Treefall: A Player’s Record

Your home, and everything you know of the world that surrounds it.

The World as You Know It

You were born in the Broken Lands, a dry, red-stone country in the far southwest corner of a continent so wide its edges are only rumor. This is the frontier, and Treefall sits near the end of it.

To the north, past country no one you know has crossed, the world turns white: ancient ice that has never melted in any tale your grandparents told. The cold rivers that run down from it are wide and deep and swift, so the land is cut into pieces by water that cannot be forded.

Eastward the world simply goes on, farther than anyone here has ever been, into places that reach Treefall only as travelers’ talk. You have never seen a city. You have never seen the sea.

Before the years anyone counts, there were “the old times,” and about those nobody can tell you much that isn’t half a story. The hills hold strange ruins and stranger metal, quiet and rusting where they fell. Folk leave them be.

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The Reckoning of Days

Everyone counts the year the same way: thirteen months of twenty-eight days, and a seven-day week, with one festival day, Fondaire, standing outside the months entirely, between the year’s end and its beginning. Folk keep Fondaire for half-remembered reasons: the turning of the year, the return of the light, a night to gather close.

Because every month is exactly four weeks, every month opens on the same weekday, Solevar, so the day of the week is easy to keep. The years are counted in the old Imperial reckoning, the only count anyone uses, and by it, it is now Imperial Year 9,723.

The thirteen months, as the country names them

#	Month	Its season
1	Lumière	Late winter; the light returns
2	Semaille	Early spring; the sowing
3	Verdaine	Spring; the greening
4	Solaire	Early summer
5	Chassaire	Midsummer; the hunt
6	Moissaire	Late summer; the harvest
7	Forgière	Early autumn; the making
8	Vendaire	Mid autumn; the gathering
9	Bruméon	Late autumn; the mist
10	Gélaire	Early winter; the frost
11	Noctaire	Midwinter; the dark
12	Victoire	Late winter
13	Tournaire	Year’s end; the turning

The week

Solevar (sun, market day) · Terrevar (earth) · Forgevar (the forge) · Lunevar (moon) · Chassevar (the hunt) · Ventevar (wind) · Reposvar (rest)

Today is Terrevar, a day for the fields, in the thick of the sowing.

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Treefall, Your Home

Two hundred souls, give or take, living off the fields and the armadillo herds. Sun-baked houses of red stone and timber, a square of packed earth, a well, a small shrine, a single tavern.

No wall worth the name, no soldiers, no militia: just a town council, a constable, and the long habit of looking out for one another. Whatever rules the wider world has always been too far away to feel.

What Treefall has that other frontier towns do not is rain it can call. The land is arid; the herds and the crops live and die by water. For as long as anyone remembers, the town’s sacred Thunderstone has brought the rains in its season, and never does that matter more than now, with the seed about to go into the ground.

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The People You Know

You grew up among these people. You know their faces, their tempers, who owes whom a favor and who owes whom an apology.

Maelle Aubrec
Council elder, the one in charge
Widow, and for thirty years the keeper of the town’s grain-and-water accounts, so she knows to the bushel what Treefall has and what it can spare. Pragmatic, unhurried, the steady center the council turns around.

Hesker Dunn
Council elder, the town’s memory
The oldest soul in Treefall, and the keeper of its old stories and older observances. If a thing happened before living memory, Hesker is the one who knows a tale about it, and he is rarely shy about telling it.

Tomas Vey
Council elder, senior farmer
Believes the safest road is a quiet one: tend your fields, draw no attention, and let the wider world forget Treefall exists, as it mostly has. Slow to act, slower to change his mind.

Reva Castaigne
Town cleric
Tends the little shrine and the sick, the one folks go to when words run out. Quiet and steady. She saw Chester’s calling before he did, and has been his teacher in it.

Brannoc
Blacksmith and artificer, Astarii’s uncle
Far more than a village smith: an elf who works real magic into iron, turning out bags of holding and small wonders no frontier town has any business owning. The one who got Sonny working again. Astarii’s mother is his sister.

Perrine Holloway
General store
Trades in everyone’s business as readily as in flour and nails, the town’s unofficial keeper of news, rumor, and who-was-seen-where. Little reaches Treefall that Perrine doesn’t hear first.

Donal Fay
Leatherworker
Gruff, fair, two fingers short on one hand. Buys hide and scale from the Floshem ranch and makes the boots and coats half the town wears.

Garrick Mott
Keeps The Dry Well
The town’s only tavern, and its gathering place, where Treefall drinks, argues, courts, and settles its small feuds. A big, easy laugh and a generous hand with a measure.

Edrin Cole
Constable
Young, earnest, and one badge against the world. His authority ends at the last fence-post, and he has never yet had cause to test it.

The Floshems
Naal and Ashwyn, armadillo ranchers
Astarii’s parents: elven ranchers, no magic between them, quietly proud and quietly puzzled that both their daughter and Ashwyn’s brother Brannoc carry the arcane. Their herds feed half the town’s trades.

The Winslows
Annot and Harl, Chester’s family
A practical farming family with no use for gods or temples, which makes Chester’s faith the household’s gentle, well-worn argument. Their two children: Chester, and his younger sister Lisa.

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The Thunderstone

The stone is genuine magic, old beyond reckoning and sacred to Treefall. Worked right, in its season, it calls the rains that keep this dry country alive. No one here knows where it came from. It has simply always been the town’s, tended and passed down through the generations, the one true treasure a poor frontier town possesses.

This time of year it matters most of all. A season’s seed without rain is a season’s hunger; with the stone, the town has never had to learn what that means.

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The Keep at Greystone

A few weeks back, something came up the road that no one has quite stopped talking about. A caravan: wagons, riders, more order and purpose than any trader’s train, passed through Treefall flying pennants no one here had seen, black, with a gold device worked into the cloth. It did not stop. It did not trade. It went through and on toward the southeast, and was gone by evening.

Where it was bound, everyone now agrees: Greystone Keep, the old grey pile of stone that stands off to the southeast. The keep has stood empty your whole life, and your parents’ lives, and theirs before them, though the oldest folk keep stories, handed down, of a time long ago when it was held.

Since the caravan passed, travelers and traders from the other towns along the road have brought the same word, over and over: the keep is occupied again. Lights in its windows. Figures on its walls. No one can say by whom, or why.

Empty my whole life, and my father’s, and his. Now there’s lights in it. I don’t pretend to know what that means. I only know the old stories, and the old stories aren’t the comfortable kind.

Hesker Dunn

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The Four of You

Treefall born and raised, the lot of you, the odd handful of the town’s young who never quite fit the ordinary mold:

Astarii Floshem	Elf	Sorcerer
Sonny	Warforged	Fighter
Chester Winslow	Human	Cleric, Twilight Domain
Hayden “HayZ” Zable	Air Genasi	Warlock

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