geography

The Tradeway between Reme and Fairhill: an old road on a much older track, dangerous to travel, with at least one megalithic monument somebody still visits.

Overview

Established in play during Session 01 - Sunday D&D Group and ruled canon at reconcile on 2026-09-13. Everything here was observed by the party on the nine-day walk from Reme to within two days of Fairhill.

Details

The Tradeway is an old road on a much older track

The Smiling Skull is roughly two hundred tons of stone arranged on a hilltop into a grinning human skull that faces the road: two cart-sized boulders set in dug and backfilled sockets for the eyes, a single laid boulder for the ridge between them, and eleven separate uprights for the teeth. None of the stone is dressed. There are no tool marks anywhere on it. It was raised by people with timber, rope, water and a great many hands, and without good iron.

It is very much older than the Tradeway. Azren worked this out standing on the hill rather than remembering it from any book, and it is the load-bearing conclusion: the monument was not built to face the road, because the road did not exist. The Tradeway is simply the newest layer of something people have been walking along this valley floor for a very long time.

There is no grave here, no chamber, no mound and no capstone — the monument marks nothing buried. What it was built to say, and to whom, is not known.

Somebody still visits the monument

A stone about the size of a clenched fist was found wedged into the turf at the base of the fourth tooth from the left, on the side facing away from the road, and packed round with turf so it would not be seen.

It is not the same rock as the monument. Every upright is coarse local granite, lichen-blotched and weathered soft; this one is smooth, dark and close-grained, and its edges are still sharp. It has not been lying in the rain for a thousand years. It was placed deliberately, hidden deliberately, and placed recently — recently measured against a thing older than any kingdom on this road.

The party carries it. It is unidentified; nobody among them could cast detect magic when they found it.

The road between Reme and Fairhill is dangerous

Nine days of travel produced two leucrottas, three stirges, eight giant wolf spiders, a farming family murdered in their own yard, and a wizard’s ambush laid with animated corpses.

Travellers on this stretch go armed, go in numbers, or do not arrive. Corian kept the party off the tradeway proper for the first four days, under the eaves of the woods on its northern side — slower and muddier, and his stated reason was that the road is for people who want to be seen on it.

Leucrottas hunt the hills north of Reme

A mated pair with a yearling lairs roughly two hundred feet up a hillside four days north of Reme, in a dry scrape under an overhang.

They hunt by mimicry: the adult produces a voice — a man, a woman, a child or a domestic animal in pain — from one position while the young one waits in ambush along the path anyone would take to reach it. The lure is a direction, not a victim. They lair with the remains of earlier victims, over a long period and in layers, and they crack bone deliberately for marrow.

A game trail along the hill shoulder shows their tracks: hooved, with a stride too long for deer and the hind prints falling outside the fore.

The pair the party killed was not necessarily the only one.

Cross-Domain Links

• The Smiling Skull — the monument itself, keyed as an encounter in Chapter 1 - The Wizard’s Amulet
• Leucrotta and Young Leucrotta — the creatures
• The Tradeway, Reme, Fairhill
• Timeline — the nine-day journey, day by day
• Chapter 01 Session 01 Wrap Up — where these were staged and ruled