Frostmere
Population: ~800 (formerly) Status: Gone silent. No contact in months.
Overview
A fishing hold on the coast of the Bitter Sea, Frostmere was the northernmost permanent settlement in the Pale Wastes and one of the most isolated. Reachable only by sled across open tundra, days from the nearest Hold, Frostmere existed because the Bitter Sea’s fish were essential and someone had to harvest them. The people who lived here were tough in a way that even other Hold-folk respected, quiet, self-reliant, accustomed to a loneliness that would break most people.
The Hold sat on a rocky shelf above the ice, sheltered from the worst winds by a natural ridge. The buildings were low and heavy, designed to shed snow and resist the gales that screamed off the frozen sea. Everything was functional. There was no room for anything else.
Notable Locations
The Ice Docks
A series of reinforced platforms extending over the Bitter Sea’s ice shelf, where fishing crews chopped through to the dark water below. Nets weighted with divine bone fragments drove the pale, translucent fish into manageable clusters. A good day’s haul fed the Hold for a week and produced surplus for trade with Greyhold and Ember’s Rest. The work was cold, dangerous, and essential.
The Warm Hall
The heart of Frostmere. A large communal hall heated by three stone hearths that burned continuously through the long winter. Every significant event in the Hold happened here: meals, councils, celebrations, arguments, births. The Warm Hall was where people came to remember they were alive. In a Hold this small and this isolated, it was not optional. Without communal warmth, the cold outside would find its way in, not through the walls but through the mind.
The Watch Ring
A circle of bone-cairns surrounding the Hold, each cairn containing a shard of Morrhael’s divine bone. The Watch Ring generated a low-level ward against mindless undead, enough to keep wandering dead from stumbling into the settlement. It was not strong enough to stop anything organized or determined. It did not need to be. Nothing organized had ever come this far north.
Key People (Pre-Disappearance)
Holdwarden Nara Frostmere
A stern, practical woman in her early fifties who had led the Hold for fifteen years. She took her surname from the Hold itself, a tradition among Frostmere’s wardens, a statement that leader and settlement were one thing. Nara kept her people alive through three severe winters, two bone-storms that breached the Watch Ring, and the slow attrition of isolation. She was respected, not loved, because Frostmere did not have the luxury of loving its leaders. It needed them competent.
Nara’s last communication with Greyhold was a routine supply request, nothing unusual, nothing alarming. She mentioned the shapes under the ice had been more active. She mentioned it the way one mentions weather.
The Silence
Frostmere failed to send a delegation to the Great Burning at The Pyre. This had never happened before. Messengers were dispatched. They did not return. A second group, armed Vigil scouts, reached the Hold and found it intact: doors closed, hearths cold, urns of ash arranged neatly on shelves, food stored and untouched. Eight hundred people gone without sign of struggle, flight, or violence. The Watch Ring was unbroken. The bone-cairns still glowed. The Warm Hall’s chairs were pushed back from the tables as if everyone had stood at once.
The only anomaly: tracks in the frost leading south from the Hold toward the nearest Marrow Field, a single set of eight hundred footprints walking in orderly rows.
GM Only
During a severe bone-storm amplified by Serith, all 800 residents of Frostmere walked into the Marrow Fields simultaneously. They stood near a major bone formation until the cold took them. The bone-pull was weaponized, boosted through the death-domain into an irresistible compulsion. Every man, woman, and child walked calmly into the frost and waited to die.
They are now undead, integrated into the Hollowdeep army. The detail that haunts the Vigil scouts who found the tracks is this: the ash-urns were gone. The walking dead carried them. The urns of their own cremated predecessors, clutched against their chests as they marched. Bone-pull erases desire, flattens emotion, strips away everything. But these people carried their dead with them. Something of who they were survived the compulsion, not enough to resist, but enough to hold on.
Frostmere is an excellent early-campaign horror discovery. The empty Hold, the orderly tracks, the missing urns, all of it should unsettle players and establish that the threat in the Hollowdeep is not mindless hunger. It is something that can reach out and take an entire community in a single night.