During the waning days of the High Regency, the ignoble but wealthy Alastairn family purchased themselves land and title and built Parenix Manor atop Mornrax Hill. There in the wilderness — the only civilization being the Bridgeroad Inn a few miles away — they set their laborers to work.
Five generations of Alastairn rules at Parenix, each one more cruel and eccentric than the last. Mornrax Hill was no natural mound, but cairn to some forgotten dynasty of pagan kings. The Alastairn delved deeper and deeper each generation, finding older and older chambers from kingdoms, civilizations and races long forgotten.
A century ago, long after the High Regency fractured into the Warring Thrones and eventually collapsed into the Seven City States, the last scion of the Alastairn succumbed to greed, perversion and blasphemy and the windows of Parenix Manor went dark but for occasional ghost light.
Only the tales told around the lonely hearth of the Bridgeroad Inn — miraculously still active even in this decrepit age — remember Parenix Manor and hint at the wealth and secrets of the Alastairn family that might lie below Mornrax Hill.
I.E. 