Brackenwake
Chapter 01 · Meadows and rivers
Wheat to the horizon, a slow river, and a village that has never lost anything. Home.
A sense of place
Rolling farmland in the western lee of the Caldera Sea: hedged fields, orchards, beech hangars on the low hills, one slow river with a mill on it running east into the sea. The safest ground in the world and the greenest.
On the horizon
The Standing Hedge: a ring of boundary stones older than the village, each the height of a man, half a mile across, with the fields inside it. From the hills it reads as a ring drawn on the land.
The paths within
Settlement
A village on a green with a stone bridge, a church, an inn and a smith, all inside the ring of stones.
Bram Haywood, Old Wynn Ashby, Pip, the Bracken Arms, the smith, the healer, the market; the Legion reaches here
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Landmark
The river, the water mill, and the wheat either side of it, running east to the sea.
Ivy Weir's mill, eel weirs, geese on the road, the Tithe Wagon crossing
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Dungeon
Eight descending depths beneath the mill: flooded ossuaries, tombs and a buried cathedral.
The Legion's advance party: bandits and goblins; Sergeant Oram Blackhand guards the first depth with the stolen sack. Undead and giant wardens haunt the deeper vaults
8 dungeon levels · Boss: Sergeant Oram Blackhand
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Wild country
Old beech on the ridge above the village, deep leaf litter, badger setts.
Old Grist the boar, foraging, the first wolves after dark
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Road
The Legion's paved road entering the Greenwold from the north east, milestones every mile.
Legion patrols, the Tithe Wagon, Captain Serle Vane's first camp
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Mine
A white scar in a green hill, copper and tin in the chalk, a yard trodden flat.
Copper and tin seams, a foreman who sells pickaxes, rats in the old cuts
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Great landmark
The ring of boundary stones half a mile across; nine of them hum at dusk, each twinned with a stone in another realm.
Fast travel between stones you have touched; the Legion cannot use them
Touch a stone and it is yours; from then on any waystone carries you to any other you own, once a day per stone. The Legion has tried for a century and been refused.
Camp
A bandit camp in a chalk hollow off the Kingsroad, fires under an overhang.
The Miller's Son and his six, a stolen tithe, a bounty board in Hearthhome for each of them by name
The camp moves to one of three hollows after every raid; tracks on the Kingsroad the morning after say which. Talk your way past with the mill's name, or fight.
Ruin
A chapel the river took, its roof a foot under the water, the bell still on the beam.
Swim in through the west door; a drowned congregation that wakes if the bell is rung; the first Skeleton Sexton
Ring the bell under water and the dead sit up for one minute and give up what they were buried with; ring it twice and they do not sit back down.
Out on the road
From the world plans. Encounters and events may change during development.
Lives woven through the land
The characters, secrets and dragon’s journey through the Greenwold.
Wheat to the horizon, a river with a mill on it, a village with a green and a stone bridge. A farmhand asleep against a haystack. An egg the size of a loaf in the straw beside them, cracking. The camera goes into the crack.
Home. Hedges, orchards, geese on the road, church bells. The safest place in the game and the one every act comes back to.
The egg hatches on your arm, and the village has a problem in an hour: the Wyrmking's men, the Ashen Legion, have been searching every farm on the continent for it and they are two days away. Act I is the Greenwold learning to hide a dragon, and you learning to be hidden. You meet the Legion's scouts, your first Bond fills in a barn fight, and the village's oldest resident tells you the one thing that sets the whole journey: the riders' Eyrie in the Stormpeaks is not a legend, and it is where a Dragonsworn goes to learn what they are.
The Old Cellars under the mill, where the Legion's advance party has holed up: bandits, goblins in the Legion's pay, and Sergeant Oram Blackhand, a Bandit promoted, who has the egg's shell fragments in a sack and means to bring them to Malachar. Beating him is the first fight Bond fills in, and Wyrmsoul's first call is here, by the game's design, in a cellar too low to fly in.
Old Grist, a boar the size of a pony in the beech hangar. The Tithe Wagon, an event: the Legion's tax wagon crosses the Greenwold every third day with a Goblin Warrior escort and can be robbed. The Fox That Is Not, a Wolf that has learned to walk like a fox at dusk and takes geese.
Eats eggs and mice. Hatchling. Takes back nothing yet; the Greenwold gives Wyrmsoul its base.
