There is silence beneath the boughs, and it is breaking.
Danakka Rimortis, the necromantic scion of the Onyx Aristocracy, has launched a full-scale invasion across the Eisen River into eastern Resinderholz. This is a major assault involving over ten thousand undead, including alchemical horrors, plague-ridden revenants, and twisted forest creatures. Fighting is already underway near Eisen, the Thunder Oak Orchard, and Rickon’s Tier. Reports suggest Danakka is using magical forest paths to flank Concordian positions, and signs of Blasserstreit plague have begun appearing across the region. The Fae of the Sableheart, once potential allies, remain silent, unwilling to act after being rebuffed at the last Summit.
Eisen Must Burn
There is fire on the water, and it must be quenched.
Like a wound reopened, the lost Barony of Vassertal has spat forth its horrors upon the living. Danakka Rimortis, the Wraith of Port Gargant, The Monger of the Plague, has stirred at last. No skirmish, no plague-ridden probing of borders, no false flags; this is war. Real and terrible. Ten thousand strong surged from the shrouded forests and poisoned earth, a tide of alchemical monstrosities and ragbound revenants, their eyes glowing like forge-coals, their limbs twisted by dark chemistry and sorcery alike.
They did not creep over the border in the shadow of risen knights. They did not stalk by night. They have come by day, and in four great columns they have crossed the Eisen River, setting the east of Resinderholz ablaze in blood and fire.
In the north, the borderlands long thought safe were suddenly not. What outposts there are have vanished in the fog. Homesteads were found torn open, their hearths cold, their walls painted with ruin. There were no trails, no tracks, only black ichor on ironwood thorns. The attacks came from directions no scout had seen, striking from impossible paths, as though the forest itself betrayed the living.
At Eisen, proud jewel of the east and home to the College of War, the horns sounded before dawn. Dozens of townships rallied their militias, Ritter students took up arms in place of ink and quill, and antique weapons were pulled from classroom cases to man the defences. Blood will run thick in the gutters of Eisen, where the greatest vanguard of Danakka’s force will lurch where other undead have failed.
South of Eisen, where the orchards of Thunder Oak lay heavy with sap and legacy, the soil boiled red beneath the boots of the dead. Ghouls garbed in bark and bone, powered by strange alchemical humors, clawed their way from riverbanks and root-hollows. The orchard's stewards lit signal fires and held fast with axe and scythe. Victor Fiorenza’s contract may not last the year, but his people fight for every day of it.
And in the far south, at the mouth of the Eisen where it kisses Lake Ladure, Rickon’s Tier is under siege. Alchemical undead now crawl through the reeds and among the ferns that pulse with mana, seeking to foul the very lifeblood of the Concord. The garrison there, such as it is, reports ghouls in the trees, corpses in the river, and strange shadows in the mists. They scream for help. Please.
This is no raid. No border incursion. It is the full wrath of the Wraith, hurled across the river like a stone through stained glass. Danakka Rimortis has waited, and in his waiting, festered. His alchemies are more twisted than before. His monsters carry within them the seeds of disease and vengeance. His purpose is terrible and clear: to break Resinderholz, to punish the Baronies, to remind The Concord what it costs to forget old foes.
This is not a battle that will be won in days. The Legion of the Blackheart Bear is still far afield. The Iron Brawlers of Weiland may come, but will they come in time? The Desert Whisperers are near, but are they needed elsewhere?
Until then, the people of Resinderholz stand alone.
Game Information
After seasons spent from the frontline, busying itself forging new forms of malady and darkness within the plague-infested countryside of Vassertal, Danakka Rimortis is attacking the Eastern Resinderholz territory of Sableheart with its colossal force. 10,000 strong, this army is of considerable danger.
While a dangerous circumstance on its own, this attack has been further complicated by unknown phenomena, outbreaks of Blasserstreit, and Danakka’s own improvements to its dangerous force. Danakka’s army has gained additional traits and The Concord may need to investigate opportunities to discover these traits if they wish to have a full perspective on this foul invader in this season, and seasons to come.
As a reminder, as a hostile force is within Sableheart, friendly forces cannot move THROUGH the territory, meaning any force entering the territory must do battle there this season.
The Shadowroot War
There are roads beneath the roots, and they do not answer to us.
The first warning came not from a watchtower, nor a warhorn, but from the mouths of dying scouts, coughing bark and black ichor. They spoke of hollowed trees vomiting forth ghouls. Of corpses that did not cross bridges or fords but grew through the bark, arms splitting trunks as if they had always been inside them.
This is the Shadowroot War, the true shape of Danakka’s assault, hidden beneath the battle lines and behind the hills. For while ten thousand march plainly upon Resinderholz, much of that force moves unseen. Risen that should not have passed the Eisen River have been found behind Concordian lines, tearing apart garrisons from the rear. None saw them pass. No paths exist on any map. And yet the enemy is there, flanking, surrounding, vanishing like ghosts at dawn.
Monsters crawl through those pathways, not mere ghouls or revenants, but stitched horrors. Alchemical hulks, grafted from deer, soldier, and sorcerer. A twisted parody of life and limb. Some wear the antlers of forest beasts, others howl with metal-tuned lungs, exhaling clouds of powdered bone that kill on contact. A militia in the Northern haven of Wildinvass has vanished, no survivors, only bloodied thickets, bark peeled like flayed skin.
In Eisen, some say the trees whisper at night. That the limbs creak in time with the screams of those captured. The roots coil. Sages at the College of War have been unable to explain the bursts of dizziness, confusion, and spontaneous bleeding among their cadets. Apothecaries blame disease. The Ritters blame the trees.
There are other reports too, that carry worse horrors. Hollowed folk, who walk like scouts and speak like lost friends, but have bark beneath their skin. One garrison in the South was overrun after welcoming a “refugee” who had staggered from the woodlands. He sat by their fire until nightfall. When they were found, all had been flensed, the corpses hung from tree branches like fruit.
The roads of Resinderholz are still open. The forest paths, those ancient tracks and hunter trails known only to locals, now bend toward death. The war on the Eisen may be fought with sword and flame. But here, in the glades and hollow ways, there is another war. A war of roots and rot, of blood and bark, of sorcery and spite.
Game Information
Strange magics assist Danakka’s forces this season, allowing a normally slow army to strike without warning and with additional effect.
Forces within Danakka’s army will have non-standard abilities when engaged this season. Heroes should be prepared for the unexpected based on what rumours have emerged from these lost havens.
There will be an opportunity for the Concordian heroes to engage the forces of Danakka during a strategic conflux, although there has been no sign of the Wraith of Port Gargant themselves on the battlefield.
In addition, the following characters investments have been damaged due to unforeseen raids by strange undead:
- Daphne ‘Rabbit Hunter’ Schultz
- Aelek
- Zayde
- Lyaune of Mackellain
- Skia Wulkure
The Help They Beg For
There is sickness in the blood, and it remembers
There is a hidden rot in this war. A thing that festers beneath the reports of assaults on the front, behind the advance of Ghoulish scouts, beyond the fears of a death unending.
Blasserstreit. The name is spoken in half-words and whispers, as if it were a curse that might root itself in the throat. First seen in Vassertal, the plague blooms again in Resinderholz. Not in sweeping pestilence, but in foul patches. A town burns its dead. A scout collapses, bleeding from the gums. A Ritter-cadet returns from the front with cloudy eyes and begging for help that will come on by a Doktors axe.
Some call it the laughing blood, or the crimson breath. And those who know the symptoms know what comes next: panic, isolation, and a mercy killing, if they’re lucky. At first it spread like fear. Now it spreads like fact across the outlying settlements, a vanguard for the vanguard.
The plague-ghouls are worse. These are not ordinary dead, nor even Danakka’s grotesque experiments. These are the lost dead, bodies that hid in root-caverns, corpses that twitched too long in cellar-dark. Reanimated not with magic, but through the sheer infectious will of the disease given force by alchemical animation. They stagger into the light on broken feet, hunting not with hatred, but with a pleading hunger. The kind that seeks out heat, blood, breath. They do not kill to conquer. They kill to multiply.
At the Thunder Oak Orchard, one worker tried to flee toward the Eisen with a nosebleed. His fellows drove him into the river with pikes and torches. On Rickon’s Tier, the stewards now quarantine with oil and kindling. “If I cough more than once,” one Houndspriest reportedly told his apprentice, “light the wick. Don’t wait for me to beg.”
Even the monsters carry it. Alchemical hulks that leak blood-mist with every breath. Risen corpses shamble not just with the taint of death, but with contagious fluids bubbling from burst veins. The war is not simply to win ground or repel invasion, it is to contain a weapon that has already begun to spread.
Danakka has made a science of its vengeance. This is no accident. The Wraith of Port Gargant has found in Blasserstreit a kind of truth, that rot does not need armies. That death spreads faster when you give it a voice, a scream, a familiar face. It does not need to hold Resinderholz. It only needs it to bleed. Then maybe it will become more than the sum of its undying birth.
Game Information
The largest outbreak of Blasserstreit since the founding of The Concord is spreading across Eastern Resinderholz, clearly seeded by Danakka’s forces ahead of their invasion. There is solace in the fact that the plague appears to be mundane, whatever manipulations forged by the wraith being unable to affect its base nature.
Tax income for all neighbouring territories to Sableheart, as well as Sableheart itself, are reduced due to these outbreaks.
Characters with investments in Sableheart may choose to be affected by the following roleplay prompt:
“This is the storm and we did not know if it would fall here, in our time. Do we have the strength to weather it? I do not know.”
The following investments are damaged due to Blasserstreit outbreaks in Sableheart, they may choose to be in recovery from Blasserstreit:
- Ratta Van Dorn
- Amelina Haur
- Leuther Maus
- Sabriel Waermund
- Wolfgang Klein
While few, there have been outbreaks outside of Sableheart as the reaping blade of plague swings wide. The following characters have had investments damaged due to Blasserstreit outbreaks near them. They may choose to be in recovery from Blasserstreit:
- Lord Orsa Dan Bremmer
- Alyce Baker
- Count Lindwyrm
- Yelena Helbrecht
- Katja Vasilevich
There will be decisions for the Baroness of Reinderholz, and the Champion of the Baronies regarding these outbreaks.
There will be decisions for the Senator of Weiland, and the Senator of Lerona Mere regarding these outbreaks.
The Fae Will Not Be Spared
There are watchers in the trees, and they do not weep.
While Eisen runs red, while ghouls split bark and bone alike, while Blasserstreit stirred in cellars dark; these watchers do nothing. No mists sweep in to hide the lost. No willow-courts arm themselves with blade or thorn. No fae knights march to meet the tide.
Those who know the old ways, who still leave offerings at standing stones and hang charms to forgotten creatures at their doors, understood. But this silence was a punishment.
The Fae Queen of the Sableheart offered her terms at the last summit, terms the Concord rejected. Her riddles were deemed too cruel, her price too steep, her allegiance too wild. And so she waits now, wrapped in thorn and moonlight, while the mortal world cracks like frozen wood. This is the bystander’s curse: to watch and not to burn, to listen and not to scream.
But silence is not safety. Damn the fae-witch and her fickle heart, her spindly hands.
The risen do not know to fear the Fair Folk. Danakka's monstrosities do not balk at courts of bark and velvet. When the woods burn and the ghouls march, the fae are caught in the fire all the same. And though they do not scream, they die.
There are signs. Wisps that no longer drift at dusk. Weald-circles found torn and trampled, as though some desperate battle took place in silence. One scout reported stumbling on a Boghoffen revel mid-slaughter, revelers crucified upside-down on thorn-latticed trees, their song still echoing with broken harmony. Another swears they heard laughter on the wind, not human, not kind, as a plague-ghoul ground its hands against a standing stone and choked on glittering dust.
The Concord might find no allies in the Sableheart now. But the Fae are not safe either. The dead mean to wage war against all the living, human or otherwise. For when the Fair Gods die their shallow graves will not remain shut.
Game Information
Fae Forces present in the Sableheart have become targets for both Concordian forces (following the general failure of diplomacy regarding the Fae Queen earlier in the year) and Danakka’s forces (who appear to take special delight in destroying these creatures.)
In some ways this is a boon, stopping the widespread rallying of the Fae Queen’s troops as was threatened earlier in the year. But it does do much to destabilise the territory even further.
Sableheart’s ‘Faebothered’ trait has been replaced with ‘Faebloodied’ as below
| Trait | +Cas. Inf. | +Cas. Suff. | Special |
| Faebloodied | -10% | +20% | None |
There will be decisions regarding the Fae of the Sableheart for certain characters, the Chapter Kaptain of Krezenberg Abbey, and the Sage Superior of the Broken Veil.
And when the roots drink deep of ash,
And when the horn is cracked and dumb,
The dead will sow what we have reaped,
And darker harvests yet will come.