World Arcanum - Geography - Stillwater

t is a small and sleepy town, hardly more than a village, which sits nestled in the hills just below the Gray Mountains. History was once made in Stillwater, and for a few moments there was a boom of industry and trade…but the city's heyday was short-lived, and Prosperity passed through just as most other travelers do: hurriedly, on Its way to somewhere else.

There is only the faintest trace remaining of the great Technological Revolution, which once swept through this town like wildfire. A keen observer might see the weathered sign which still points the way to a mine long abandoned, or the old engine that rusts, unfed and untended, in a weedy back lot; these things are like the watermark of a flood upon a high wall. In the end, Stillwater has not changed much since the day that Gilbert Bates built his first steam engine here. Dwarven traders still come down from the quiet hills, bringing jewelry and steel, leaving with food, ale and leather. Trappers and prospectors come and go, bringing their wares to the Assay Office at first thaw and first frost. The market for good furs is brisk, and some men can scrape out a living with a pie tin, panning gold dust from the freezing mountain streams. Bounty hunters are the richest of the lot; a single ogre's ear is worth 10 gold crowns, more than enough to see most mountain men through the winter.

There is one tavern in town, a place with sawdust on the floor and its oak bar ringed by many a glass of the local rotgut liquor. The mountains seem to breed a proud silence in men and dwarves, and nothing but hard drink can ever loosen their tongues; only when a few drinks have gone down the gullet do the tales begin to spin. If one is very fortunate, someone there may be willing to tell of the mysterious Stillwater Giant - that strange creature which is neither bear nor ogre, but walks the upper slopes of the Gray Mountains in the undying snow. Any man who has worked those mountains for more than a few years has a tale of the Giant: of tracks unnaturally huge, which a hunter followed until the author of those tracks leapt across a crevasse some thirty feet across; or a terrifying shout which rang out over the peaks in the dead of night, the roar of a great voice which was not man, not ogre, not wind nor water nor beast, but came full-throated from the mouth of a thing Unknown; of enormous boulders which came crashing down suddenly from above, nearly crushing a man and mule on some precarious ledge; or the mangled remains of orcs that were found in a narrow defile, torn to pieces by an enraged beast which disdained to eat their rank corpses after they were slain…