@TheEdVerse Sir, Ed!! Cira 1300s, is there anything about Zelbross you can share we might not know from published lore? How much did you flesh it out in the home realms game and did the Knights stop by?
— stephen parlin (@smparlin) October 6, 2021
1)
The Company of the Crazed Venturers, not the later Knights, visited Zelbross, and there’s a faint 1978 pencil map and key somewhere in my Shipping Container 1 (the 80-footer). 2)
The hamlet sprawls along the west bank of Brossaddan’s Water (later called “the Hark Rill” and later still “the Harkril”), a tiny local stream that empties into the Delimibyr, which is where the superb-for-pottery clay banks… #Realmslore— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) October 8, 2021
3)
…are. “Sprawls” because there’s a cluster of homes, outhouses, and “half dug into hills” storage barns (for winter food) nigh the river and then a wide arc of outlying farms around it, reached by a spiderweb of lanes (grassy… 4)
…tracks to minimize traffic-caused mud, with two thick lines of berrybushes planted along both sides so you don’t get lost trudging home in a winter whiteout blizzard and freeze to death, to provide a little wind cover, and to…#Realmslore— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) October 8, 2021
5)
…provide berries and a supply of edible critters that come to forage on the berries). It had an inn on the Shining Trail (the Last Place) and a tavern, The Sly Fox, and a secret Harper safe haven: the farm of the recluse… 6)
…Harthress “Hard Axe” Shaenra, a scarred, fat old retired adventuress with long, wild white hair, a deep, white, puckered sword-scar running straight down a viewer’s left side of her face, and a gravel voice mainly used to…#Realmslore— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) October 8, 2021
7)
…spew long and complicated oaths (“By the untasted teats of the stillborn sow!” and the like). She was, of course, a Harper, and wore bracers (normally hidden under the tattered sleeves of her filthy old weathercoats) that… 8)
…could catapult multiple sleep-poisoned darts. Though she did most of her fighting with axe and blade.
The countryside north of Zelbross, up to the forest, was very rich in game (deer and foxes and “gurra” [the local name for groundhogs] in particular, and…#Realmslore— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) October 8, 2021
9)
…several Zelbrossans maintained extensive and successful trap-lines by which they fed their families and neighbours, and gained lots of pelts to cure and make into winter clothing.
There’s not a lot more that I can recall off the top of my head… 10)
…and drawing on the campaign notes here in my office, but near Zelbross, in the wilds northeast of the hamlet, is the “bottle-tomb” of an ancient wizard (a hole in the ground lined with stones that’s the rough shape of a…#Realmslore— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) October 8, 2021
11)
…bottle, that a dead person is ‘buried’ in standing up) that at one time—and may still—have a scepter, some rings, and a spellbook in it; the Venturers found it, but didn’t plunder it.#Realmslore— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) October 8, 2021