Dust-Hollow

This village is a grim warning. It sits in the center of a 5-mile radius of grey, blowing silt—a "Fallow-Scar" where a massive Army supply-farm was started and then abandoned. The grass was stripped for a thousand horses that never stayed, and the soil died. The villagers here aren't farmers; they are desperate "Sifters" looking for the tools and gear buried when the farm was evacuated. The "Gristle": Life here is hard because it's an artificial wasteland. They look out at the green horizon of the rest of the Gap with a mixture of envy and resentment.

Established in Y175, Dust-Hollow is Baron Vark's way of picking the pockets of a dead empire. Grand Marshall Seraphim’s strategy of "50 battalions over time" left the Gap littered with caches of equipment that were delivered but never distributed. Vark realized that the "Grand Deception" left a fortune in the sand—swords that never drew blood and shields that never saw a fiend. The history of this village is one of scavenging the Marshall's incompetence, turning the waste of a swindler's army into the tools of a halfling's tyranny.