Crosspine Nein
Whisperwood: A Traveler’s Warning & Chronicle of the Devil’s Hunt
In the deep reaches of South Cheliax, north of the Southfang Road and west of the Avernus River, there lies a stretch of forest where sunlight seeps through twisted boughs like blood through gauze. Whisperwood. Older than Cheliax, older than Thrune’s torches, older even than the first mortal bargains struck with Hell. Beneath its canopy, the air is always cool, always damp, and echoes wander long after the speaker has fallen silent—sometimes returning changed.
Locals claim the forest remembers the old ways, when spirits and devils shaped the hunt and mortals merely ran from it. Now, game grows scarce, villagers vanish, and horns sound in the night mist. The Devil’s Huntsman—stag-skulled, ember-mounted, judge of both the wild and the wicked—rides again.
The fires Thrune set to purge these woods once burned for three days and nights. When the smoke cleared, Whisperwood stood untouched… but something beneath its roots had awakened.
Crosspine: The Southern Watchpost
Your story begins in the hamlet of Crosspine, a splinter of civilization clinging to Whisperwood’s southern border. Once prosperous with steady timber flow to Egorian, it now survives on fear and superstition. By day, lumbermen cut only where their ancestors left warding cairns. By night, no door opens after the third bell.
Though Crosspine flies House Thrune’s sigil and the Hellknight insignia, its people place more faith in whatever unseen power keeps the forest from swallowing their homes whole. Lately, even that thin protection wanes.
Key Figures
Sheriff Maerin Teldane – A failed Hellknight armiger with iron discipline and hollow eyes. She has seen the forest move.
Father Corvius Vale – Asmodean priest, convinced a powerful devil hides in Whisperwood—one he hopes to bind for Cheliax.
Edran Pike – A half-mad trapper who swears he saw the Huntsman burning through the trees atop a horse of embers.
Ylara Thornbrook – A tiefling herbalist whose bloodline has lived here longer than Chelish maps. She knows of the old pacts—and what they cost.
Crosspine marks its doors with antler sigils. Its people wear charms of bone. And each winter they hold the Feast of Horns, a masked celebration said to honor the forest’s “watcher.” Outsiders are seldom invited. Some guests never emerge at dawn.
Whisperwood: Nature, Lore, and the Forgotten Bargain
Whisperwood shifts over time—paths swallowed, new cairns appearing where none existed. Its beasts are quick to anger; its trees slow to burn. The druids once called it the Green Vein, a place where the world’s lifeblood rose close to the surface. When Cheliax bent knee to Hell, Thrune sought to cleanse it with fire. The flames burned black, as though consuming their own shadows, and left the trees unscarred.
In those days, a fallen noble house made a secret pact: they bound a devil of the Hunt, a horn-calling judge who wore the skull of a great stag and rode a mount wreathed in embers. For a time the Huntsman served them, stalking rivals and outlaws alike.
Then the pact broke.
The Huntsman vanished—until the recent nights, when horns echo through the fog and travelers whisper of hoofprints burned into stone.
What the People Believe
These warnings are recited in Crosspine like prayers that no longer save anyone:
Do not answer horns in the dark. They call all things to the Hunt—beast, man, or worse.
Do not cross running water after nightfall. The Huntsman’s hounds will not, and neither should you.
Offer iron or salt at the treeline. Strength and purity are the only currencies Whisperwood respects.
Never hunt beneath a red moon. The prey taken on those nights is not mortal.
If you see eyes like burning coals, kneel. The Huntsman ignores the submissive; he devours the proud.
Rumors in the Present Hour
A Hellknight patrol vanished along the northern edge of the forest three weeks ago.
Hunters found stone scorched with hoofprints too deep for any living beast.
Ylara Thornbrook seeks help retrieving a stolen book of her grandmother’s—one bound in bark and etched in infernal runes.
A noble from Egorian hunts relics of an ancestral family that once held land deep within Whisperwood… and never returned.
Final Counsel to Travelers
If you must enter Whisperwood, carry iron, carry salt, and carry fear. Stay to marked trails, and light a lantern of red glass to ward the gaze that watches from behind every branch. Speak no bargains aloud—not even in jest. The forest listens. The forest remembers.
And should you hear a horn at midnight, run toward the wind.
It is the one direction the Huntsman never follows.
Crosspine Nein
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Sihri Shadow-Whisper
CATFOLK BARD (DAREDEVIL)
Born in a hidden catfolk enclave deep within Whisperwood, Sihri was marked early when she wandered beyond the torches and felt the Huntsman’s breath in the dark—and returned singing instead of screaming. Her voice carried something ancient, and her clan whispered that the forest had either spared her, claimed her, or taken an interest. She grew into a performer who hid warnings and coded messages within her tales, carrying secrets between clans and rebels alike. When she arrived in Crosspine, the Huntsman’s horn sounded the same note she heard as a child—and she knew it was calling for her.
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Mavros Emberclaw
CATFOLK ORACLE
Mavros Emberclaw was born during a strange celestial night and raised deep in Whisperwood alongside his fierce older brother, Benkata. His healing magic manifested young—brilliant, Celestial, and angry—which the enclave’s seer claimed tied him to the ancient hunt stalking the forest. Mavros heals not out of faith but out of rebellion, a soft voice carrying a power that refuses to bow. As the Huntsman’s riders draw near and his father’s claw pendant darkens, even Crosspine can sense something awakening in him.
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Cherri Döngs of the Batwomen Ninjas
CATFOLK FIGHTER / BRAWLER
Born in Whisperwood and abandoned in a cave as a baby, the catfolk Cherri Döngs grew up half feral, half trained by the strange “Batwomen Ninjas” who raised him. Fierce, and more than a little unhinged, he terrifies most of his enclave, his loyalty to his younger brother Mavros is absolute, and he tears through anything that threatens him like a storm with claws. No one knows his true name anymore—not even Mavros—and Cherri is determined to keep it that way.
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Zevran of the Broken-Wheel
HUMAN CLERIC
Zevran survived being struck by lightning twice in one afternoon and decided that clearly meant the gods wanted him alive—and electrified. Ever since, his healing magic comes with a painful jolt that knocks patients out of chairs but somehow fixes them anyway. Drawn by a strange vision of a horned figure crackling with ozone, he wandered into Whisperwood and immediately upset the local foliage. Some say the forest recognizes his wild energy; others think the Huntsman simply finds him entertaining.
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Sir Vantis Valor
HUMAN PALADIN
Sir Vantis Valor survives in Cheliax by playing the only role a paladin can—hunting monsters in the dark so the empire never has to look at its own reflection. A détour he took as a divine warning dragged him off his assigned road and into Whisperwood, each mile thick with the dread of a fate he couldn’t refuse. When he reached Crosspine, he felt corruption in the air—forest-born, infernal, and hungry. Now he stays not out of hope but obligation, clinging to the village as the last place left where his defiant sense of righteousness matters.
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Brool Oath-Breaker
HUMAN MONK / FIGHTER
Twice broken by the Devil Nuns’ Tar Trial and cursed with pitch that seeps from his scars on moonless nights, Brool fled into Whisperwood and nearly died before Ylara Thornbrook hauled him home. He’s lived behind her hut ever since, a tar-streaked brawler who expects the world to hit first. Brool fights with anything in reach—books, bowls, spoons—each strike born of pain rather than training. Crosspine calls him “Bob the Re-Tarred” behind his back, but none dare say it to his face.
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Sokari Tide-Walker
CECAELIA MONK
Sokari Tide-Walker was born to a Cecaelian clan that roamed the Arcadian depths, a child of tide and storm. A monster off Cape Kraken shattered his world, dragging his family into the deep and leaving him orphaned on the waves until the monk Rick “Tricky Ricky” Valspar pulled him from the sea. Forged in Ostenso’s pits and tempered by grief, Sokari walks the land with the quiet strength of something shaped by the ocean’s ancient will. Drawn toward Whisperwood by the promise of a new temple site—and whispers of a relic tied to his bloodline—he follows the currents of fate as if answering a call older than memory.
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Savarious the Flesh-Starved
TEIFLING SORCERER
Savarious awoke on a stone floor with no past, no name, and a single command pinned to his chest: “Find the Devil’s Huntsman and join.” His body is wrong—cold skin, ember-eyes, and a hollow ache that no food can fill—yet Whisperwood seems to accept him in a way mortals never have. He hunts ruins and graveyards for clues, convinced the Huntsman is the only thing that can fill the void inside him. When the horn finally sounds in the distance, Savarious knows it is calling him home.
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Manny Winter Wolf
SKINWALKER MONK / BRAWLER
Manny lived feral in Whisperwood until hunters of the Brotherhood captured him for their fighting pits, where he learned from every blow and mastered the discipline to cage the beast inside until the perfect moment—then shattered his chains and vanished back into the forest. Whisperwood guided him through horrors and shifting shadows until he collapsed half-frozen at the edge of Crosspine, where Edran Pike dragged him from death and gave him a hellhound-hide hat. From Pike he learned the truth: the man called Morangias who hunted him once will hunt him again. Manny knows the hunt for the Winter Wolf of Whisperwood is far from finished.
