Grimdark Fantasy Adventure

My first published module just dropped!

The City of Ashenford was once a bright jewel in the Western Kingdom, sitting astride the gleaming river Quicksilver as a major source of economic wealth and trade.

Now, it is a shadow of its former self. Undead incursions from the west bank broke themselves against the city for 18 months, and when they finally came through, the plague came with them.

Burning bodies piled the streets while eldritch horrors not born of this world fed on the corpses that remained.

Those who survived huddled into what was left of Ashenford - ruins of manor houses and guild halls stand with blackened timbers clawing the sky like skeletal fingers.

The various orders of knighthoods and the city watch did what they could, but they died in droves too, and when at least some of the blood and smoke had settled, the real monster as always, was man.

Factions struggle against one another for control of what’s left. Knights under oaths of chivalry rape and loot on the roads in and out of the city as refugees attempt to flee to anywhere else…

The Quicksilver runs black with corruption.

Your Commander, Lucien DeMarais, and a handful of others are all that’s left of the Company of the Fading Star.

Once a great and storied order of knights, now tattered remnants broken by nearly two years of war with the living dead and much worse - pushed back by opponents both undead and human to the wreckage of Fort Verloren, at the crossroads just south of the city.

Last night, the Commander claims his dead wife appeared to him in a dream and gave him the answer to avert the end of the world.

You and the rest suspect he’s gone mad, but so has the rest of the world.

The news from the capital, Schleswig, is that the road between here and there is riven with a great chasm that split open overnight around the start of the troubles, and that noxious vapor and black smoke pours forth from it in the day, and at night - winged creatures rise toward the moon with swords as keen as loss.

Whatever the truth is, no one is coming to save Ashenford.

The Commander says the few of you have to get to Eastbridge, braving the city itself, then make it into the mountains where he claims an ancient order cloistered away in some rotting monastery holds the key to ending all this filth and death.

He says we must find a monk named Demetri - he does not know what to do once we find him, he only says we will know.

You wish that you could believe it was something so simple - but if you die trying, there’s a few new hopefuls filtering into the Fort every week, desperate for a heel of bread and clean water.

The chaplain blesses you all as you prepare to head out, and says in his mournful tone that this will be the last quest of the Company of the Fading Star. 

The above is the opening text from my new (and very first!) published adventure, “Company of the Fading Star.”

It is written for the Mörk Borg system but is easily adjusted for any fantasy TTRPG.

Clocking in at over 100 pages (I think that’s about the same as the entire core rulebook!) of lavish full color spreads, “Company…” is an ode to books like The Black Company, Abercrombie’s “Heroes,” and other other ultra dark fantasy/military stories.

The adventure includes overland travel, urban survival, weird wilderness (think In the Mouth of Madness) and a final dungeon crawl that claimed more than a few PCs at my own table.

Pick your copy up now:

https://castlegrief.itch.io/company-of-the-fading-star