Stormhaven
Welcome to Auryn.
A place of great tragedy and endless, blistering cold, Auryn is an ancient world, filled with horrors waiting to resurface from beneath the ice, and glorious tales waiting to be told. An ancient curse, bestowed upon this mortal realm by the vengeful gods of old, wreathed this once living and breathing world in an icy cover of frost and darkness, spelling doom to the empires of old, and bringing with it an age of isolation and panic, known as the Age of Darkfall.
The few bastions of civilizations, including the town of Stormhaven, stands today as testaments to the burning spirit of mortals, seeking ways to bring light and life into this god-forsaken world of endless gloom. The land itself is as treacherous and perilous as the strange monsters it houses. The bitter cold of the howling blizzards carries with them a stench of death and madness. The sun itself struggle to cast its lifegiving rays of light unto the hungering land, where the green crops of ages past are little but legends of today.
Stormhaven, a town of 2000- or so citizens, is an unusual sight in these cold lands. Due to its advantageous position, defensible against both climate and onslaught, it has prospered and provided a sense of protection and civilization to the world.
While the climate of Stormhaven, and its surroundings, are more temperate than many regions in the world, it is still a struggle for civilization to survive. Outposts and hamlets of ages past have mostly been abandoned in favor of the protection of larger settlements. Agriculture is sparse at best, and impossible at worst, resulting in a world that relies on alternative supplies of food, such as fish, mushrooms, game and hardy berries and plants that somehow still manage to sprout and blossom under these frigid conditions.
The cold has brought with it a sense of desperation as well. Howling packs of monstrous were-creatures roam the wilderness, ghastly reanimated corpses devour the folk lost in the snow, and only the brave, or the foolhardy, venture far from civilization in search of food – or glory.
Our tale begins, as another tale ends. Something is changing the landscape beyond the boundaries of the mapped region of Stormhaven. Snow of ages past is melting away. Storms are subsiding. The world is thawing, ever so slowly, bringing with it a promise – and a sense of dread. For what mysteries does the ground hold? What was lost beneath the cold embrace of the unending cold? Will the warm rays of the sun bring glory once more to these lands – or will unspeakable horrors, twisted by time, resurface once more, to usher in a new age of darkness?
- We are about to find out.