Oldfen
The Walled Grave
Steel and sacrifice—this is the way of Valkenmar. And today, you will give what must be given.“These walls are not built in cruelty, but in necessity.They do not rise to punish, but to protect. If you suffer within them, know that your pain buys the lives of countless others.
You were once men and women, but the Blight has taken that from you. Now, you are only the sickness, the rot, the slow march of death. And death cannot be granted mercy. Death does not deserve freedom.”-— Baron Malric Valkenmar
Oldfen is a ruined settlement in Faulmoor remembered as one of the most notorious containment failures of the Rotmire Blight. During the first year of the Rotmirecrisis, Blight,a perimeter wall was built around the desperate rulers of Faulmoor attempted to contain the outbreak in Oldfen by constructing a wooden wall, encircling the entire town in a cruel perimeter. The walls were meant to keep the infectionafflicted frompopulation spreadinginside. beyondThe Oldfen’stown borders—butwas ineffectively reality, they became a prison of sufferingsealed and death. The remnants of these rotting wooden barricades still stand in places, their timbers warped by time and decay. They bear the scars of claw marks, bloodstains, and the deep grooves of desperate hands tryingabandoned to climbits or tear their way out. In some places, skeletal remains still hang from the spikes, grim reminders of those who made it to the top but not beyond.fate.
Overview
Sections of Oldfen's quarantine wall still stand. The remaining timber is warped and decayed, marked by damage from people who attempted to escape and by the later breach that allowed Blighted dead to spread into the surrounding countryside.
The settlement within is largely ruined. Streets, homes, storehouses, and older commercial buildings survive in varying states of collapse, while the remains of quarantine works continue to define the landscape.
Old burial pits and disposal grounds lie around the perimeter, further marking the area as a place shaped by containment rather than rescue.
History
Oldfen was enclosed during the first year of the Blight as Faulmoor's authorities attempted to prevent the crisis from spreading beyond the town.
Soldiers were stationed ataround thesethe walls,perimeter orderedwith orders to killprevent anyescape. whoThe triedsealed population was left inside as conditions deteriorated.
The policy failed. Enough of Oldfen's dead eventually broke through the perimeter to escape—whethercreate infecteda ormajor not.outward Somemovement of theseBlighted. menThat breach contributed directly to later disasters in the surrounding region, including the fall of Ashenmoor.
Present Day
Oldfen remains overrun and womenhazardous. Its surviving structures and cellars attract scavengers despite the risk, particularly because stories persist that valuables, silver, and old household wealth remain hidden beneath the ruins.
The town's greater significance is historical. Oldfen is remembered as proof that quarantine could become an instrument of mass death without ultimately achieving the containment it was meant to thisprovide.
Notable Locations
The Quarantine Wall
The surviving wall sections are the most visible remains of the containment effort. Their construction and later breach define Oldfen's history.
Burial Grounds
Unmarked pits and disposal sites remain around the settlement, created during the period when soldiers and laborers attempted to remove bodies from the quarantine perimeter.
The Ruined Town
The interior contains damaged homes, stores, workshops, cellars, and other remnants of the past, either as shattered survivors who lost their minds, or as undead horrors cursed to wander their old posts. It is said that at night, one can still hear the echoes of old commands, the clash of steel, and the cries of the desperate. Beyond the walls, unmarked burial pits stretch into the nearby wilderness—places where soldiers once dumped the dead to prevent further spread. These places are unnaturally silent, as if the land itself remembers the suffering.
Despite its ruin, Oldfen is said to hold secrets beneath its decayed streets. Rumors persist that before the Blight, the town’settlement's wealthier merchants and noble families hid their treasures away, burying gold, heirlooms, and valuables in concealed vaults and forgotten cellars. Desperate scavengers and daring smugglers risk the horrors of Oldfen to search for these lost riches, believing that wealth still lingers beneath the rot. Some claim to have found untouched caches of silver and relics, while others vanish without a trace, their fates unknown. It is whispered that the dead guard these treasures, drawn not only by the hunger of the pre-Blight but by the lingering greed of their past lives. The town, once a place of trade and prosperity, has become a gambler’s folly—a place where fortune and death walk hand in hand.
Oldfen is more than just a town ravaged by the Blight—it is a monument to a terrible mistake, a place where mercy was abandoned in the name of containment. Now, the dead rule the streets, the ghosts of the fallen linger, and the few who venture within rarely return.life.