Crag Island

North of the Fungest is the **Crag Island**. An aptly named island, full of deep, cavernous valleys, steep cliffs and underground rivers. Toxic pools that release deadly fumes form in the bottom of the valleys, making the majority of this alien island inhospitable.

A species of simians makes its home in the Crag, something between a baboon and a macaque. They mostly walk on four, although when fighting with swords and other weapons that they scavenge they can stand on two legs and fight. They are extremely territorial and attack anyone who gets close to their homes, which are built close to caves and trees near the poison pools at the bottom of the valleys.

These apes worship a serpent-like god. A journal from a strabded Gvilder trading cog details that there's a giant ape amongst the other monkeys, many times their normal size. It wields the log of a large tree as a weapon and it has a mark of a serpent carved on its back and chest.

## History

Very little is known of this island. Its rocky terrain, little vegetation, pools of toxic fumes and volcanic clouds surrounding the island have made it an unattractive location for any sailors throughout history. Even the people of the Orange Marquisates have cared little of exploring it. In fact, the very first accurated description of the Crag came by a washed up journal of a cog from Gvilderstaaten, almost a century ago. That account claimed that aggressive monkeys and even larger apes roamed the island, some even wielding swords they scavenged from human warriors. Although we can now confirm that these claims are correct, it is not known to anyone where could these simians originate from. Some claim that they must be local to the island, while others think they must have escaped from a vessel of the far South that was shipwrecked on the island, since no specimens like these can be found in northern Giantstep or Smallstep.

### Noel the Lemming's Voyage

Later on, a merchant known as "Noel the Lemming" landed on the Crag's shores, looking to capture one of the monkeys in order to sell it to foreign circus troupes. According to Noel's book, *The Fool's Errand*, their mission was a failure, but his accounts unveil some very interesting details. The island's vegetation is very scarce, although the few trees and bushes that cover it seemed to be endemic to the island and all had red tinted leaves. Combined with the volcanic terrain and the heavy, toxic atmosphere, the Crag's landscape seemed very unique. The monkeys had builttheir homes using a material that looked (and smelled) like hardened feces. Not only that, some monkeys proved to be extremely skilled fencers and were as if they had trained with swords for all their lives.

Three of Noel's mercenaries claim to have slain the monkeys' supposed leader - a white ape, tall as four men- after unloading more than ten crossbow bolts on its stomach, but -extraodinarily enough- state that upon slaying the beast it was able to resurrect itself with little trouble, chasing them off with its ghastly screams.

Even more preposterous was Noel's account. According to him, the group could periodically feel tremors beneath the ground. These tremors were nothing like any earthquake he had experienced before. Alongside them he would hear something along the lines of a snake's slither, especially when near one of the many cave entrances scattered around the island. Additionally, upon examining some marks in one of the caves, Noel hypothesized that the serpent god worshipped by the monkeys was in fact an actual, physical snake of gargantuan proportions. He and his companions did not stay in the Crag long enough to test this theory.

Other reports and rumours surrounding the Crag have also surfaced in the last decades, killing most people's desires and hopes to explore the island's premises in order to discover new alchemical ingredients or colonize it. Thankfully for the people of the Orange Marquisates, the only route that would take any sailors near this forsaken rock is the one that leads to Zyla Gora and the Platanus Bog, places where one would need many reasons in order to visit in the first place.