Wolfran Island

This is homebrew and not Eberron Canon

Geography

Wolfran Island is an international Island off the Southern coast of Breland. It is a days travel by sail from Sharn, making it just far enough into the Thunder Sea to be largely unpopulated, but not quite far enough to be encroaching on Sahuagin territory. The sea-devils do send patrols out to the south and east ends of the island, but for the most part leave it be.

The island is sizable enough, taking two days of travel to cross from west to east, measuring close to 40 miles long and around 30 miles wide. The west end of the island terminates in high rocky cliffs which the waves beat against relentlessly and are topped by the once picturesque Wolfran Manor. A private dock lies at the base of the cliffs. The north end of the island has a small cove, called Stillwater Cove by the locals. The north east corner of the island is the home of Deepstorm village, a fishing village. The east end is a wide sandy beach which is quite pleasant to look at. To the south is only dense jungle populated by various types of snakes, insects and monkeys. A path runs through the center of the island from the Manor to the Village, and midway on the path is an Airship tower, now destroyed.

WolfranIsland

History

The Island is officially privately owned by Lord Derick Wolfran, a Brelish Shipping Magnate. Wolfran was an utter control freak, with minor psionic telepathic powers, which made for a terribly efficient shipping business, but tended to harm his personal life. Although Wolfran made his fortune in Sharn, owning several caravans and ships which passed through the city regularly, the chaotic, unpredictable and thus uncontrollable city-life aggravated him to no end. So at age 30 Wolfran bought the island from the Brelish, then known as Storm island due to the frequent storm elemental sightings in the area, and moved his entire extended family to it.

A fishing village, Deepstorm Village, already existed on the island, and had for decades. Wolfran allowed the village to remain, on the condition that they be his serfs and work for him. With no other choice the villagers agreed and were put to the task of building Wolfran Manor on the west side of the island.

Wolfran built a few improvements to Deepstorm Village, a magical water purifying well, a church to Arawai and a Fishery to mass produce fish for profit. He also imported about 2 dozen of his own workers from the mainland to live on the island in a barracks-style living quarters outside his house. Some workers were tasked with supervising the villagers in their construction work and at the fishery, while others were tasked with manning the private docks or worked in Wolfran's house performing housekeeping duties or assisting in private research.

At first the island seemed a paradise, and a profitable one at that. Wolfran continued his work in peace, communicating with subordinates in Sharn and Stormreach via a magical mirror network, and his family enjoyed the peaceful tranquility of the island. His brother Traven a talented hunter and artificer, only stayed for 3 months out of the year to visit with his family and hunt in the jungle, preferring instead to sail from island to island on his privately owned yacht. Wolfran's wife, Iesha, and daughter, Lorey, were not allowed the same luxury of freedom however. Lord Wolfran kept his women on a very short leash, never allowing them to even go past the Tower in the midpoint of the island without him accompanying them.

Iesha was fed up with the life she was leading with her husband and so one night decided to flee to the Fishing Village, where a friend of hers would pick her up by boat and take her back to her family in Karrnath. Lord Wolfran found her packing her things, and believing her to be going to live with a new lover flew into a mad rage. He chased her throughout the house before cornering her in the downstairs library and strangling her with her own scarf.

When he came to his senses he knew he had to get rid of her body, and so buried her beneath the manor in the caves, (room B35), that his slaves had been excavating for Khyber Shards. He then closed off the caves, claiming they were empty of shards, until he was confident that the body would not be identified. He then went to his brother Traven for advice, confessing his terrible deed. Traven suggested they tell everyone that she did in fact leave, and went to her parents in Karrnath for some time to study with the Church. Wolfran agreed and the story was repeated to anyone whom asked. Unbeknownst to him, his daughter Lorey had witnessed the whole thing, and was shocked and frightened into a catatonic stupor. She stopped eating and talking, and eventually wasted away to virtually nothing, dying as an emaciated skeleton in her room at age 13. Wolfran buried her body with her mothers and kept her death secret as well.

Things were peaceful again for some time, but beneath the surface Lord wolfran was slipping deeper into madness and obsession with control. He was experimenting with necromancy, abducting the occasional fisherman as raw material, trying to create obedient professional workers. For the most part he created only skeletons and zombies, which he had secretly laboring in the caves, bringing him valuable Khyber shards. He eventually perfected the necromantic formula which he would later use on his brother. He also used an exotic necromantic technique to create two soul-bound dolls using portions of his own soul, which he crafted to appear like 5 year old twins. He named the twins Thomas and Treja, and treated them as his own children.

Wolfran's other endeavor was that of elemental binding. He had gotten a Thuranni agent to steal him the knowledge from the gnomes of Zilargo. Which was a very very expensive feat to accomplish. He had put it to use a few times, successfully binding elementals to weapons and armor, but his grand achievement would be to bind one to an airship.

When he approached his brother with his experimental designs, one that called for two elementals to be used, along with psionics to replace the dragonmarks needed to control them, Traver laughed and said it wasn't going to work. Lord Wolfran exploded with pent-up rage and struck Traver in the back of the head, instantly killing him. Panicked he resorted to his necromancy and re-animated his brother as the banedead Traver, using a khyber shard implanted in his skull to preserve his personality and soul, and he used his psionic powers to wipe away any memories of his past life.

Now he took his banedead brother and a few mages that were in the employ of the manor, along with all of the fisherman of the northeastern village, and set them to work building the airship. He had quite lost his mind at this point, and drove many of his workers to their deaths building it. The food-stores were also dwindling as he wouldn't let the fishermen abandon their wok to go fish. By the time the ship was built, over ¾ of the village were either dead from whips or malnutrition. He then cut the fishermen loose, declaring their services no longer needed, but they did not live very long, soon either succumbing to starvation, too weak to man the boats and lines, or gave into cannibalism, eating the rotting bodies of their fallen comrades. These villagers became the ghouls which now plague the north end of the island.
Lord Wolfran, along with the Manor's mages, called into their service two elementals, one storm and one fire. They attempted to bind the storm elemental to the Airship, named the Racing Wind, first while leaving the fire elemental bound to the summoning circle in the tower. It was bound successfully but then when Wolfran attempted to dominate the Elemental psionically it rebelled, and did so with so much force that it cracked the binding matrix containing it. An eruption of magic and psychic energy ensued, blowing the ship into two pieces, and sending it flying to both ends of the island. The top half of the tower was destroyed and all the mages killed.
All that remained left alive on the island was the wildlife, the three undead set to guard the tower, and the ghouls on the north end. Wolfran himself was incinerated, but his soul was bound into the Khyber Shard which had bound the Elemental. A piece of the elemental also remained bound to the shard, and so the two of them merged. The resulting creature had all the fury of a storm, but all of the singleminded hatred and need to dominate of Wolfran. It's first act was to return to the manor, where it patrols now, waging a war within itself between the two fractured personalities.

Recent Events

The north end of the island has long been a stopping point for smugglers, who like to make anchor in Stillwater cove and replenish their supplies, or hide contraband on shore. So just one week prior to the players arriving on the island, only two weeks after the explosion which claimed the life of Wolfran, a ship of smugglers known as Wave Riders put in anchor at the cove. They had plans to meet with a captain sailing in from Stormreach with some valuable cargo for House Cannith. They were to meet on the pretense that the Wave Riders needed the captain to smuggle in some contraband for them, but in actuality the smugglers intended on trapping the captain and his crew, killing them, and taking their ship and cargo.

The Captain arrived as told, anchoring off the east beach, and met with the Wave Rider captain. The Wave Rider Captain asked him to take half of his crew, some of his Cargo, and follow him into the jungle where they would retrieve the contraband to be loaded and exchange cargo and payment. As soon as they left the beach a group of Wave Riders emerged from the jungle and snuck aboard the Cannith Ship, where they quietly slaughtered the remaining crew and dumped their bodies overboard. The Smuggler Captain led the unwitting dupes into a trap where his henchmen killed all of them and looted their bodies, dumping them in a pit near the ruined airship tower.

The Smuggler captain and some of his men then returned to the Cannith ship where he expected to reap the rewards of his treachery, and was quite disappointed and terrified to find his men engaged in a pitched battle against a monstrous Devilfish which had been drawn to the ship with the scent of the spilled blood in the water. Scared beyond reasoning the Captain and his men abandoned the prospect of sailing the Cannith ship, which was by now quite ruined with a large hole in the hull, and they fled through the jungle to their own ship.

It was here they ran into another unwelcome surprise. The ghouls that were once the villagers of Deepstorm Village had climbed aboard their own ship and were feasting on the crew left behind. The Wave Riders unwittingly walked right into the undead trap as they took rowboats back to their ship and climbed aboard. Only one rowboat, containing Throkk and two shipmates, made it back out before the ship was overwhelmed by undead and dragged to the ocean floor.

Throkk and one of his mates holed up in the north half of the Airship ruin, and the other fled through the jungle to the manor where he ran into a different gruesome fate.

Players actions on the island

The players came to the island on the order of their employer, Auric Davian, on a privately chartered ship. Davian spared no expense, employing a ship healer and a full crew. They put in off the east beach when they caught sight of the beached Cannith ship which they had been hired to investigate and hopefully retrieve. After a surprise fight with the lurking Devilfish, that they spectacularly killed, they came to realize that the gaping hole which it had broken in the hull would drastically reduce the chances of successfully salvaging the vessel.

They then went to the tower in the center of the island, spoke to Traven, talked to the bound fire elemental Zarnax and made a bargain with it for it's freedom. They burned the bodies of the Cannith crew for fear of them rising as ghouls, and travelled to the south airship half where they got half of the binding stone and killed a zombie ape which was inside. They then proceeded to the North Airship half and cleared the beach of Ghouls and freed Throkk and Eoin as well as looting anything valuable on the airship. It was westwards to the Manor after that, where they got split up, thus encountering the raging spirit/elemental of Wolfran and the two soul-bound doll children Thomas and Treja at roughly the same time. One party member was choked out by Iesha's haunted scarf, nearly reliving her hateful death, and the other currently stands against Wolfran alone.

Current State of the Island

The Devilfish which attacked the Cannith ship is dead, and the ship has been offloaded of all cargo and valuables but remains beached. Wolfran Manor is barely explored and holds all manner of surprises. The submerged Wave-Rider Ship is still over-run with undead; Ghouls and Drowned. Deepstorm Village is yet unexplored and holds it's own seperate dangers. Traven's yacht is still tied to the dock and with some work may be useable, but only Traven would know the command word to activate the elemental it uses for power.

Inhabitants of Wolfran Island

Name Description Status Notes
Lord Wolfran A Psychotic control freak Psion/Artificer Now an undead storm elemental in the basement of [[Wolfran Manor]]
Traven Once Lord Wolfran's Brother Now an Intelligent Zombie(Variant Banedead) Memory of past life locked away
Iesha Wolfran Lord Wolfran's dead wife A ghost in the manor /
Thomas and Treja Two Soulbound Dolls In the Kitchen of the Manor /
Lorey Wolfran Wolfran's dead daughter A ghost in her room Hates her fathers spirit, and wishes him exorcised
Zarnax Bound Fire Elemental Was imprisoned in Airship Tower's binding circle, freed by PC's Wants revenge of Wolfran
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