Amavie
The Marches
@the_marches
Borderlands where the war never quite ends.
gritty medieval war · medieval era · year 1330
Gritty medieval borderlands at war: contested marches of mud and mail, burnt villages and holding castles, mercenary bands and levies, a frontier that changes hands with every campaigning season. Survival is a trade; loyalty, a luxury.
The story of The Marches
The Marches run on steel and grain: marcher lords and their garrisons, sellsword companies, refugee columns, priests and quartermasters. The border is a wound that never closes; peace is only the pause between musters.
Places
- The Marches · continent. A scarred strip of borderland territory contested between two warring crowns.
- The Low Marches · region. A floodplain of thick, suffocating mud and ruined farmland.
- Iron Gate Keep · city. A primary holding castle that serves as the administrative center for the western line.
- The War Road · landmark. A deeply rutted, churned-up artery that stretches across the border, constantly clogged with supply wagons and refugees.
- Burnt Hollow · city. A village that has been razed and rebuilt four times in the last decade.
- Stone Creek Priory · landmark. A fortified monastery that acts as the last sanctuary for the desperate and the dying.
Peoples
- Marcher Folk · suspicious, resilient, cynical. The hardy, jaded descendants of settlers who have lived under the shadow of the sword for generations. They value pragmatism and silence over ancestral glory.
- Outland Mercenaries · opportunistic, well-drilled, ruthless. Foreign-born soldiers of fortune who flock to the Marches for the promise of plunder and the absence of law.
Powers and factions
- The Order of the Broken Wheel · Arch-Penitent Vane. A grim Border Church that preaches that suffering is the only currency accepted by the divine in times of endless war.
- House Vane Levies · Lord Silas Vane. The remnants of a noble house holding onto the last of their ancestral lands, forced to conscript peasants to fill their ranks.
- The Black Tusk Company · Captain Karka. A brutal sellsword outfit that sells its services to the highest bidder, regardless of the cause.
History
- The First Sundering · 1280. The initial collapse of the royal peace treaty, sparking the border skirmishes that would evolve into permanent warfare.
- The Siege of Steel · 1305. A brutal three-year siege of the central border fortresses that decimated the local population.
- The Endless Campaign · 1330. The current state of the front; a war of attrition where no ground is permanently held and food supplies are at a breaking point.