Savage Frontier.pdf

OFFICIAL GAME ACCESSORY

The Savage Frontier

by Paul Jaquays

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Savage Frontier ........... .2

Savage Frontier Overview .................... 5

The Peoples of the North .................... 18

Cities, Towns, and Villages ................... 28

The Sea, the Ice, and the Islands .............. 35

Lost Lands, Strongholds, and Ruins ........... 39

Rivers, Mountains, and Rough Lands .......... 45

The High Forest .......................... . 49

Uthgardt Ancestor Mounds .................. 53

Personalities of the North ................... 56

Maps

Economic Map of the North ................. 7

Ruins of Ascore .................. inside cover

Grandfather Tree ................ inside cover

Hellgate Keep .................... inside cover

Luskan ....................... . . inside cover

Typical Ancestor Mounds .......... inside cover

The City of Waterdeep ......... outside gatefold

Icewind Dale ............... Trackless Sea map

The Ten Towns ............. Trackless Sea map

Silverymoon ................ Trackless Sea map

Beorunnas Well ............. Trackless Sea map

Hall of Mists ............................. 64

Appendices

Appendix A: Magical Items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

Appendix B: Northern Proficiencies . . . . . . . . . 60

Appendix C: News of the Land . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

Appendix D: Adventures in the Savage Frontier . 63

Credits:

Editing: Karen S. Boomgarden Cover Art: Larry Elmore

Cartography: Dave Sutherland, Typography: Kim Janke

Dennis Kauth,

Interior Art: Esteban Maroto

& Paul Jaquays

Keylining: Stephanie Tabat

TSR, Inc.

POB 756

Lake Geneva,

WI 53147 USA

TSR UK Ltd.

The Mill, Rathmore Road

Cambridge CB1 4AD

United Kingdom

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ISBN 0-88038-593-6

$7.95 US

9233

9233XXX1501

INTRODUCTION TO THE SAVAGE FRONTIER

Civilization ends here.

Although no sign in the North actu-

ally says this, the folk of the North

know this to be true (Well, to be honest,

there was a sign over the door to my

laboratory that said it, but I made Erek

take it down. Who I am I, you ask. Let it

be known, that I am Amelior Amanitas,

alchemist extraordinaire and supreme

sage of the North. At the request of

Elminster, I am dictating the his tory and

wealth of information regarding my

savage homeland to my manservant

Erek, who has promised to edit out

digressions such as this when he reco-

pies it. But as I said, I digress).

To walk past a citys walls is to rely

only upon ones own skills and strength

of arms. It is truly a Savage Frontier,

where man has yet to tame the land or

its denizens. You have been warned.

What is the Savage

Frontier?

The Savage Frontier is a descriptive

name for what many also call the

North. In this book, the North refers to

those lands north of the city of Water-

deep, between the Sword Coast and the

Great Desert; the term also encompass-

es the islands of the Trackless Sea,

including Tuern, Ruathym, and Gun-

darlun.

It is a rugged, heavily wooded wilder-

ness marked by cool, mild summers

and harsh, bitter winters. What little

civilization can be found hugs the

coastal regions and a few inland river

valleys. The rest is the domain of orcs,

trolls, barbarian tribes, and uncount-

able other monstrous denizens, who

regularly hurl themselves in fury upon

the palisades of the towns and villages

in the wilderlands.

It is a land of riches. Mineral wealth

unequalled elsewhere in the known

realms is found here, along with seem-

ingly endless stands of timber of a size

not often found elsewhere. Here too is

the wealth of history, the plunder of

lost civilizations and vanished realms.

Using this Book

This book is intended to be read by

Dungeon Masters only. Much of the

information contained within would

not be known to players and their char-

acters under any circumstances.

Read this book in its entirety before

running a campaign in the Savage

Frontier: it describes the major fea-

tures of the North, beginning with his-

tory and ending in adventure. In

between, it looks at the geography, cli-

mate, creatures, peoples, religions, poli-

tics, cities, island realms, areas of

mystery, and personalities. Though it

hoards a wealth of detail, this book only

scratches the surface of adventure

opportunities of the North. The rest has

been left to the most potent force

present in the

your

imagination.

History of the North

Eons before men walked the earth, ages

before the elves were civilized enough

North...

to record history, in a time when the

North was always warm and the seas of

the world were deeper, the lands of

Abeir-Toril were dominated by vast

empires of inhuman peoples. In the

elven oral tradition, these were known

as the Days of Thunder when cruel

lizard, amphibian, and avian peoples

(known to the elves as the IquaTel-

Quessir or creator races, but with no

honor or respect intended) tamed the

mighty dinosaurs, built towering cities

of stone and glass on the shores of the

warm seas and spanned the wilderness

with shining roads, and fought constant

wars of extermination, such was their

hatred towards each other.

The stuff of magic was rawer in those

days, less refined, more potent. These

ancient peoples experimented end-

lessly with magics more powerful than

can be even imagined today. Powerful

mages hurled devastating bolts of seem-

ingly god-like power, leveling armies

and mountains; and like gods, they

played at creating life, wryly choosing

to release their monstrous mistakes

rather than destroy them. To those who

made them, the mistakes were unnatu-

ral horrors, unlike anything that

walked the land. Most died in the cruel

jungles, yet many lived and as thought

awakened in them they hid themselves

from their creators. When the end

came at last, it was they, not the surviv-

ing creators who seized control of the

suddenly colder realms. And so it was

that the first of the elves, the dragons,

the goblin races and an endless list of

creatures of a new age took possession

of their heritage. Their creators, the

ancestors of the lizardmen, bullywugs

and aarakocra, declined into endless

barbarism, never to rise again.

The unmeasured age that followed

was known as the Time of Dragons,

when those mighty creatures reigned

supreme. Not until the elves themselves

became powers in the world would the

rule of dragons be challenged.

Elven sages still speculate on the

events that brought about the over-

night destruction of the creator races.

There are wildly diverging theories,

but all agree that a rapid climate change

occurred, creating a world unsuitable

to most of the creator races and the

dinosaurs. Many believe that the

change resulted from a cataclysm the

races brought upon themselves. Propo-

nents of this theory point to the Star

Mounts in the central High Forest,

whose origins are most likely magical

and otherworldly. The elves believe

that around this time, the greater and

lesser Powers began to manifest them-

selves in the world, particularly the

beings known as Chauntea and Corel-

lon Laretheian, aiding the new races

and confounding the survivors of the

creator races.

There has been civilization in the

North since before the Time of

Dragons, yet little more than tantaliz-

ingly vague myths survive. For millen-

nia, gold elves dwelt in Illefarn (where

Waterdeep now stands) and Eaerlann

(along the River Shining). From their

ornate forest cities, they traded with

primitive, emerging human nations like

Netheril and Illusk and repulsed the

constant attacks of the goblin races. Yet

as men began to dominate the world,

the elven lands declined and now little

or no remnants remain of those lost and

abandoned realms. When the elves

chose to leave the North and travel to

Evermeet, their works quickly disap-

peared, leaving only places like the Old

Road and a ruined port in the High For-

est to mark the passing of Eaerlann,

while a mysterious ruin called the

Crumbling Stair may be the last rem-

nant of fabled Illefarn.

Meanwhile, in the far North, the

dwarven burrow clans united as the

dwarven nation of Delzoun, named for

the dwarf who forged the union. The

dwarven nation, which existed primari-

ly underground, extended from the Ice

Mountains in the Utter North to the

Nether Mountains in the south. Silver

Moon Pass was its western border and

the Narrow Sea its eastern.

To the east, on sandy shores of the

calm and shining Narrow Sea, human

fishing villages grew into small towns,

then joined together as the nation of

Netheril. Sages believe that the fishing

towns were unified by a powerful

human wizard who may have discov-

ered a book of great magic power that

had survived from the Days of

Thundera book that legend calls the

Nether Scrolls. Under this nameless

wizard and those that followed,

Netheril rose in power and glory,

becoming both the first human land in

the North and the most powerful. Some

say that this discovery marked the birth

of human wizardry, since before then,

mankind had only shamans and witch

doctors. For over 3,000 years Netheril

dominated the North, but even its leg-

endary wizards were unable to stop

their final doom.

Doom came as desert, devouring the

Narrow Sea and spreading to fill its

banks with dry dust and blowing sand.

Legend states that when the great wiz-

ards of Netheril realized their land was

lost, they abandoned it and their coun-

trymen en masse, fleeing to all corners

of the world and taking the secrets of

wizardry with them. More likely, this

was a slow migration that began some

3,000 years ago and reached its conclu-

sion some 1,500 years later.

Whatever the truth, the wizards no

longer dwelt in Netheril and to the

north, once-majestic dwarven Delzoun

had fallen upon hard days. Then the

orcs struck. Orcs had always been foes

in the North, surging out of their holes

every few tens of generations when

their normal haunts could no longer

support their burgeoning numbers.

This time they charged out of their

caverns in the Spine of the World,

poured out of abandoned mines in the

Graypeaks, screamed out of lost

dwarfholds in the Ice Mountains, raged

forth from crypt complexes in the Neth-

er Mountains and stormed upward

from the bowels of the High Moon

Mountains. Never before or since had

there been such an outpouring of orc-

ish power.

Before this onslaught Delzoun crum-

bled and was driven in on itself.

Netheril, without its wizards, was

wiped from the face of history. The

elves of Eaerlann alone withstood the

onslaught and, with the aid of the

treants of Turlang and other unnamed

allies, were able to stave off the final

days of their land for yet a few centu-

ries more.

In the far west, men also dwelled

wise, clever primitives called the Ice

Hunters. They lived their simple lives

on the Sword Coast since time beyond

reckoning, countless generations

before Netherils first founders set foot

on the Narrow Seas western shore. Yet

this peaceful folk fell prey to another

invasion. From the south came crude

long ships to disgorge a tall, fair-haired,

warlike race which displaced the Ice

Hunters from their ancestral lands.

This race, now known as the

Northmen, spread their farms and vil-

lages along the Sword Coast from the

banks the Winding Water to the gorges

of the Mirar. Their fierce warriors

drove the simple Ice Hunters further

and further north, forced the

goblinkind back into their mountain

haunts and instigated the last Council of

Illefarn. Within 500 years of the

Northmens arrival, Illefarn was no

moreits residents had migrated to

Evermeet.

From the Sword Coast, Northmen

sailed westward, finding, claiming and

establishing colonies on the major west-

ern islands of Ruathym and Gundarlun,

eventually spreading to ail islands in the

northern sea. Others migrated north-

ward, past the Spine of the World and

became the truly savage barbarians of

Icewind Dale.

Where Luskan now stands, the

Northmen found the citadel of Illusk,

built by a refugee wizard from

Netheril. The Illusk wizards ruled for

centuries until the folk of Illuskan (as

the surrounding village was known)

were liberated by raiders led by

Uther Gardolfsson, a Ruathym Thane.

The angry Illuskani destroyed Gar-

dolfssons fleet and drove him inland

where he and his warriors would die

(theoretically) in the monster-infested

wilderness. Instead, they forged the

birth of a new people, the Uthgardt bar-

barians.

Meanwhile in the east, the elves of

Eaerlann built the fortress of Ascalhorn

and turned it over to refugees from

Netheril, as the Netherese followers of

Karsus built the town of Karse in the

High Forest. Other Netherese founded

Llorkh and Loudwater. Still more wan-

dered the mountains, hills, and moors

north and west of the High Forest.

These became the ancestors of the

Uthgardt barbarians and the founders

of Silverymoon, Everlund and Sunda-

bar.

In the centuries that followed,

Ascalhorn became Hellgate Keep when

it fell into the hands of demons, and

Eaerlann collapsed under the attack of

a new orc horde. The elves fled south-

east, joining with Northmen, Netherese

descendants, and dwarves to form

what would later be known as the

Fallen Kingdom. This realm was short-

lived and collapsed under the next orc-

ish invasionthough in dying, it dealt

the goblin races a blow from which

they have yet to recover.

Yet along the coast, in what was once

elven Illefarn, humanity was once again

rising in power. Merchants from the

south, tribesmen from the North, and

seafarers from western islands had cre-

ated a village around a trading post on a

deepwater harbor, first known as

Nimoars Hold after the Uthgardt chief-

tain whose tribe seized and fortified the

ramshackle village. Nimoar and his suc-

cessors, known as War Lords, led the

men of Waterdeep (as it had become

known to the ship captains who called

there) in a slowly losing battle against

the trolls. In a final, climactic battle, the

trolls breached the aging palisade and

all seemed lostuntil the magic of a

Northern youth, Ahghairon of Silvery-

moon, turned luck against the trolls and

the everlasting ones were destroyed

or scattered.

Ahghairon, heir to the magical heri-

tage and learning of Netheril, stayed in

Waterdeep and in his 112th year he

again saved the city... from itself. In so

doing, he created the Lords of Water-

deep, the government that rules there

today. The city has since grown into the

largest in North, possibly in all Faerun.

With Waterdeep as a firm anchor, civi-

lization again forged cautiously into

the wilderness. Illuskan (now just

Luskan) was retaken from the orcs.

Loudwater, Llorkh, Longsaddle, Tri-

boar, Secomber and other towns were

resettled by pioneers from Waterdeep,

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