Cragwar is a mining town in northern Breland with a tumultuous past. As a valuable source of mithral, the town held strategic importance out of proportion with its small population and other resources, and thus it changed hands many times during the Last War, ending in Brelish territory at the time of the Thronehold Accords.
Cragwar’s troubles began long before the Last War, however. The town’s mithral mine delves deeper than most know, breaching through into Khyber. Centuries ago, a horror from the depths reached out to the surface. Before the horror returned to Khyber, most of the residents of the town were killed, and the others traumatized. The survivors realized that they had been changed, and generations of descendants to come would forever be tainted by the evil that influenced them.
The 169 original survivors of this event banded together and called themselves the Truthkeepers. They swore oaths to suppress the truth of their corruption as best they could, sealing the deepest shafts of the mithral mine, and hiding evidence of the evil’s taint. For generations, every aging Truthkeeper selected one successor from the younger townsfolk to reveal the terrible secret of their ancestry upon the elder’s death, maintaining the exact numbers of the conspiracy.
The Truthkeepers have been a mostly benign force throughout the town’s history, keeping the general population of Cragwar from being traumatized by the truth of their heritage, and generally having the town’s safety foremost in their minds. On rare occasions, they regretfully turned to murder if any visitors or new settlers grew too curious and stumbled onto the terrible truth of Cragwar.
These violent actions grew somewhat more frequent during the Last War, where the Truthkeepers had to be ever vigilant of the various groups of foreign soldiers garrisoned in their town. With the signing of the Treaty of Thronehold, the Truthkeepers hoped that the constant presence of outsiders would ease. Unfortunately, the valuable mithral mine grew famous during the town’s repeated changing of hands during the war, drawing the interest of the Aurum. At least two concordians of the Aurum have set their sights on the small mining town, and have invested in it to expand its operations.
The Truthkeepers are growing more and more paranoid and desperate, wanting Cragwar to be left alone, and many of them have begun tapping into the dark powers of their heritage to fight against the capitalist interests developing in their town. Perhaps the time when the Truthkeeper’s secret is revealed to all is coming soon, and Khyber only knows what madness that may bring.
Source: Map Perilous