Ashington Manor

What remains of Ashington Manor is the burnout and rotting husk of what was once a stately manor for the Ashington family. An infamous landmark purported to be cursed and haunted in local folklore, only bandits and wild beasts will willingly dwell in its walls now. The manor's legend is well-founded, for every 17 years the Ashington Curse ensures that a mass murder will be echoed on the manor's grounds. Every iteration of the mass murder is preserved in a time shift that changes the features of the manor in a manner similar to Castle Tristenoira. Thus, Ashington Manor exists during the periods of its time shifts as a temporal distortion.

Ultimately, should the curse be allowed to come to full fruition, the manor will disappear entirely as it is engulfed by the Mists.

History

History Prior to the Ashington Curse

The portrait gallery of Ashington Manor depicted a transition from the kinder generations of old to the cruelty of the younger generations. Elsewhere, in its library, four generations of Ashington Lords collected works of occult lore. The final lord to do so, Herod Ashington, was the then current lord some eighty-five years ago. Although he was only a dabbler in black magic and not a true spellcaster, Lord Herod was particularly knowledgeable in Vistani magic thanks to his friendship with a couple of darklings.

A depraved and vile nobleman, Lord Herod held regular gatherings of debauchery and perversion with his fellow nobles at the manor. Sometimes unfortunate passersby were abducted as "guests" for the parties, and most of said guests lost their lives as "party favors". The Vistani girl, Rozaleen, was one such victim, kidnapped by Lord Herod's cronies Rostoff and Hanford.

Rozaleen's Murder and Curse

Although Rozaleen's kidnappers had taken her for purposes of sexual exploitation, Lord Herod recognized her abilities as a seer and fortune teller and demanded a night's entertainment with the reading of the tarokka. Having received an earlier premonition of ill omen, Rozaleen was nonetheless forced to give the readings for Herod and his guests, all echoing surmounting doom. Doubting the truthfulness of the foreboding readings despite the anxiety of his guests, Lord Herod threatened Rozaleen with her life to provide entertaining fortune telling instead of frightening. Rozaleen warned Herod that none of them should leave the manor grounds should she not be able to. Infuriated, Herod began strangling Rozaleen in the middle of her tarokka reading. Before she died, Rozaleen transformed her warning into a curse. That night was eight and half decades ago.

On the following evening, Lord Herod and his fellows gathered again at the manor. The mood of his guests was notably less happy than they were before the previous night's end. Egged on by the evil bard Maekon, Lord Herod came to suspect his guests of harboring sympathies to the deceased Vistani girl. Consumed with rage over this perceived betrayal, Lord Herod slaughtered his guests down to the last man and woman, though his servants fled the scene. Lord Herod lost his life to the death gaze of Maekon, whom was secretly one of the Vehrteig. Unaffected by Rozaleen's curse thanks to her nature, Maekon took Rozaleen's tarokka deck and left. Said tarokka deck was a highly powerful magical item that granted Rozaleen's curse such power that the cycle of murder and betrayal would happen again, albeit with different individuals and under different circumstances, upon the manor grounds once every 17 years on the anniversary of Rozaleen's murder.