Harwith¶
"Now take the knife and each of you drop some blood in the bowl." — Hal'Gamesh to his new minions (S138)
Harwith is a frontier village of the Sancturi Dalmar Province that was "swallowed in a Hollow overnight" at the opening of the Sancturi Campaign in the Fifth Age. Its people woke inside the Icy Hollow of the devil Hal'Gamesh, behind "a 30' wall of Ice", and were bound to him by a blood pact.
The village¶
"From a distance, you can see that the village is situated on a small rise, just above a wide and meandering creek. A small cluster of building surrounds what appears to be a very large tree. Encircling the village is the typical spiked fence found at most simple Sancturi villages. The buildings are constructed in typical Sancturi frontier fashion: stone foundations with beam and post wooden construction."
The Green Boar Inn¶
The inn of Harwith, owned and run by Normand Haket, a 52-year-old Danari with "a wooden peg leg on his left leg" who "retired as an Elite Sword from the Imperial Army" after service with the company called the Rising Boars. "He would like to see the return of his Inn, though that seems very out of reach at the moment."
The villagers¶
The people of Harwith were farmers of onions, potatoes, wheat, turnips, maize and string beans, a cattle-ranching family whose stock had "just up and disappeared", a widowed barmaid, a fixit man with "a small shed with an anvil and simple forge", and the sawyer Albert Hanival, who ran the lumbermill with four slaves, among them the convicted Namakan Runeblade Kaito Tadaheik and a captured soldier of Arnyr. Hanival was a witch who traded "info, some blood, reagents and the occasional traveller" with the devil "for access to the Hollow". The farmer Gofrei Varley was "a Hollowlock Necromancer associated to the Hollow", building beneath his house an Umbralar, a "Dark Spirit Idol ... that can extend the hollow", and was "responsible for the Hollow's sudden expansion to cover the village". Three members of the Lamar family hung from the great tree, the wife and eight-year-old daughter "found guilty of obstruction by the Sancturi" for hiding the grandmother, a witch, from the witch hunters; Hanival had turned them in.
The Icy Hollow of Hal'Gamesh¶
The Hollow that took Harwith is a cold one, ruled by Hal'Gamesh, a horned brown devil of the "abyssal black tundra" who "is a Hollowlord and has access to unlimited MP in his Hollow", attended by twelve invisible frostfire imps, two greater imps, a pack of winter wolves led by Raksjaw, the dire yeti Shalul, frost hares and snow owls for scouts, and "Patchwork Abomination (trying to make a living vessel large enough for a greater demon)". Holding court in the village square, he separated "minions from meat", bound his chosen with blood dropped in a bowl, and set them tasks: to kill the renegade Hollowlock Thorstein, who was digging "the half buried ruins of an old Kalari abbey" in the Florentine Woodlands for a piece of the Worldstone Heart; to kill the exiled Prince Immeron of Alghert, "living in exile in the Florentine Woodlands" with an Eldritch soulcrux hidden in a Kalari relic; and "to expand the Hollow". The pact was bound to a fetish, a dog's skull carried by one of the invisible imps.
In the first session the party "awoke in an inn and a Hollow had swallowed the village of Harwith", formed "a group of nine 'mercenaries'" with the inn's travellers and the innkeeper, travelled through the Florentine Woodlands of Floren, spared Thorstein "in return for his demon killing the imp (Vag'Drothos)", and went looking for the witch Zaela in the village of Guillon. What became of Harwith afterwards is told in the Sancturi Campaign chronicle.
Gap
The sources do not place Harwith within the province or say how far it lies from Kurano, nor record whether the village was ever freed from the Hollow.
Earlier accounts¶
Before Harwith the opening scenario was written for Hearnst Village, "a small village located almost exactly a day's travel from" an unnamed town, "near the ?? crossroads", "a cluster of houses, an inn, a cooper and lumbermill", with "a large dead tree in the center square" and the three Lamar corpses hanging from it, and "scorch marks, ash and charred timbers" where the witch's house had burned. The same villagers appear under slightly different names (Harolt for Rotbert, Arlette for Adile, Basquet for Basset), Normand Haket "is the local Master of the Watch", and the Hollow was not icy but one of earth and brimstone, "Class 3, all manifestations", where "trees and plant life are turning to stone" and the ground is "soft and broken with a sulfurous smell". Its Hollowlord was the talkative devil Hez'Vandros, "Realist-Sarcastic-Happy-LovesToTalk-type", who bound his victims to "a carved granite dog skull" and sent them after a Hollowlock named Olivand who "had the AUDACITY to call in some witch hunters". Both drafts (S144, S145) were superseded by the Harwith scenario (S138).