There are more dead than living in Respite, and their necropolis is Delera’s Watch. Named after the tomb of Delera Omaren, one of the city’s founders, the necropolis is the resting place for Storm Lords, pirate captains, and wealthy explorers. The pirate tombs are filled with traps and wards, and undead guardians are prepared to stop robbers from frustrating the dead pirates’ attempts to take their wealth and treasure maps with them.
As a burial site, this land is very old. The necropolis’s hillocks are all burial mounds from the Age of Giants, and below the surface lie sepulchers and bone-filled pits. Despite constant efforts to stop them, undead often rise from these dark places, and stories abound of catacombs where mummified corpses have lain undisturbed for more than forty thousand years.
Using the land around Delera’s Watch as a makeshift graveyard, generations of poorer citizens have, depending on their cultures, buried their dead in simple graves or left corpses out for scavengers to devour. This hodgepodge of grave markers and bone piles is like a moat around the stately tombs and sarcophagi of Delera’s Watch itself.
Crypts and catacombs are hidden throughout Stormreach, but most of the ruined city’s notables are buried in the district of Delera’s Watch, named for one of the first Storm Lords. Aside from the tomb of Delera Omaren, this neighborhood includes the crypts of a number of famous smugglers of old Stormreach. Naturally, tales abound of how these legendary pirates were buried with treasure maps, powerful magic items, or journals detailing the location of sunken merchant ships. Even on their deathbeds, the pirate captains were suspicious and paranoid, and their crypts remain guarded by traps, magical wards, and (it is whispered) undead guardians.
Stories abound of a subterranean necropolis of the giants beneath Stormreach, where mummified corpses have lain undisturbed for more than forty thousand years. Whether these tales hold any truth remains to be seen, for any entrance to these catacombs is well hidden.