First of all, some lowland farmers are branching out into herding, now that they can also travel further, and the hills and mountains near their villages are no longer out of reach. This will happen fast: as soon as anyone from the uplands makes it to the lowlands and has a look at the nearby terrain, or even earlier than that, if some enterprising livestock expert in the lowlands asks themselves “how hard could it be?”

Secondly, the more enterprising upland farmers are reconsidering the old economic order of “just give all of your excess produce to the Rust Brothers and it’ll be fine”, and wondering how much money they could make if they cut out the middle-man; especially if they retool their business to make small, easily-concealable luxury goods that the soft lowland people will pay well for. This might happen quicker if the Rust Brothers allow private boat traffic on the river (see the next section), but even if they don’t, eventually paths will be found through the moors. (Remember: in fiction, what kind of people do we find on moors? Smugglers!)

The No Man’s Land north of the Iron Lock

Perhaps the most conservative part of all of Harga is exposed to the most disruptive of changes, and they won’t like this at all.

If anybody with a boat is allowed to travel up- and downriver, there will suddenly be a lot more activity on the Begrand, and the village that was previously dedicated to Rust Brothers, Sisters of Heme and veterans, will start to be overrun by newcomers. Inns will need to be expanded, or new ones built; chances are that people will start talking about building a completely new settlement on the confluence of the Begrand and the tiny river that comes down from the military fort on the edge of the mountains, which is a more natural stopping-point for river traffic. Sisters of Heme venturing to their groves on the other side of Begrand, preparing to fill their minds and souls with the true double-edged nature of Heme’s blessing (nature, red in tooth and claw, is yours to exploit if you survive), will feel violated by having to first wade through travelling merchants talking about wool and hawkers selling fried food.

But if river traffic by civilians is banned, and this part of Harga continues to be reserved for the military, that needs to be enforced. The river’s too wide at this point for any kind of “just stretch a chain across it” scheme; and anyway, as mentioned previously, the settlement where the Rust Brothers and Sisters of Heme live isn’t even on the main river. You’ll probably need to build a dock and customs inspection point at the confluence, and a number of lookout towers up- and down-river to thwart people trying to portage around the checkpoint. You’ll need to staff all of these, have people bring them supplies, and you’ll need patrols to make sure that nobody’s building new settlements or smugglers’ hideaways where they shouldn’t be. Even if you’ve got the budget to do this, which you almost certainly won’t, there’s plenty of people who live here who will be wondering how that squares with their oath to protect the people. At best they’re protecting them from themselves, which will sit badly with people who remember the origins of the Rust Church as a belief in self-improvement.

The grain basket

There’s going to be a multiplication of settlements, as in the uplands, but for different reasons. Here it’s about exploiting fields that were previously out of reach, and the amounts of people involved mean that small hamlets are going to be springing up everywhere, each with a few farmers’ houses, maybe a pub. As mentioned earlier, herders will be eyeing up the local mountains and wondering if they can put sheep there, now that travelling a small distance is no longer impossible.

Either way, the effect is the same: if you want to keep track of what your subjects are saying, you’re now going to need a lot more spies. Expect the number of informants, on the official payroll or opportunistic freelancers, to rise to Stasi-level numbers.

Also, remember the merchants from earlier? This is perhaps the only place in the Ravenlands where you can genuinely have someone with money and ancient book-learning pull the fantasy cliché of “I believe there’s a dungeon nearby that is rumoured to have interesting contents; go and investigate it please, won’t you?”

The moors

As people who previously lived in the grain basket go looking for new places to live, some of them will inevitably end up here, on the grounds of “how hard could it be?”. A number of them will fail, and possibly become ghosts or undead; some Rust Brother sorcerers will be tempted to experiment on them, but their ardour will be tempered by the knowledge that secrets are more difficult to keep nowadays. All it takes is for one of the unfortunate dead to have family connections to people back in the lowlands with money, and for some traveller to recognise them, and awkward questions are suddenly going to be asked.

For those who survive, this is literally a frontier environment, so if you ever wanted to know what Rust Brothers wearing chaps looked like, now you know. Dust off all of your Western tropes, and add demons. (Who said horses have to only have four limbs?) These small settlements won’t necessarily be favourable to anti-Zytera rebels: the people who’ve come here are small-c conservatives who believe in hard work and not relying on anybody else. But rebels can certainly hide out here in a way they couldn’t elsewhere, because there’s a “I don’t care what you get up to in the privacy of your own home” attitude that is definitely not the case back in the more crowded settlements back home.