Cogelos by Rob Torno
Written by Dennis N. Santana
Illustrated by Rob Torno
Introduction
Once a thriving countryside, where wheat stalks made golden curtains across the land broken only by the rising and falling hill forest, Cogelos and its villages now face a grave threat to their continued survival. Cogelos is an old and simple region where the land and personal strength are what is held most important. What people remain are the outlying farmers struggling to grow crops in the dying earth and the hunters fighting a war against their old forest home.
Deep within the forest stood the village of Reekoh, once a community of loggers and hunters that never once troubled their neighbors, now an ruin, flayed by ice and snow. What many centuries of human habitation could not, Neirave the ice mistress of Rekoh did: she conquered nature and made it her most loyal ally. When Reekoh shunned and abused her, it brought about the end of itself.
Those organisms which could not be twisted was merely drained of all vitality. Trees now lay caked with frost and encrusted with ice, the soil is covered in treacherous snow that saps any life it could give to the forest. Any lesser animals by now have fled or died. Only the strong beasts that Neirave uses to hunt down humans remain.
Neirave’s icy domain acts as though alive, spreading slowly out of the forest and into the surrounding countryside. Whether it would even end with her is unknown, as the forest itself seems to act harsh as its new mistress, slaughtering those within with nary a visible command from the Sleepless Drift. Many now believe the forest itself to be under no one’s control, and quite deliberately aiding Neirave in revenge for all the years of abuse both suffered.
Background
Cogelos was not a cradle of the world, but when the harsher regions evicted the humans within them it became a natural spot to settle. It has a rich past history, but most of it would be uninteresting to a traveler, involving tall tales of mythical beasts, forest spirits and legendary hunters rather than wars, riches or romances. With a temperate climate and plentiful soil and forest, it was ripe for man to take. For untold generations people have settled in Cogelos, logging its trees, mining its rivers, seeding the land. Never once did they foresee how the land would be turned against them.
There were a few villages in Cogelos, most of which faded over time as their people left to the more successful settlements, with the greatest and most recognized being those outside the forest. Kepet is the oldest, a community now within reach of the Sleepless Drift. Kepet is a great source of wheat crop, and they traded with their brothers in the Rekoh forest village for prime wood and the skins of the woodland beasts. The two villages share a foundation of history that made them inexorably linked.
The tale of the founding of Kepet and Rekoh shows their veneration for hunters and their pride in taming the wild life. Kepet and Rekoh were said to have been founded by two different families. One was led by a great hunter and another by a great farmer. The farmer wanted to head into the forest where there would be lots of plants, while the hunter wanted to stay out in the open where he could better challenge the local wild life. But eventually the division proved too much for them. The farmer could grow nothing in the forest and there was not a lot to hunt out in the fields. The families sent messengers to one another and eventually intermarried.
Kepet became the village of great farmers, while Rekoh became one of great hunters.
The region of Cogelos remained simple. They never quite struck gold and only small amounts of precious material from the rivers near Kepet. While they heard tales of great nations beyond their frontiers and eventually came into contact with other civilizations and kingdoms, they were not pushed out of their ordinary lifestyles because of this. Rekoh had even less contact with the outside world and its changes, knowing little beyond Kepet. A neighboring Kingdom considers Cogelos part of its territories, but knows better than to antagonize the hardy people of the fields and forests. With benign and light-handed rulership they have managed to slowly squeeze some easy (if not altogether very precious) riches from Cogelos.
When Neirave manifested as the Sleepless Drift, her first course of action was the scattering of her childhood home. Hunters from the village that managed to escape told neighboring communities of that day.
News of Neirave having gone missing were quick to spread, as everyone knew who she was. Few if any of them cared about what could happen to a girl her age in the forest. She was a witch, an ill omen. They were glad to see her gone. In a place where men held power and superstition was rampant, a girl like Neirave was less than trash.
But she soon strode back into the village, each of her steps leaving behind a trail of ice. It is said that she stood in the middle of the town as though waiting. For an apology, perhaps, or at least for someone to show her any sort of kindness or care. No one did, no one said a word. People barely wanted to look upon her pale beauty, thinking she had finally given herself wholly to her supposed witchcraft.
No Hunter recalls what she said to them before beginning the slaughter.
With one breath she made a storm of ice which sent homes flying and flayed men where they stood. It took only that to send everyone running, but Neirave made sure to destroy everything with more of her powerful storms. For her, it took only five or six breaths to eradicate the place where all her worst memories lay. Hunters from Rekoh regrouped and are said to have a hold inside the forest, but things look bleak as the ice moves beyond the trees.
Appearance
Cogelos is a somewhat small region mostly dominated by the fields around Kepet and the forest around Rekoh. Though other small family communities exist, these two are the only large settlements worth mentioning, one of which is all but destroyed and the other which sits on the edge of an ice-encrusted razor. Though once the warm colors of spring and autumn, the skies around Cogelos have become increasingly gray and the ground increasingly white.
Kepet: This large settlement is a number of wooden and log homes around the main trading road. One can see nearby farmland which might have been covered in golden wheat, but are now a vast waste of brown and white soil where small plants struggle to rise from the dirt. The Great Lodge where the town convenes is its most impressive feature, built out of the logs of the largest trees in the neighboring forest, said to have stood since five hundred years back.
The Forest: The forest goes by many names, sometimes merely Rekoh for the village within it, nowadays called Cocytus for being the icy fortress of Neirave. It is a thick forest of enormous trees. The terrain is made treacherous by the rising and falling of the hills. Now a dark, treacherous place, where the days are silent and eerie, the nights filled with stalking predators, Rekoh is unfit to inhabit except by predatory beasts. The ground itself is an enemy, hiding pitfalls and sinkholes within the snow, and the only source of food remaining is the meat of the vast army of forest beasts stalking its trails.
Somewhere inside this forest is the icy seat of the Sleepless Drift upon which Neirave is said to rest, concerning herself not with short bursts of aggression, but with the slow, but permanent expansion of her icy mantle. The Hunters believe the forest to be alive now, and in full support of Neirave’s plans. They can see no other reason why the beasts, the ground, perhaps even strange spirits of the forest, would turn violent.
Rekoh: Little, if anything, remains of the childhood home of Neirave. Only memories of the glorious village of Hunters remain. For Neirave, only the haunting presence of her past remains, buried somewhere around this ruined village in the form of her old, preserved body. Many Hunters have tried to search the remains of Rekoh for some answer to Neirave, but it is here where Neirave’s hatred is at its strongest and her forces at their most violent.
Using Cogelos
Cogelos is a relatively simple region to add to any campaign with a temperate countryside or other large stretch of rural land. It is a simple woodland region with only the autonomy that matters to them, that of their local affairs. The one truly important piece in the region is the Forest, but Kepet offers the players an opportunity to roleplay with the locals in a more peaceful setting, allowing them to see the fears and dreadful rumors of the land and better prepare.
A sense of imminent danger pervades Cogelos as it is a set piece clearly tied to the narrative of the Sleepless Drift. Neirave’s ice is already harming the outlying places of Cogelos, and people are scared. Word from Cogelos rushes to the outside world to see just what aid may come to them. It is a fairly straightforward place that can be dropped into a setting to pique the interest of players looking for a dire land to explore.
Adventure Hooks
- The Kingdom that lays claim to Cogelos receives word of the strange and possibly disastrous happenings in this outlying holding. They actively call for explorers to confirm these rumors, since sending official military could agitate the situation even further.
- The PCs in their travels stumble upon the Rekoh forest, as it is in their way to more fruitful pursuits. While traveling during the day seems to be the same as any other wintry forest, when night falls they are beset by beasts of natural and unnatural sorts.
- On the edge of the wildlands, the PCs discover a grievously wounded man attacked by wintry wolves, quite far from their natural habitation. Should they decide to aid the man, he will most certainly try to involve them in his order of hunters fighting the Sleepless Drift in its own wintry hold.
Cogelos, the Seat of the Sleepless Drift by Nevermet Press is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.nevermetpress.com/contact.
