Allerton Hold

There is little of Allerton’s Hold left beyond the shells of some structures, exposed to the elements and long bereft of roofing. The trail of the thieves of the Shard of Shadows (stolen from the Mayor’s home three nights ago) leads past the old ruins, almost certainly on their way to the City of Mornings. But something has changed in the ruins – in the last year someone has built a new roof over one of the stone cottages that remained fairly intact.

This was the staging area for the daring theft set up by the thorns, a small group of mercenary thieves lead by Lyra Blackthorne. Tipped off about the existence of the Shard of Shadows, they spent six months based out of these ruins collecting intelligence and arranging for the acquisition of the strange artifact. Now as the fastest members of the crew make haste for the City of Mornings with the shard to sell it to the highest bidder, the rest are holing up once again in Allerton Hold.

While two of the crew continue on to the city, the rest of the thorns are in a panic over the state of their leader. While carrying the shard, Lyra was struck by one of the town guards, and the wound has a very strange infection, a darkening blood and ichor, a deadening of the soul. The remaining thorns are becoming very frightened for their leader’s life, but also for their own. The shadows within the cottage now seem to creep and dance of their own volition and in Lyra’s fever they seem to be talking directly to the shadows themselves. Most of the crew are now in the other ruined buildings, only the two bravest returning to stock the fire and check in on Lyra’s wounds and state.

The thorns will accost travellers through the area (even those seeing the thorns themselves) to beseech them for aid for Lyra. Lyra’s injury is obviously magical and requires magical healing of the wound, dispel evil to be rid of the darkening wound, and remove curse to be rid of the shadow shard’s influence. Only the mayor and their small cabal (who style themselves as the ‘shadow wardens’) will recognize the source of the infection as the stolen shadow shard.

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 10,200 x 10,800 pixels (34 x 36 squares). To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 70 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 140 pixels (for the recommended 10‘ squares) – so resizing the image to 2,380 x 2,520 pixels or 4,760 x 5,040 pixels, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2025/02/10/allerton-hold/