Ivahn Katavarg

The Silent Forest’s most powerful villain is Ivahn Katavarg, a feral lycanthrope bandit.

Ivahn Katavarg and his clan were inspired by the crimes attributed to Sawney Bean. Plus, I knew I wanted a werewolf villain available in Krevborna, so this is how I fit that in--perhaps in a semi-novel way.

Ivahn Katavarg

Ivahn Katavarg is the patriarch of a clan of inbred werebeasts who prey upon travelers of Krevborna’s roads. The Katavarg clan’s victims are robbed and often eaten. Some are taken back to the Katavarg’s lair, a primitive haven within a trap-laden cave complex in the Silent Forest, to serve as slaves and future meals.

Each member of the Katavarg family bears a curse that makes them transform into a werebeast a night. The curse takes a variety of forms; werebears, wereboars, and wererats all number among the clan. In his bestial form, Ivahn is a gray-furred werewolf.

Among his family, Ivahn Katavarg lives like a king. He keeps the choicest riches taken from the family’s victims for himself, and treats his many wives and children as servants and playthings. His base desires and sensual appetites are both colossal and monstrous.  

    • Appearance: He is a slovenly man, stout as a barrel but as strong as a beast—even in his human form.

    • Personality: His manners are coarse and he spares little thought for the wants and needs of others. 

    • Motive: He believes that growing fat upon what be pried from the fingers of others is preferable to honest work. 

    • Flaw: His love of secrecy is contested by his desire to be infamous and feared.

The Wychbog Cottage and Yrd Dolma

Below are two more adventure locations within Krevborna's Silent Forest. The first is an expression of fairy tale horror: a forboding cottage in the woods where a coven of three hags trade supernatural healing for the flesh of live children. The second is a more mystical area inspired by my love of the old Robin of Sherwood show and, oddly enough, Dark Souls.

The Wychbog Cottage

A tumble-down cottage perched atop creaking wooden supports emerges from a flooded fen in the Silent Forest; the cottage’s occupants, the Wychbog Sisters, are three ancient crones who can miraculously restore the health of those who dare to visit them.

    • The Wychbog Sisters are named Yubella Greentongue, Old Kruka, and Mother Malaryn. 

    • All three sisters are corpulent and wear ragged dresses made of human skin, though they disguise their terrible natures under palatable illusions. 

    • When their aid is sought, the Sisters make their visitor a poisonous offer—they will cure whatever ailment besieges the sufferer, but in return that person must bring them a living child as payment. 

Yrd Dolma

Within an obscure clearing in the Silent Forest stands a circle of weathered gray sarsen stones known as Yrd Dolma. 

    • In the center of Yrd Dolma, a sacred bonfire is kept burning by blind pagan pyromancers of the Aeld Faith. 

    • The druids and pyromancers who tend the bonfire believe in a prophecy that states that a great warrior will one day willingly sacrifice themselves to their holy flames; this martyr will die within the bonfire and be born again, emerging from immolation as a sacred undead champion.

    • The druidic priests of Yrd Dolma believe that their ordained champion is fated to free Krevborna from the grip of supernatural evil.

Old Sepulcher Road and the Seven Citadels

Two more adventure locations in Krevborna's Silent Forest. Old Sepulcher Road is my attempt at practicing what I preach: I think they idea of a "treacherous and/or haunted road" is under-utilized in world building. Part of the inspiration was passing a road called Hungry Hollow Road in my travels and being taken aback by how menacing that name was. The Seven Citadels is my nod to putting a little something into Krevborna for the sword & sorcery fans.

Old Sepulcher Road

Old Sepulcher Road cuts through Vargovishta Pass in the Karthax Mountains, stretching from Hemlock Hollow to the Silent Forest. 

    • The road is the hunting ground of the Bloody Bishop, a dullahan searching for his severed head. 

    • In life, the Bloody Bishop was a defrocked priest turned bandit who offered his victims no mercy. 

    • When he was captured by a local militia, he was tortured and decapitated—now returned as an undead rider astride an undead steed, he continues to terrorize the living.

The Seven Citadels

Seven tribes of heathen savages live within the Silent Forest. Each barbarous tribe’s territory centers around a tower of black stone that they both fear and protect from adventurers who wish to plunder the relics and ancient treasures safeguarded within them.

    • The members of barbaric tribes decorate their skin with swirls of blue pigment; they practice cannibalism and ritual human sacrifice. 

    • The tribes’ territories encircle the black citadels, but even the most foolhardy tribal members never venture inside them to explore. 

    • Each citadel is the prison of one of the Fallen Lords—witch queens and princely warlocks who now exist only as shadowy wraiths lost to madness and despair.

Lynbury

The adventure location described in this post about Krevborna's Silent Forest takes British "hauntological" works such as Children of the Stones and The Stone Tape as its point of inspiration. There's also quite a bit of John Buchan's story "Fullcircle" in there as well.

Lynbury

Lynbury is a small village on the outskirts of the Silent Forest. It is surrounded by a circle of eldritch standing stones inscribed with druidic runes and sigils. 

    • Once the circle of standing stones has been breached, is is impossible to leave Lynbury; any attempt to leave shunts those seeking an exit back into Lynbury.

    • The people of Lynbury are unfailingly polite, kind, and welcoming; they encourage newcomers to make themselves at home and to consider settling down permanently.

    • Amiable companionship is used as a lure—those who enter the Lynbury Circle find that the populace of the village coax them to join in nights of drinking and singing at the village pub and offer to induct them into the village’s troupe of folk dancers. 

    • Any unattached visitors will discover that an attractive and attentive villager has set their eye on them as a romantic prospect.

    • The villagers of Lynbury are happy, but only because all other sentiments and emotional responses have been drained from them by horrid sorcery. 

    • Lynbury is a snare for the unwary and weak of will: Simon Glaston, Lynbury’s country squire and unofficial magistrate, taps into the magic of the standing stones to siphon away his fellow villagers’ emotions and feelings to feed an ancient pagan god.

    • This “god” is actually an eldritch entity from the Outer Dark known as Ozoga—also referred to as the Crawling King and the Conqueror Worm. 

    • If an outsider probes too deeply into the nature of the standing stones or the villagers’ unnatural happiness, Lord Glaston hunts them down with monstrous worms gifted to him by Ozoga.

    • The only way to escape Lynbury is to slay Simon Glaston and offer his blood to the standing stones. 

    • Although killing Lord Glaston will allow visitors to escape the confines of the Lynbury Circle, it does not banish evil from the village; once the current squire is dead, another villager will be elevated to his position and begin his malign work anew. 

Aeldentree and Camp Lovelorn Lake

Today we've got two very different locations within Krevborna's Silent Forest: a hidden city of insurgent fey and Gothic fantasy take on the slasher genre, complete with an unstoppable (???) masked killer. Aeldentree adds a bit of morally gray political terror (and terrorism!) to the setting. Camp Lovelorn Lake is, obviously, inspired by the Friday the Thirteenth franchise.

Aeldentree

Magical wards keep the once-proud city of Aeldentree hidden from the world. The city is built among the boughs of massive white mournwood trees and is home to a confederation of elves, goblins, and fairies hailing from all four of the fey courts. 

    • Aeldentree’s populace are the pomenysh descendants of fey who were victimized by human pogroms and usurped from their ancestral lands in Krevborna.

    • Aeldentree is a sanctuary, kept secret from the prying eyes and vicious intent of mankind; only those who possess a fetish made of elk bone can successfully find Aeldentree within the Silent Forest.

    • The most militant of Aeldentree’s citizens belong to the Sarabande, a secretive cabal of pomenysh insurgents.

Camp Lovelorn Lake

Beside Lovelorn Lake, a placid pool of crystalline water in the Silent Forest, sits an eponymous campsite consisting of wooden cabins, a dilapidated dining hall, several fire pits, and a small jetty. A hand-carved sign hanging above the entrance of the site reads “Welcome to Camp Lovelorn Lake.” 

    • The cabins are well-constructed, but they show indications that they have witnessed violence in the past, such as aged bloodstains and the telltale marks left behind by a fearsome woodman’s axe.

    • Something unnatural in Camp Lovelorn Lake calls to teenagers on the cusp of adulthood, exerting a pull that draws them to come and stay during the golden months of summer—even if that means shirking their responsibilities or running away from home.

    • The campsite is, of course, a trap; anyone who stays at the camp will be hunted by a demonic, mask-wearing killer who is bound to the site by a lingering curse. 

    • The masked killer believes that every soul he claims from a murdered victim furthers the goal of resurrecting his dead mother—whose decaying head he keeps in a woodland shrine deep within the Silent Forest.

The Silent Forest

From Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" to Robert Egger's The Witch, "the woods" are a place where the laws of man--be they temporal, spiritual, or moral--are suspended in the wildness that resists the forces of civilization. If you want to have a Gothic-influenced setting, you need a dark forest where savage elements lurk in the untamed bosom of the natural world. The Silent Forest fills that role in Krevborna.

(art by Tenebrous Kate)

The Silent Forest

Forbidden and Accursed Woodlands 

The Silent Forest is a deep woods of misshapen trees whose limbs resemble clawed, skeletal appendages. True to its name, the forest is ominously quiet. Old burial grounds—their headstones cracked and the names upon them effaced by time and the depredations of nature—are slowly consumed by the green hell of the Silent Forest. 

Villages lurk at the edges of the Silent Forest, but the villagers warn their children not to enter the woods, as it is believed to cursed. When night falls, the malign creatures within the forest grow stronger, faster, and more ravenous. 

However, the Silent Forest is not wholly uninhabited. Those who live in proximity to the Silent Forest report that elves, goblins, and fairies possess a secret enclave deep within the woods, hidden from the eyes of human kind. Tribes of wildlings, regarded as cannibals  prone to scalping civilized folk who intrude on their enclaves, also make their homes among the Silent Forest’s twisted trees.  

Hallmarks

The following elements and aesthetic notes define the Silent Forest:

    • The forest is an accursed and unholy place; many sects of the Church forbid their parishioners from entering it.

    • Elves, fairies, and goblinkin maintain a hidden city in the Silent Forest.

    • The trees of the Silent Forest are often blackened and ominously shaped.

    • Woad-painted wildling tribes live deep inside the woods.

    • A family of bandits known as the Ulvarg clan hide within the Silent Forest.