Crosshaven
The Adventurer’s Frontier
Crosshaven was established alongside the construction of the Sanroko Crossnational, its very foundation built by and for adventurers. The town boasts a culture entirely its own within Crudilex, shaped by the rhythms of traveling parties, daring quests, and the ever-evolving needs of heroes and explorers passing through.
While Crosshaven operates under an official government, the true seat of power lies in the Tavern on the Hill, a legendary gathering place for adventurers. Here, a quiet but unshakable understanding binds its transient residents: if ever the town were in peril, its inhabitants, both locals and adventurers, would band together to protect it. This unspoken pact has kept Crosshaven safer and more orderly than any garrison of guards could ever hope to achieve.
Battlemaps set in this location
Poacher Camp
A caravan of criminal totemic poachers, led by the infamous Grizelda, hunt and kill rare and valuable monsters. What they are doing outside of Crosshaven is not illegal, because Crosshaven has no proper laws. However, it is generally acknowledged that it is not particularly savory behavior. Given the issue already present between the Fey and the people of Crosshaven, most do not seem to care much about protecting beasts when they regularly attack their jobsites. This has made Grizelda’s group all the more happy to stick around, and their bandit camp has become a less mobile thing than it had been in the past.
Airfield
Local farming planes tend to avoid the regions around Crosshaven for the simple fact of the mass of adventurers who pass through. The sort who willingly delve into dungeons and delight in fighting monsters tend to have complex and deadly requests for humble pilots. However, even among those who work flying planes there are those who seek a life of daring, and such mercenary fly boys spend a good amount of time seeking high-paying challenges that require a quick-witted flying circus.
Often sky drops into deep woods or a fast one-way trip out of town are the kinds of jobs picked up at the airfield north of Hinge, but some requests get truly crazy. Those are the ones the types who land here are looking for. Big risks, big rewards. There are always three or four planes sitting and waiting for someone to come over with their party and pitch their wild idea.
"The Hinge"
The famous local tavern is run by Fizelma Herzal, the retired gnome adventurer who treats all the fresh young heroes as beloved children. She always has a warm smile and a tall stiff drink for anyone who enters. The tavern itself was unnamed for decades, but when asked, Fizelma would say “the red buildin’ what’s near the henge,” and in her thick accent it sounded like “hinge.” Locals started to call the place that, and the name stuck.
Its main hall is a huge circular room with a wall of booths around the outside, low lit, with plenty of places for brooding. The inner area is a circular bar with four or five bartenders. A spiral staircase heads up to the kitchen or down to the wine cellar. The food is horrendously bad. Fizelma is a horrible chef, but everyone is expected to eat
her slop with a smile. She is always imagining a new menu, and heroes who call Crosshaven home are very protective of her feelings.
The tavern is something like a town hall, part tavern, part hotel, part restaurant. It really serves whatever purpose it is needed for at the time. The tall red building is large enough to get lost in. Built over a natural hot spring, it has a lower-floor communal bathing area. But what is most well known about The Hinge is the dagger wall, a section of timber packed with knives stabbed into it, sometimes through notes. Each knife represents a drink already paid for. Anyone down on their luck can pull a dagger and give it to a bartender for a drink on a fellow adventurer, with the promise to come stab a new one back in after their adventure is done.
Logging Camp
The lumberyard was the original reason the town was founded before the train came through. The logging efforts after the Sanroko-II was built have been greatly expanded, and they have pushed their cutting all the way against the local stone henge. This has angered a spirit who claims it as its territory, a small creature called “Redcap,” said to be a legendary wizard of the Fey.
Since then, the loggers and their work have been plagued with unbelievable bad luck. A parade of misfortunes and embarrassments has come over each and every lumberjack who works the yard, stalling and threatening to end the industry completely. Little has been done to restart the operation, and the workers are growing angrier by the day.
The Bazaar
The center of Crosshaven, just north of the castle station, is an adventurers’ bazaar selling anything and everything either used for adventuring, such as weapons and armor, or collected while adventuring, like dungeon treasure and monster parts. Its supply is extremely inconsistent, as it is generally staffed by adventurers themselves, and they have a habit of packing up and leaving on a whim. Sometimes, though, you can get very lucky walking through the stalls, coming upon something collected from a nearby tomb or crypt that might be of great significance to you but mean less than nothing to the vendor. Much of the goods that enter the bazaar trade hand to hand between the patrons themselves, as they are typically selling their own supplies in hopes of gathering coins to buy something they need more.
The trouble with a market filled exclusively with items
dredged up from crypts or claimed from felled foes is the unpredictability of the items themselves. Some might be dormant magical artifacts trading hands, hoping to land in the possession of the ones they are destined for. Others are unbelievably cursed, stained by the final utterances of the person run through by the vendor themselves, unbeknownst to them, and carrying that evil within. The Bazaar is a gamble for its patrons, but that is the sort of thing adventurers like most.
Darkhorse Adjustment Bureau
The heavily regulated adventurers’ society pushes a system that expects all explorers, scouts, rangers, and dungeon delvers to register as licensed adventurers. It is led by the weathered old man called Commissioner Booth of the Darkhorse Adjustment Bureau. He has slowly built a reputation for the bureau’s authority over the legality and integrity of what can and cannot qualify as adventure. However, the law has not yet been enforced or applied in Crosshaven, largely due to its lack of a central government.
Many suspect that if the town does become incorporated into a larger nation, Darkhorse is likely to become the ruling body, and Booth is making political moves to see that come to pass.
Mainstreet
The long strip that crosses Crosshaven west to east is a roadway known as Main Street. It is a bustling frontier crossing with wooden walkways for pedestrians and a dirt road for motor coaches and horses. Main Street is lined with eateries, shops, and all kinds of adventuring goods stores to equip the heroes who pass through. It is a hub of activity but can suddenly shift to a tense battleground when two groups of adventurers get into a skirmish.
Every so often the goals of two parties conflict, and they settle it with what is called a Crosshaven tango, a standoff where both groups meet at high noon at either end of the long road and lay it all on the line against the other party. Last man standing is declared winner for their entire group.
When the whole of the other party is knocked out, surrendered, or sometimes when the tensions are real high, clean dead.
These fights are considered an honorable conflict, and other adventurers will watch from the sidelines, ready to step in if anyone tries to act underhanded. There are no real rules, but when someone plays foul it is easy to spot, like ending a surrendering opponent or trying to leave the street and flank around. Not strictly disallowed, but you are likely to get run out of town if you are caught.
Trappers Keep
Along Main Street is a large shopping center that contains anything a fashionable lady might need: a salon, beauty supply, and clothing store all in one large building. The structure started out as a fur trader, but it gained a reputation for selling luxurious and rare furs and pelts, attracting tailors, and slowly evolved into the store it is today.
Trapper’s Keep is a little glimmer of nobility in the otherwise rough and troubled town, and one of the few places that draws in tourists and travelers along the train tracks for more than just the novelty of a lawless frontier.
Cross Castle Station
A four-towered structure with large doors like breezeways. The central area has an open roof, and the inner walls are lined with pulleys and cranes, with drums of fuel and repair tools for the Sanroko Crossnational-II train when it comes through Crosshaven. From afar this group of high towers looks like a powerful castle that would be at the center of an imperial city. However, these structures only resemble a castle. They are purpose-built to service the train and are of almost no use otherwise. No grand ballrooms or elegant thrones. The Cross Castle Station is an exceptionally beautiful, well-designed train stop.
Church of the Machine
The Church of the Machine is a Diotanic institution, a stark stone building with little frill or flair. Thick stone walls in a brutalist design are broken up only by its fountain garden in a closed central plaza. The structure itself is imposing and uninviting, not what one would instantly consider a church at a glance.
Before Crosshaven became a proper town, it was a small collection of farmers and a market vaguely controlled by the Colloran capital city not too far away. Slowly more people came, and eventually the capital’s Church of Dioten saw a large enough population to build a church to organize the area. The Church of the Machine serves as both a religious institution and a notary or census office, as its tenants focus on strict law and order. When the Sanroko Crossnational train tracks were laid, the population of the town multiplied tenfold in a matter of months from engineers and laborers alone, and the church was thrust into the forefront as the only sort of legislative body in the area. Claiming that power in stride, they helped build the town into the thriving frontier it is today.
However, it did not last. When the capital city fell after the civil war, the public opinion of the church violently soured, and the people of Crosshaven simply refused to pay tithes or acknowledge the church at all. The small community that still attends the church in town has grown isolated and bitter, seeing themselves as the true founders of Crosshaven, abandoned by those they helped.
You Catch it; We COOK IT!
Along Main Street is a double-building bar and grill with huge bonfires roasting dragon meat and sizzling greatfinch steaks. Inside a fenced-in courtyard is a locally famous outdoor shanty-straunt with stained tablecloths and candles burnt all the way down, filled with armored adventurers laughing and drinking, still filthy from their recent exploits, eating food some love and many wince at between bites.
Local adventurers have a habit of trying to squeeze every coin out of any encounter they find themselves in, pulling whatever components and monster parts they can out of any beastly kill they strike down. Generally these parts are either too pulverized to be useful in scholarly identification, too poorly kept to be useful in alchemical studies, or just generally considered foul and useless bits of monster gore. Most heroes drop piles of useless monster bits, dejected and filthy for having lugged them all the way back to town. This opened up a new business possibility, one few would
consider outside of a wild place like Crosshaven: a monster grill.
“You Catch it; We Cook it!” specializes in the absurd business of prepping monsters, buying and preparing exotic meats. It tries its best to be an upscale establishment but has become something of a novelty for adventurers, a place to go and eat something unexpected for the fun of it.
Anno Coven
On the southern end of town is a provincial group of hedge witches living within, but at the outskirts of, Crosshaven. Among the covens the Anno and hedgemages like them are often self-taught, without a hag or matron to formalize their coven within the greater culture. Their magic is often seen as less useful or less refined than established coven traditions, focusing on simple everyday remedies for ailing animals or keeping away sickness in the towns they live beside.
The Anno coven settled in Crosshaven for its unique intersection between civilized human life, the forest Fey such as Redcap and his henge, and the many dungeons hidden in the area. Recently the coven has been feeling the
growing druidic unrest from the deforestation and damage to the sacred grove around the Forgotten Henge. They tried to be peaceful and broker an understanding between the laborers cutting the woods to fuel the construction of the train and the local Fey spirits in the area, but ultimately it failed. Now the beasts are becoming more and more restless.
Scroll Monument
On the southern end of town is a circular area that acts as Crosshaven’s graveyard. While there are no bodies interred here, a large statue of a scroll with a face etched with many thousands of names acts as a single headstone for them all, a memorial to adventurers killed during their journeys who were unable to be recovered and those who were never given a proper ceremony.
It is local custom to treat the monument as a headstone for whomever you most need to mourn, a general memory of those lost and important to us, so that everyone who mourns here also saves a bit of their thought not just for the one they lost but for all who the monument represents.
Cap’s Well
At the heart of an abandoned apple orchard up on a hill on the southern part of town is an old overgrown well. Deep beyond the reach of the bucket, the well is said to drop hundreds of feet, and the water it pulls back up comes out putrid and foul. This is the place where they say if you toss a copper into the well and wait alone at night, whatever you say will be heard by the mad Fey wizard Redcap, a gnome of incredible power who wears a long pointed red cap and rides a jackalope.
Marble Quarry
Struck by a Noctire meteor, a moonfall rush is what started the town. When the meteor and its contents were located and mined out, the miners discovered a rich marble vein, and a secondary industry popped up. However, the mining operation has had constant stops and starts as local Fey creatures continue to harass the location.
The quarry has traded hands and owners fairly regularly, many hiring out nearby adventurers who had been using the town as a pit stop. Slowly this became a mutually beneficial relationship and really saw the shape of the town grow into what it is today.