Vorrenmere
The World of Whose Crit
Places of Interest
• The Amberlands: A farming region in the shadow of several mountain ranges that is known for its incredibly fertile soil and friendly populace.
• Cradwick: A small town near Marrow Manor, in the far northwest. Unremarkable, forgettable on a map, the kind of place that has spent generations developing a communal habit of not mentioning what's up the hill. Local superstitions about the manor are numerous and never directly acknowledged.
• Dunholt: A small town on the edge of the Amberlands, rumored to have frequent Unsainted activity. Hidden, unglamorous, the kind of place that slips between the cracks of Acolyte authority.
• Herestad: A large city on the far northeastern edge of the continent, fully under Acolyte governance. Home to Cardinals, a significant Knights Pristine presence, and the full weight of Holy Order administrative and religious authority.
• The Hollow: The ruins of an ancient and once magnificent city that lie in the geographic center of the continent, not far from Sanctenholm. The Acolytes have forbidden passage there, and there are rumors of dark and vile things that stalk its crumbled roads.
• The Kessler Pass: A frontier corridor between the Amberlands and Sanctenholm. A mountain pass where Acolyte authority thins and official oversight becomes unreliable. The Pass's treacherous geography and politically charged location make brigand raids commonplace and leaves events here difficult to verify or report. Things happen in the Kessler Pass that nobody officially records.
• Marrow Manor: The site of the party’s recent adventure. A haunted estate near Cradwick where the group encountered a strange mystery. A father's grief ritual resulted in his daughter's death, and the loss of his other daughter’s memories. The party enacted a ritual here to restore the now grown woman’s memories of her sister, at which point she, the spirit of her deceased sister, and their long suffering butler traveled through a strange black portal into a place beyond this world.
• Sanctenholm: The capital of the Acolytes of the Pristine Saint, lying at the center of the continent itself. The central bastion of Holy Order power. The Most High Acolyte's spire rises from its center. Home to the Knights Pristine headquarters and the highest concentrations of Acolyte authority in the world.
Vorrenmere: The Sainted Reach
Vorrenmere, or the Sainted Reach, as the Acolytes of the Pristine Saint prefer to call it, is a land of roads and markets, towns and wilderness, farmers and scholars, criminals and clergy. Humans, dwarves, elves, gnomes, and goliaths make their lives here alongside one another, navigating the breadth of a civilization with a long history and no shortage of opinions about itself.
It is a world shaped by faith, politics, and the tension between them. The Acolytes of the Pristine Saint have governed most of the civilized world for generations, and life under their authority is the only life most people here have ever known. Trade flourishes along the main roads. Villages manage their own affairs quietly. Cities hum with commerce and ceremony. The Acolytes are present in all of it, sometimes as comfort, sometimes as weight.
Beyond the reach of the Acolytes’ direct authority, in frontier towns and the spaces between, things are looser. Other kinds of people find ways to live. Other ideas about how the world should be organized take root and occasionally grow into something more. Vorrenmere is large enough that it contains multitudes, and old enough that not everyone agrees on what its history actually means.