Marrowgrim is a fairly affluent city located where the Sinhe River and Yellow Peaks nearly run along-side each other. It started off as a small mining town, growing fat off the gold from which the Yellow Peaks take their names, and the river allowed for convenient shipping. It didn’t take long for a bustling trading town and eventually large metropolis to take route there.

Many generations ago, the miners dug too deep and broke through into the lava tubes. All of the men working the mines that day died, and work ground to a halt. A few weeks later, work would resume once more, thanks in no small part to inflated wages to entice more workers. A month after that, lava flooded the mines once more, burning dozens alive.

Men are nothing if not stubborn, particularly when gold is involved, but after three similar incidents over the course of the next year, it got to the point where no one was willing to work the mines for any price. Trade continued thanks to the Sinhe, but the city was reduced to a shadow of its former glory.

Many generations later, the city was attacked by a lich named Krool’thex, who easily overwhelmed the modest defenses. Krool’thex was mostly interested in the mines, though. He animated zombies and skeletons to work them, but this proved inefficient. Though they did not complain, the sheer number of corpses required and frequency of the lava breakthroughs was inconvenient, to say the least.

Then Krool’thex had a breakthrough. He developed a lesser form of the ritual used to convert himself into a lich, and used this to create his new servants. These liches were little more threatening than they had been in life and retained their sentience, and the up-front costs were huge in comparison to animating lesser undead.

It paid for itself soon after, though, when lava once more wiped through the mines. Krool’thex had but to wait a few days and all of his servants had regrown and were once more forced to work the mines. The lich-king of the city used his wealth and free labor to construct himself a magnificent palace in Marrowgrim, and at the heart of the palace is a vault where all his slaves’ phylacteries are kept.

Today, Marrowgrim is even more successful than it was in ages past. Most are unaware of Krool’thex’s undead labor force, and those who do know of it overlook it in light of the profits to be made at the town. The city itself has become a bit of a hot spot for the surrounding nobility, who like to vacation there due to the surprisingly-complete lack of “riff-raff.” Free from beggars and thieves, the nobles walk the streets freely and peruse the varied goods which come along the river. For his part, Krool’thex seems content to enjoy the finer things in un-life and watch his city grow.

Encounters at Marrowgrim

The PCs meet a lich-slave who’s managed to run off from work. The slave begs for the peace of the grave, but unless the PCs can destroy his phylactery he’ll never get it.

The PCs are hired by a man who claims to be the rightful heir to the city’s throne, from before it was taken over by Krool’thex. The man tasks them with destroying the lich’s phylactery and then the lich himself, so that the city might once more return to his family.

Krool’thex quickly assimilates any foolish enough to beg in his city into his workforce. However, this is not enough to satisfy his ambitions, and the PCs discover that he’s arranging for merchants to kidnap beggars and vagrants from other cities and smuggle them Marrowgrim. This raises the question of exactly why Krool’thex needs so many slaves, as well…