Across Ustalav lie the scattered settings of tales of woe, monuments to historical tragedies, irreligious altars, stains of existential imbalance, and more unspeakable corruptions of earth and stone. From these vaults of horror creep more than just shuddersome tales. All too often, the terrors of legend themselves spring forth, authors of outrages and the spawn of blasphemies upon which death and sanity hold no rein. Endlessly these accursed sites call to heroes and lore-seekers, adventurers intent on putting an end to their mysteries and lingering corruption. Few who hearken to these dark summons return, and the scarred bodies and shattered minds of those who do only strengthen the chilling grip of these bastions of fear.
What follows is a selection of Ustalav’s most infamous haunted locations and cursed sites. While the country’s people shun innumerable sites of local miseries and misfortunes, those here number among the greatest scars afflicting the Ustalavic countryside—those places whose miseries grow greater and more malignant year after year. Fireside tales paint fearful portraits of these locations, their grim masters, the best known of their shadowy residents, and the unexplainable things that haunt their halls, but few claim to have actually ventured within sight of these grim edifices. Thus, revelations beyond the scattered details collected herein await discovery by future bands of the brave and foolhardy.
Bastardhall
Eternal Bastion of Blasphemies
Woe to those in whose veins f lows the blood of Bastardhall, for every drop is a sanguine link in immortal bindings neither age nor anguish must ever be allowed to rust.
What happened at Castle Arudora in 4213 AR was terrible but swift. It began the night a scullery maid whispered of admitting a stranger carrying a swaddled bundle into Lord Raudltz Arudora’s library, and of how that stranger bore a shocking resemblance to the centuries-old statues of the family’s nobly armored patriarch, the lost paladin Lord Eragayl Arudora. The following day seven messengers raced from the castle with summons for the family’s most distant kin. Yet what urgency prompted the call, none would ever know.
Few saw the black coach that stormed through the village of Maiserene, but the crack of its driver’s whip splintered the peace of the quiet community. That night, a fog rose across Lake Laroba, blotting out the island fortress of the Arudora save for ghostly glimpses, and has refused to fall in the ages since. Nothing but the black coach—the harbinger of death—has left the castle since.
Few dare to guess what fate befell the Arudora family, but whatever curse afflicted the respected noble clan proved virulent and persistent. The villagers of Maiserene had little hope as dark things came upon them in the night, the brutalized corpses of castle servants and older deceased residents that shrieked and gibbered and dragged many back across the misty bridge. The residents managed to destroy the wooden bridge reaching out to the castle, but no tool or craft could mar the spectral span that rose to replace it. In the face of such terrors, the faith of the town’s church of Aroden faltered and failed, and ultimately the people of Maiserence scattered or stood alone against the night.
Now, Castle Arudora—the fortress fearful tales and maledictions name Bastardhall—stands mysterious and silent, but for one year of each century. Then, the nameless curse of the Arudoras manifests and rides out, an unnatural coach of blackest evil that scours Varno and beyond in search of occupants. The coach knows its passengers and bids them enter of their own will; should these fearfully specific riders refuse, the coach departs with its mysterious driver’s promise to return in a week’s time, when his words will no longer be a request, but a demand. For centuries the people of Varno have feared the black coach, and spread rumors of why it claims those it does—that the victims are secret witches, the kin of saints, relatives of the Arudora servants, or the culprits of secret crimes. Whatever the reason, the fearful have long attempted to avoid or fight the coach, but all have failed. A peasant army even marched on Bastardhall in 4413 and burned the accursed palace to the ground. But, a century later, when the mists parted, the castle stood restored, even grown in its number of towers, and the coach’s six midnight steeds galloped forth once more.
Today, the people of Cesca, Corvischior, and scattered hamlets dread the turning of the century and pray they’ll never spy Bastardhall’s black coach. Those daring few who have sought the castle out tell of a ruined village where frightened shades still huddle and an ethereal bridge reaches into the mists, while dark shapes teeming amid the black waters scatter at the passage of something elusive but massive. Divine servants and potent arcanists have attempted to probe the island fortress, but their powers reveal only greater mysteries, such as a veil of incredible holy might that rings the island like a divine prison. Yet still rumors and sightings f ly weird and wild, claiming that servants of the goddess Urgathoa ply Lake Laroba on dark skiffs, that things long dead or never born circle the castle towers and feed upon all who enter the mist, and that those who draw near and listen at the cursed earth might feel a terrible thrum, as of relentless drums in the depths or the pulsing of a monstrous heart. Few will ever know the truth of what lies within the halls, among the towers, or buried beneath the cellars of the accursed castle, but again the time draws close, and soon the black coach will bring a new generation of Bastardhall’s scions home once more.
Casnoriva
Academy of Arcane Insanity
After aiding the armies of Soividia Ustav in founding his nation, the Varisian wizard Casnori constructed his sprawling, star-shaped manor amid the mountains of Virholt. For years he taught apprentices and advised the kings of Ustalav, until finally departing Golarion to explore other realms. Before the Whispering Tyrant made his presence in the world known again, the lich struck out at the school of magic at Casnoriva, trapping the scholars and students there amid their own extradimensional sanctuaries, and unleashed terrors from the planes to twist the estate’s halls and hunt its residents. Silent and mysterious, the halfpreserved ruin of Casnoriva still stands, though masterless magics endlessly war around its floating stone towers.
Castle Corvischior
Laboratory of the Vampire Count
Across the lake from the county seat of Varno stands the castle of Corvischior. This was once known as Korsinoria Palace in brighter days, when heroic counts opened the citadel’s gates to their people in grand festivals, yet the eyes of the once majestic griffin-gargoyles have blackened with tears of neglect and the gardens’ armies of gay topiaries have melded into a shapeless terror. While still the home of Varno’s ruling family, the Tiriacs, the land’s people believe their lords forsook them long ago in favor distant, debauched courts. In truth, since Count Ristomaur’s supposed death in 4521, the land has known a single lord: Count Ristomaur Tiriac himself. For centuries, the reluctant vampire has sought a cure for his death-like condition, seeking out the brightest minds in alchemy and arcana and secretly spiriting them back to Corvischior to toil in search of some alchemical salvation. The once glimmering halls and spires of Castle Corvischior lie abandoned but for strange guardians and the spectres of the Tiriac family servants who, under the mastery of the crone-like Radaya, eternally suffer in a purgatory of their final moments. Below, the cellars house a vast dungeon of profane laboratories, unsettling surgeries, chemical oubliettes, experiment prisons, and lodging for an army of savants, both living and dead. Among it all, Tiriac and his most trusted advisors oversee ever more outlandish experiments, eternally hopeful for some miraculous breakthrough, even as they feed failure after grotesque failure into the caverns deep beneath Lake Korsinoria.
The Furrows
Wasteland of Trenches and War Scars
A scar sprawls across the heart of Ustalav, scourged not by necromancy or monsters, but by vicious human cruelty. What was once the lush Ardealian farmland known as the Furcina Plain now lies dead and barren, its residents slain, its farms scorched and salted, and its land scored by the trenches of warmongers compelled by greed and pride.
In 4687, infuriated by the mismanagement of Ardeal’s wealthy lands and taking advantage of the new prince’s inexperience, the knights of count Aericnein Neska seized control of Furcina. Managing to avoid royal censure through delays and manipulations, Neska sought time to force Count Olomon Venacdahlia into ceding the lands to him. The stubborn count of Ardeal proved too proud to concede the largely fallow lands, raising a small army of unprepared nobles and conscripted peasants to drive out Neska’s well-trained knights. Although well outnumbered, Barstoi’s soldiers fortified themselves amid the land’s very fields, digging miles of trenches and ramparts to withstand the waves of Ardealian conscripts. Bloody skirmishes and grim conditions typified the 6 years of battle that came to be known as the War without Rivals.
Facing growing royal ire, Count Neska withdrew his troops from Furcina, but not without striking a crippling parting blow, his retreating knights burning the regions’ fields and forests and salting the ashes behind them. The demoralized Ardealian survivors reclaimed a worthless wasteland scattered with the bones of their fellows and the ruins of once-bountiful villages. Although Prince Aduard’s court eventually forced Barstoi to pay recompense, it was a pitiful sum paid over the course of decades.
Today, the Furrows—as locals came to call trenchscarred Furcina—remains much as Barstoi’s troops left it decades ago. Although some life desperately struggles through the ashes and poisoned ground, the land is largely dead—yet hardly abandoned. The village of Feldgrau, once the region’s largest community, lies silent, its residents slaughtered and buried in a mass grave, yet their memories linger on. Dilapidated noble estates rest like gigantic, empty skulls amid their dusty lands, the House of Ensland and Candlehalls being the most infamous, frequented by insidious gamblers and cavorting ghost lights. Only dust and poison sludge runs through the parched beds of the Millrun River and Bainecreek, where contagion and muck take on a predatory semblance of life. Crossbough Bridge, the site of the villainous Coronel Jebaid’s capture and drowning, still stands resilient, though none who enter its covered expanse ever reach their destination. Among the dead rows of the Ripe Earth Orchards something unnatural has brought a new, deviant life to the blackened fields, while amid the charred Thrushsong Woods the ash ghosts of ancient trees and terrified fey wander in search of vengeance. Yet most sickening are the black veins of the Peasant Graves and Dead Man’s Maze, the two largest labyrinths of trenches scarring the festering land, where the embittered remains of armies were left to rot and never told of their battles’ end.
Gallowspire
Prison of the Whispering Tyrant
Storytellers across Avistan and beyond tell the tale of the deathless wizard known as the Whispering Tyrant, his undead campaign to conquer the land and murder a god, and the alliance of heroes who buried him within his fortress. For many this is a heroic tale of righteousness, sacrifice, and hope. But those storytellers end their tales too soon, choosing to ignore the truth that Tar-Baphon was never slain, and in fact lives on, trapped with his greatest works and servants beneath the grim fastness of Gallowspire.
For nearly 900 years, Gallowspire has stood amid the ruins of Adorak, the lich lord’s city of death. Ensorcelled chains and blades festoon the grim tower, upon which the lich’s guardians suffer endless unlives, while gargantuan necromantic terrors await their master’s commands with the patience of the dead. Winding ascents, spiraling loggias, and chain-riddled tunnels climb the spire’s exterior, culminating in a horned terrace where the tarnished silver seal of the Shining Crusade bars entry, but only as a consequence of keeping the tower’s master sealed within.
The Garden of Lead
Pleasure Palace of the Damned
History tells of the Garden of Leids, where Ustalav’s kings once lounged amid extraordinary waterfall gardens and menageries of fantastic beasts. Soon after Dissayn, the Skeleton Countess, led the Whispering Tyrant’s hordes to the garden’s gates, she gathered nobles captured from throughout the land for a final fete. During the night, her skeletal minions f looded the palace’s winding halls, delicate pools, and enchanting canals with molten lead. Frozen as it was in its final moment, the catastrophically haunted gardens hold the corpses of its final costumed revelers, their bodies and grim finery magically and eternally encased in lead. Rumors also hold that Dissayn escaped destruction during the fall of Tar-Baphon and, in her madness, retreated here, indulging her unliving insanity as the tyrant-hostess of an endless grotesquery.
Ghasterhall
The Palace of Travesties
A true mastermind, the Whispering Tyrant let little go to waste. At the prison-library of Ghasterhall, known to some as the Palace of Travesties, the lich lord stored ancient texts of no immediate use, half-living alchemical and necromantic experiments, random relics, and other unthinkable or nameless curiosities and experiments. Here a horde of undying scholar-sentinels filled their immortal minds with lore and discoveries, a single skullsage bound to each scrap. With no master to make demands of it, the impregnable library stands quiet, the work in its bowels largely halted except for the endless experiments of its scrupulous curator, the demilich Gier.
Kalexcourt
Vault of the Witch-Priests
Amid the fogs of Ustalav stand the monuments of an age of savagery, when scarred barbarians did battle in the names of warlords, totems, gods, and beings that defied definition. For ages, Kalexcourt, the Fortress of Monoliths, stood amid the hills of Vieland. Here, on the ground holiest to the region’s lost Kellid tribes, the shamans, wise men, and witch-priests were committed back to the earth. While pale warriors stood sentinel upon gigantic, molar-like towers, the divine dead commingled in a rot of ages far beneath the soil, each interred corpse adding the memories of its life, informing an endless spirit moot in its inf luence over the beasts of the land and the eddies of fate. Yet centuries ago, Kalexcourt fell to the swords of the invading Varisians, and shamans were buried no more. Ages later, explorers delved into the mysteries of the mound fortress, discovering a conqueror’s ransom in golden torcs, legend-scrawled shields, and strange idols, but also awakening a terror ancient and hungry for minds. Dozens died within the mound, and only by toppling the entire ruin did two adventurers seal the ancient thing within the cavern-tombs below. All of Vieland knows the legend-lie of how the Treyes brothers discovered fantastic wealth within the tunnels of Kalexcourt, and how their unwary assistants destroyed the mysterious ruin. But only the hidden journal of Liron Treyes holds the truth: that amid the true wealth of Kalexcourt, the witch-priests of the ancient Kellids still lurk—and now know of their people’s slaughter.
The Saffron House
Manor at the Edge of Madness
Mired in the clinging murk of the Sclerain Swamp lolls a yellow stain amid the grasping black and green, a blotch on both nature and time that the swamp’s slow ages refuse to erase. Tinged the shade of rotting bandages, the aptly named Saffron House leaks its wrongness onto both its surroundings and those who enter, its nausea-inducing shades quickly overwhelming any fear of the things that lurk in the mire and drive victims toward the sagging estate. Those who explore the seemingly abandoned, sheet-shrouded rooms eventually realize an unnerving feature: the layout of the house itself. Many rooms that serve as vital organs of a home feel underformed or atrophied, uninviting in their tightness or crippled layout, while other chambers seem like vestigial afterthoughts, near useless in their confines. Slowly the realizations dawn: that thin things move in the spaces between the walls, that a thousand suicides never freed owner Cleid Thord from his home, and that the house’s noxious color is the manifestation of an omnipresent, otherworldly intruder visible through the psychically soaked parchment of a traumatized reality—one that still watches.