Wrencrest

**Wrencrest** is a small city on the Iron Plaines. It straddles the Lithewater as it runs through the heart of the region, just north of Castle Barrmount. It is only settlement on the Iron Plaines large enough to qualify as a city, and one of only a handful in all the Witherlands.

Wrencrest and its extensive environs are governed by House Wrencrest, who rule from their Grand Hall in the Crest, the city's citadel and patrician's district. Wrencrest is a nexus of trade and communication due to its central position in the Iron Plains, and its access to the Lithewater—wide, deep, and with only a slight meander—allows it to trade extensively with other kingdoms. As a result, Wrencrest has greater and broader contact with the Middle Kingdoms and the South than anywhere else in the Witherlands, rivaled only by Wingsway, and there are more followers of the Southern Pantheon in Wrencrest than anywhere else in the North.

A few miles upriver of the city is Castle Kneethorp, ruled by a cadet branch of House Wrencrest. The Horseroad runs north to the village outside Castle Barrmount, a journey that takes a day and a half on horseback, two days on foot, and four days marchin with an army.

People from Wrencrest are known as 'Wrencresters'.

## History

Wrencrest began as a minor town, one of many along the course of the Lithewater. After its destruction by invading Northwinders, it was rebuilt as a timber fort by the rising King Almys the Purblind, who controlled a great swath of the southern Iron Plains. Almys bequeathed the fort, which he considered his least valuable possession, to his youngest son Hulward.

In the succession crisis following Edmund's death, however, Hulward joined forces with his brother Dunfer to the rest of their brothers. They divided their father's land into two, but were forced to bend the knee to a Northwinder warlord, Tancrede de Graines, who took advantage of the chaos to conquer King Almys' territory. Hulward and Dunfer split the land in half, Hulward becoming the Prince of Wrencrest and Dunfer becoming the Prince of Blackhollow, their father's stronghold, both as vassals to King Almys.

### Principality

As Wrencrest developed into a prominent trading town under Prince Hulward's rule, he began to pay more lavish tributes to Tancrede. In turn, Tancrede made concessions to Prince Hulward, advancing the prince's power over other Witherlander lords conquered by the Northwinders. The prince even converted his people to a mixed faith of worshipping both the frozen gods and the Atmor Pantheon, and built an Atmoric monastery, the Priory of Kneethorp.

At first, Tancrede attempted to limit Wrencrests power so that Hulward would not consider rebelling against him. However, seeing Wingsway to the west become a growing threat to his northern territory, Tancrede strengthened Wrencrest so that it would balance out its distant neighbour, reducing taxes, supplying surplus grain, and sending architects and labourers to help him increase the fortification of the area. Hulward, practically acting as Tancrede's steward by this point, claimed much of the responsibility for these improvements, increasing his support.

Tancrede became wholly confident of Hulward's loyalty when the latter helped to besiege his own brother at Darkhollow, who had been growing defiant against their oppressor. Hulward personally put his brother's keep to the torch, took his wife for his own and his children as wards, and banished Dunfer to the distant islands off the eastern coast.

His betrayal of his brother earned Hulward the ire of many other lords in the region, and he knew he needed to act fast to maintain his position. Eventually, he thought of a plan to appease the lords with plunder, and to get rid of Tancrede altogether. He convinced the warlord to finally march against Wingsway, and Hulward promised he would gather soldiers from all the Witherlander lords in Tancrede's domain to fight with him. The great army set off through the Iron Plaines and set about pillaging Reaper's Skull towns near the border.

As the army was traversing a mountain pass on the march to Wingsway, however, the Witherlanders turned on Tancrede's men. To overcome a disadvantage of numbers, Hulward had secretly hired a group of Azaryan witches, who helped to almost completely annihilate the Northwinder force, as well as a large amount of the other Witherlander men, with the end of having fewer men to divide up the spoils. Hulward deceived his allies into thinking that the witches had been sent by Wingsway. Sharing in their grief, they looted the fallen Northwinders and returned to Wrencrest.

Two months later, Hulward bribed one of Tancrede's few surviving men into riding back to Tancrede's fortress in Northwind, and telling them that the city had been taken, but that more men were needed to secure it. Hulward offered to help defend the fortress while Tancrede's reinforcements were gone, to which the Northwinders agreed. Once inside the city with his witches, Hulward had a fire set, and he and his men plundered and absconded with a great chunk of the dead warlord's wealth in the flaming chaos. Hulward later defeated Tancrede's vengeful sons at the Battle of the Lithewater, finally breaking his clan's power and liberating the southern Iron Plaines from Northwinder subjugation.

When the Witherlander lords discovered Hulward's earlier treachery, they murdered him and burned his witches (some may have escaped, and are said to skulk in hidden caves and dark forests, or even in the recesses of the modern city, to this day). His family were banished to the east isles, where Hulward's elder son Wrollyn managed to make amends with his uncle Dunfer. The two returned, and Dunfer convinced the Witherlanders to forgive the Flighty Prince's heirs. Wrollyn reclaimed his father's princeship, and Dunfer rebuilt his ruined fortress at Darkhollow. Wrollyn came to be known as Wrollyn the Witchling, as he was the first to bear the pale colours signature to House Wrencrest, and is believed to have been born of an affair that Hulward had had with one of his Azaryan witches.

### Wraynard the Wraith

The reign of Prince Wraynard II was a period of unparalleled turmoil for the Iron Plains. Also known as the Sorcerer-Prince of Wrencrest or the Wrathful Wren, he was a tyrant reviled and feared by all, who used his magical powers to terrorize Wrencrest and its surrounding lands. He earned the name 'the Wraith' for his ability to levitate and walk through solid walls, which he would use to step right into the homes of his enemies and slay them with his rays of frost.

## Cityscape

   Wrencrest represents a melding between the technical limitations of building a city in the North, and the grand aspirations of its Wrencrest lords to build a city that emulates the splendours of the South, such as the likes of Sol and Erillia.

During the night, foxes often roam the streets looking for mice and food scraps.

### Layout

The city began as a simple wooden fort, with its keep on top of Gunter's Hill and a bailey below, surrounded by a pallisade. The pallisade has vanished as the city has grown far beyond those perimetres, eating deep into the pine forest on one side, and spilling onto the opposite bank on the other. What was once the keep on that tall, broad hill has now become the Crest, where the Wrencrests and other aristocrats dwell in elaborate homes behind the old stone wall.

Stone steps lead down from the Crest to the rest of the inner city. Most buildings here are made of wood, though many are being replaced with stone to reduce the risk of fires. The inner city is colourful and well-maintained, showing Lord Bennard's desire for a place imitative of the great cities of the South. The stone ramparts of the inner city divide it from the poorer, less-developed sprawl beyond, itself divided by successive rows of wooden pallisades, with buildings walled with wattle and rather than stone or panels of wood. This is the grand swath of this city, ever growing as the town's wealth brings a growing population and the felling of more surrounding pine trees.

### Architecture

   The inner city is mostly made up of timber structures, maintained to a very high aesthetic standard and painted colourfully. Outside the ramparts, in the outer city, the quality and splendour of the architecture deteriorates considerably, with most buildings being made of wooden frames with wattle-and-daub walls and thatched roofs. The outer cityexpands far beyond the inner city's walls, with well-organized streets and successive wooden pallisades.

### Points of interest

#### College of Wrencrest

The Bardic College of Wrencrest, or simply the College of Wrencrest, is a school for bardic knights perched on a rocky outcropping just below the walls of the Crest. The college is large enough to accomodate about fifty pupils.

Commissioned by Lord Bennard near the start of his reign, the college emphasises the novice's accumulation of as much verse as possible, at the expense of spiritual and martial education, making it more like the colleges of the Southern Kingdoms than the more austere monasteries found elsewhere in the North.

Another unique and controversial feature of the college is its intensive, ongoing process of recording the bardic knights' poetry in manuscript, and in multiple translations; whereas it is typical for bardic knights to learn some of their songs in Commontongue as well as Oldtongue (or Northtongue, depending on whethere they're from), the College of Wrencrest is constantly translating the verses into Soltongue and Petaltongue for the study and enjoyment of foreigners.

Both the commitment of a historically oral tradition to written word, and the translation of a deeply Northern tradition into the languages of the South, has caused some uproar among some convervative bardic knights.

#### Grand Hall

The Grand Hall of Wrencrest is the stately home of House Wrencrest. Described as a sort of 'illustrious longhouse' by foreign visitors, it is a wooden structure four stories in height, with each floor voided in the middle to create a great cavernous heart, through which one can lean over a railing and see all floors above and below. Beautiful painted murals decorate the house, many of them Lord Bennard's own handiwork.

#### Nest-o'-Rubies

The Nest-o'-Rubies is said to be the finest inn in the kingdom. Built on the Crest and developed to me more and more luxurious with successive lords, it has been used for generations by the city's rulers to accomodate vising nobles and other distinguished guests. The inn is crowned by three tall towers with round tops of shining bronze, the tallest of which is accessible from the third floor of the Grand Hall by a covered bridge, and is exclusively reserved for the Lord of Wrencrest and those he allows inside. The well-furnished observation room at the top of the Bronze Eyrie is where the Lord of Wrencrest bring their guests for more discreet conversations.

#### Priory of the Bronze Hand

The Priory of the Bronze Hand was built in 249 BCE by Prince Hulward the Flighty, after he and his people partially converted to the Atmor Pantheon under their Northwinder conqueror, Tancrede de Graines. Even after Tancrede was slain and the Northwinders ousted, the faith in the Atmoran gods remained strong in Wrencrest, and the monastery still stands to this day.

The priory is a somewhat small, sombre building, located in the portion of the city across the Lithewater. The monks therein identify themselves as the Order of the Bronze Hand, named after the old Witherlander hero Haldric Bronze-Hand, who they venerate as their patron. Prior Leowyn is the order's current leader.

## Economy

Wrencrest's primary exports are fur, leather, gold, tin, and pinewood, which they trade mostly for luxury goods such as luxurious furniture, artworks, jewellery, and precious gems.

## Culture

The city's religious majority worship both the Frozen Gods and the Atmor Pantheon, a curious amalgamation left over from their subjugation by the Northwinder warlord Tancrede de Graines. Through Atmoranist eyes, Haldric of the Bronze Hand is regarded as the patron hero of the city.

Wrencrester nobility are known to layer themselves in thick layers of silk and wool, colourful but not vibrant. Rounded fur hats with feather crests are fashionable among men, and women often wear ruffs.

Wrencrest if famous for its 'steam baths', a centuries-old tradition in the land. Small, sealed chambers are filled with steam from fires fueled by locally abundant pinewood, allowing occupants to bathe by sweating their skin clean. The steam baths are wildly popular with visitors from the south, who yearn for some familiar warmth in the otherwise chilly kingdom.

Both inside the city and in the countryside beyond, mushrooms are a staple food, with a variety of fungi growing throughout House Wrencrest's woodlands. A knowledge of mushrooms—which ones are edible, which ones are poisonous, what medicinal or magical properties each kind can offer—is a greatly valued ability. Mushroom hunting, as well as berry picking, is a common and often meditational pastime. Besides mushrooms, the people of the Wrencrest city and land eat a great deal of vegetables, especially turnips, and black bread of rye. Mead is the favoured beverage for those too poor to afford wine, and soup is typically filled with a heavy sour cream.

Every year, the Wrencresters holds their spring festival: a great poetry competition where bardic knights face off against each other in the recitation of heroic verse. New, original works are encouraged, particularly ones that poignantly describe or allude to recent events. The winners of the poetry recitals then engage in a joust, and finally a tourney, against non-bardic knights. The winner is crowned the King of Sword and Tongue.

Weapons may be carried openly inside the city walls.