- Frozen Certainty
- Warm Smiles, Cold Hands
- Eternal Life Guaranteed
Frostborne
Alignment: Neutral Evil
They are neither loud nor cruel on the surface. They are tidy, patient and endlessly well informed about what the powerful are hiding from you. The Army of Light burns the villages, the nobles bleed the Unblooded, and the Frostborne alone, they say, are telling the truth. It is an excellent pitch, and it has emptied more than one hamlet near Timony Keep.
Those who have crossed their path know the rest: the preserved sit in rows, eyes open, and nobody has yet reported back from the other side of the thaw. Neutral and evil in equal measure, the Frostborne are not hunting your coin. They are hunting your yes.
The player reaches the village as the first snows bury the road. The cold-priests are polite, patient and very persuasive; their rune-lit spheres keep a room warm without fire, and they speak of the frozen faithful as if visiting old friends. The warden's men want the priests driven out. The hungry families want to listen. One elder has already packed. Both sides ask the player to carry messages, keep watch and find out what really waits in the caverns, and the cult would very much like the player to come and see for themselves.
- An Early Winter
- An Offer From the Cold
- Nobody Came Back From the Thaw
- Frozen Faithful
- Hostile Zealots
- Glowing Runes
The Cultists Caverns open in the flank of the Shiverclaw Mountains like a mouth that has learned to smile politely. Icicles as long as longboats hang from the lip, and beyond them the cold deepens from bitter to reverent. Violet spirals of rune magic glow in the walls, pulsing slowly, like something breathing in its sleep. Candle stubs and iron braziers ring the entrance, and the smell is tallow smoke, wet stone and the clean, waiting nothing of old ice. Overhead the green lights drift across the stars, and they look a good deal friendlier than the welcome below.
This is a home of the Frostborne, who preserve the living in ice. Their faithful are not buried but kept: set into the frozen deep with rune and prayer, sleeping through the years in a stillness that the cult calls patience and everyone else calls a very cold bed. Robed figures tend the altar at the tunnel's heart, murmuring over their charges, and they do not welcome visitors. They have the territorial temper of all zealots, which is to say that a lost traveler is a trespasser first and a person a distant second. Cairn water is not poured here, and the hospitality ends at the icicles.
Why walk into it at all? Because the caverns hold sleepers whom someone, somewhere, would pay dearly to find, and because the runes are older than the cult's manners. Rumor says the deeper tunnels run far longer than the mountain should allow. A wise adventurer brings warm boots, a bold excuse and a good reason to be remembered fondly. Anyone who stays too long is likely to be remembered very, very quietly, from inside a block of ice, with a lovely view of the ceiling.
Frostborne
In the deepest cold, they are the ones who do not flinch when breath turns white and blood slows under the skin. They stand in cavern hush and ritual shadow, pale as old bone, patient as sealed graves, carrying themselves with the awful calm of people who have already survived what should have killed them. Around them, warmth feels reckless, laughter sounds too loud, and every hurried heartbeat seems embarrassingly young.
Their lives are built around what must not be lost. Food is kept against famine, names against forgetting, bodies against rot, and grudges against the mercy of time. They do not worship decay, and they do not forgive it either. Where others burn, bury, mourn, and move on, they preserve — lovingly, obsessively, sometimes violently — because memory without protection is just another corpse waiting for weather.
To outsiders, their restraint can feel like cruelty wearing good posture. Desire is not absent among them; it is simply disciplined, buried deep, and all the more dangerous for being held under ice. A glance may linger for years, a touch may mean more than a shouted vow, and a promise made in their presence can feel less like romance and more like being locked in a beautiful tomb with excellent manners.
They are mortal, but not easily spent. Their strength lies in endurance, silence, and the terrible patience to wait out hunger, grief, enemies, and entire generations of fools. Stand too close, and the cold may not kill outright — it may simply teach what should have stayed frozen.
- Glacial Ritualists
- Preservation Obsession
- Frost-Rimed Flesh