Barony of Pech

The south-eastern part of the Kingdom of Norlan, from the northern tip of the great interior plains to the Berland Highlands in the south, is the Duchy of Zuiden. By 5000 IY, two Counties (Klumgras and Grunben) had been created within the Duchy to help administer the vast territory, even though the majority of it is comprised of huge cattle ranches. Just over a century later, the King of Norlan, Erste Dalin III, underwrote an effort to re-establish the vast gold, silver, copper, iron and diamond mines that had once riddled the Iron Mountains. As part of this venture, the Barony of Pech was carved out of the County of Grunben in 5122 IY. The first Baron, Resil of House Zashalin, was appointed by Erste Dalin to build forts for garrisons of the Royal Army to protect against incursions by humanoids from the mountains. It was several decades before any mines were productive, and they never achieved the scale that Erste Dalin envisioned.

The Barony struggled on for several centuries, always overshadowed by the very prosperous other regions of the Duchy. Despite having more than three quarters of the population for the Duchy, it generated less than one quarter of the tax revenue. Matters only got worse towards the end of 56th century when Kurik of House Tolinger became Baron. He seemed to have very little interest in the running of the fief, and seemed more focused on building Castle Fesen, his new Baronial Seat. Things became marginally better in 5580 IY after Kurik was summoned to the Crowton to answer charges that he'd misdirected Crown funds intended to contribute to the maintenance of Royal Army forts. For nearly a year, he dedicated himself to solving the problem of scarce materials, long the biggest complaint of the Army's builders. Protests turned to relieved reports of progress from the forts that protected the Barony. Kurik even appointed his daughter and heir, Lady Velima, to sourcing the most important materials needed.

The positive direction was short-lived, however. In fact, in many ways it became worse almost right away, when the stockpiled materials began to vanish. It started with "centralization" of the depots by the Baron to increase, he claimed, the efficiency of distribution to the sites at which it was needed. Soon, however, delays began to plague the building efforts, and before long, requests for materials went unanswered altogether. Protests of increasing volume made their way from the Count of Grenben to the Duke of Zuiden, and then quickly to the King himself. The removal of a noble was a rare enough occurrence in the Kingdom and hadn't been necessary for several centuries. The Crown's brief dithering became moot in early 5581 IY when Castle Fesen was the site of a massive event that caused the death of the Baron.

The first indication that something had happened was from a messenger on her way to the Baron from the Count of Grenben at Bergen Manor. She quickly noticed that after passing the first guesthouse (a common type of inn that are set about 20 miles apart along major roads) inside the Barony that the farms and homes along the way were deserted. She became quite disturbed when she arrived at the village of Kleindorf to find it also abandoned, but she continued on to Castle Fesen. She found doors, windows and internal furnishings were missing, as were all of the people and animals. The workshops outside the Castle had been flattened and everything lighter than big chunks of stone had been flung outward from the castle as if a massive storm had swept through. Strangely, trees not twenty yards from the castle were unmarred and still had all of their leaves.

The Duke’s team reached Fesen about eight days after the messenger and found nothing significantly different from the situation she’d reported. However, during their return, their camp was attacked the first night by a large group of zombies. Two soldiers were killed, but the rest of the zombies were successfully destroyed and eventually burned. After the second attack the next night, during which another soldier was killed, the force travelled through the night back to Zuiden. After consultation with the King, Duke Nelim assembled a force of paladins from the Order of the White Hart and Order of the Holy Sword, clerics of the Leisturm Order, and Royal Army soldiers. He personally led the troops to Pech to investigate the sudden appearance of so many undead. After a campaign of several weeks and the destruction of hundreds of skeletons, zombies and ghouls, the Duke took his weary troops back to Zuiden, confident that they had eradicated the threat once and for all. It was assumed that the vanished population of the Barony were accounted for in the grim harvest of undead. At the time, those that objected that too few undead had been destroyed for them to represent the thousands of missing subjects of the King, were mostly ignored as alarmists.

Velima survived the event, having been in Highwater at the time that it apparently occurred. She was interrogated by the Crown and eventually cleared of any knowledge or involvement in her father’s crimes. Nonetheless, the Barony was dissolved to become part of County of Grenben once more, and Velima disinherited. Whatever meagre assets of her family that could be found were taken by the Crown and presumably were used by the Truth and Reconciliation Council of 5588 IY in paying compensation to claims from relatives of those who vanished in Kurik’s folly. It was during these early years afterwards that the former Pech became known as the Ghost Barony.

Survivors from the outer regions of Pech migrated west and south to the Blinde Forest, where a small, fortified merchant factory had been established to transport timber to markets in the Three Kingdoms to the south (competition from lumber camps in the western part of the Kingdom made the domestic market untenable). Eventually, this settlement grew into the town of Onderdark, which became the Royal Army’s only garrison in the Highlands.

In 5591 IY, Erste Calima came to the Throne when her father died, and with her administration, the first major restructuring of the Royal Army since the Varini Reforms of 4358 IY. As a former General Staff officer in the Army, as soon as she ascended the Throne, Calima ordered her Lady High Constable to implement her wide-ranging changes. Although these are now considered necessary, the changes were unpopular at the time, particularly as a lot of forts and garrisons were shuttered. Criticism reached a fever pitch in Onderdark when in 5594 IY, waves of undead spread through the Blinde Forest, and all that was left to fight them off was a single understrength company of the Royal Army’s reduced garrison. A hurriedly raised force from Zuiden, supplemented in a manner reminiscent of 13 years earlier (paladins and clerics from the Order of the White Hart, Leisturm Order, and Faithful Church), rushed south to confront the undead hordes.

In the aftermath, a massive investigation was instigated by the Crown to learn where the undead had come from. After nearly two years, the Royal Commission suspended the investigation inconclusively, as resources had to be diverted to the escalating Frost Wastes War. Erste Norasi, Calima’s successor, established a new Royal Commission to investigate the mystery when yet another surge of undead appeared in 5627 IY. Unfortunately, that Commission was no more successful, and despite hundreds of thousands of crowns spent on research and Private Companies, no more significant information has been discovered. Waves of undead have continued to appear sporadically, as quickly as eight years between floods and as far apart as twenty-two years. No one doubts the connection to the events of the Ghost Barony, but what that connection is and how to stop it has eluded everyone so far.