Famous Locations
You take to the left wing of the Library, books, maps and parchments with scribbles of landmarks lay gathering dusk, you take a few texts that peek your interest and sit with a lantern overhead as your only light source, as you begin to turn the pages, you wonder, what wonderful or horrid locations you might want to visit upon your next adventure, but for know, it's better to understand them, than travel into their mitts unaware.
Haggles Nest , The Withering Mire of Calliwood
Tucked within the fetid, shadow-drenched groves of south-western Calliwood lies Haggles Nest, a festering swampland where the light dares not linger. Choked in a perpetual fog of sickly green smoke, the air here reeks of soggy mud, sweet rot, and the faint coppery tang of old blood. Gnarled black trees twist from the marsh like skeletal fingers, their roots coiled around long-forgotten bones. Few tread this way willingly, and fewer return whole.
At the heart of this mire dwells a coven of ancient hags, their names lost to time but whispered in half-remembered nursery rhymes and militia campfire tales. It is said they lure travelers to their lair not merely for slaughter, but for darker, hungrier rites. Soldiers of the Iron Militia, especially young, strapping conscripts, seem drawn to the Nest as if pulled by some unseen thread. Likewise, unflowered girls have vanished upon the swamp roads, their absence noted only by withered wreaths and mothers' wails.
The hags' magic is not merely an illusion. It is an invasion. Under their hexes and honeyed charms, the swamp transforms. The stench of decay is replaced by the scent of pinewood and fresh roses, the croaking of bloated toads becomes the music of flutes and windchimes. To the entranced, the hags appear as maidens or lovers, figures of comfort or desire. By the time the truth is revealed, their limbs are already bound in roots, and their screams muffled by moss.
Some say these spawnings give birth to twisted changelings or swamp-born witches, others believe the hags feed on the womb itself, devouring the future to prolong their ancient curse.
The Raven’s River runs near, but even its current dares not disturb the stillness of the Nest. For in Haggles Nest, time rots slowly, and the hags wait patiently, for flesh, for fear, for the foolishness of men.
The Raven’s River — The Black Vein of Calliwood
To the west of Castor, winding like a festering scar through the blighted southern reaches of the Calliwood, runs the Raven’s River, a waterway in name only, for what flows within it is no longer welcome in the realm of nature. Born in the shadows of Haggles Nest, the cursed swamp where hags weave their vile enchantments, the river has become a vessel of slow corruption. What was once a source of life is now a sluice of decay and madness.
Legends claim the hags of the Nest, through their breeding rituals, death-rites, and unholy pacts have tainted the very water table, infusing the river with curses and ancient hexes. Over generations, the poison has thickened. Those who drink of it twist, their minds unravel, their bodies contort into things too hideous for sane tongues to describe. Some crawl back to their villages screaming; others vanish into the mire, only to return as silent, stalking abominations with eyes like hollow lanterns.
But the earth itself remembers purity.
The sea, in all its vast, salt-bound wisdom, rejects the Raven’s River, refusing to let the curse enter its sacred tides. Where the river should flow into the sea, it halts. A jagged barricade of obsidian-like stone and volcanic glass rises unnaturally from the land, forming a dam of jagged peaks and crumbling teeth, a natural wall said to have grown overnight, as if the world itself rebelled against the river’s approach. The cursed waters pool and stew behind it, dark and motionless.
Still, the Raven’s River calls to the wicked and the desperate.
Necromancers, alchemists, mad scientists, and doomsday cults send coin and promises into the hands of cutthroats, bounty hunters, and reckless adventurers, seeking even a single vial of its toxic flow. For those who survive the journey and the warped horrors that crawl along the bank, the river offers something far worse than death: potential. Power. Mutation.
Some say entire villages have been sacrificed just to harvest a few drops.
Others say the river is sentient now and watches.
Grimstone, The Iron Heart of Castor
Rising like a steel colossus on the eastern fringe of the Calliwood, the city of Grimstone is a thunderous testament to human ambition, industry, and conquest. A sprawling metropolis of smoke-belching chimneys, towering iron spires, and labyrinthine streets slick with soot and oil, Grimstone is home to over two hundred thousand souls, each one a cog in the relentless machine of progress.
To the ancient Fae Folk, Grimstone is a wound on the land, a defiant fortress that bleeds steam and iron, severing the old magics of the forest with every turning gear. Once the edge of the Fae’s sacred territory, the city now casts a permanent shadow over the Calliwood’s eastern border, a monument to mankind’s victory over wonder.
At its core lies the Great Forge, a mammoth edifice of brass and steel, crowned with twin smoke stacks that belch flame night and day. Here, within the Grand Citadel, the elite and elected gather beneath gilded gears and clockwork chandeliers to debate the policies of Castor. Though ostensibly governed by a people’s Governor, it is no secret that the true power lies with industrial barons, arms dealers, and old blood tycoons who lurk behind parliamentary curtains.
One such industry is war.
Grimstone is home to Grimstone Prison, the largest worker-penal complex in all of Castor. Hidden behind iron gates and propaganda, the prison feeds the furnaces of the city, its inmates forced to toil in secret foundries crafting colossal steel automatons, munitions, and siege engines for the ever-hungry Iron Militia. These armored soldiers patrol the city with cold precision, but are just as likely to be seen in the seedy underbelly of the metropolis.
Below the polished brass and riveted skybridges, vice festers like rust. Brothels, famed for their discretion and diversity, cater to both Human and Fae, offering experiences both sensual and arcane. Speak-easies hidden beneath tram stations pour forbidden liquors, while casinos hum with rigged machines and the whispers of fate. Most notorious of all is the Black Market, known to its denizens as Midnight Bazzar, a place where illegal artefacts, stolen Fae relics, cursed weapons, and banned magicks are traded beneath the flickering glow of phosphor lanterns.
Within its deepest shadows, homeless Fae Folk gather, castaways of a dying world clinging to the refuse of the new age. They say some among them still remember the old ways, and barter in secrets, not coin.
Above it all, the spiralling architecture of Grimstone stretches into the heavens, where the richest citizens, those born into legacy or wealth, live in sky-high manors and airship docks that pierce the clouds themselves. Up there, the air is cleaner, the sky brighter, and the troubles of the ground forgotten.
But even the clouds cannot muffle the sound of the city’s great clock, which tolls each hour like a war drum, reminding all below that Grimstone marches ever forward and it waits for no one.