Skull Fortress

Skull Fortress was a fortified stronghold on Pirates' Skyhold built and utilized by the crew of Bartholomew Blackdagger circa the 15 century DR.
==Description==
The expansive fortress-complex featured a stone keep built onto the side of a skull-shaped rocky crag. Wooden scaffolding was set up aside the keep walls, allowing access to the parapets. The fortress extended several floors beneath the surface of the earthmote to form a vast subterranean keep that was perfect for pirates that required safe-keeping for their ill-gotten treasures.
Beyond the keep itself was a simple wooden palisade with a pair of large doors that allowed entry along a set path. Tall wooden lookout towers granted the fort's pirates easy view of anyone that stood outside the palisade or those that were granted access within.
==Geography==
It was situated at the base of a peak situated east of the murky Vilebog wetland, south of the Pirate King's Retreat.
==Defenses==
The fort was granted additional protection by a network of ballistae that were positioned at the Market Square located to the north near Pirate King's Retreat.
==History==
Skull Fortress was constructed in the early to mid–15 century during the peak of the Blackdagger pirates' success. When Blackdagger's avarice and drew the ire of the malevolent wyrm Garrundar the Vile, the black dragon assailed the pirates' strongholds, forcing Commander Hames and his crew to hole up in Skull Fortress with little food, a single source of clean drinking water, and to means to contact their captain. Within a tenday Hames had a mutiny on his hands, as the ship's quartermaster and several others made their way out to survive in the jungle outside. Within a month's time riots broke out among the group of beleaguered pirates as they ran out of food and faced starvation and what surely would be their collective deaths.
Their fate was far worse however. Those that had already died began to rise as undead monstrosities, an effect brought on by the vile curse places on every pirate on the island by Garrundar. The great black wyrm poisoned the water that fed into Skull Fortress, ensuring Hames and his men would die in short order and return as mindless servants cursed with guarding Skull Fortress for all time.
In the , scouts from Company Yargo ventured near Skull Fortress when their skyship, the Buccaneer's Tear, touched down on Pirates' Skyhold. The company mercenaries enlisted the aid of the Hero of Sleeping Dragon Bridge to journey into the keep looking for riches, rather inadvertently learning the secrets of Blackdagger's pirates. The adventurer laid to rest the undead form of Commander Hames and the pirate spirits that remained by his side.
==Inhabitants==
Following the decimation of the pirates and their transformation into undead, most of Skull Fortress became overrun by lizardfolk that came under the dominion of Garrundar.
==Appendix==
===Appearances===
:;Video Games
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===Gallery===
Image:Skull_Fortress_Aerial.jpg|View of Skull Fortress from a nearby scrying stone, from Neverwinter.
===References===
Category:Fortresses
Category:Keeps
Category:Locations in Pirates' Skyhold
Category:Lizardfolk locations