Southvale
Southvale is a river-and-farm settlement in Faulmoor whose relative fertility and livable terrain made it a refuge for wealth during the Rotmire Blight. What began as a small agricultural community changed rapidly as affluent refugees settled permanently and built fortified private estates beside the town's older homes.
Overview
Southvale occupies unusually productive country by Faulmoor standards. Farms, orchards, river access, and reliable produce gave the settlement value before the Blight and made it even more desirable once food became scarce elsewhere.
Southvale survived well enough to become desirable, and that success proved corrosive. The town still grows food while many families who once worked its fields can no longer afford the security that wealth purchased around them.
The influx of wealthy refugees altered the town's physical and social structure. Imported materials and private construction produced larger fortified estates beside older stone cottages and timber homes. Original residents increasingly found themselves pushed toward service work, overcrowded housing, poverty, or displacement.
Southvale has a modest wall and guarded checkpoints, but private mercenaries, money, and control of supplies matter more than conventional military strength.
History
Before the Blight, Southvale was known primarily as a small agricultural and river settlement.
The crisis brought people with enough wealth to purchase safety, property, labor, and food. A temporary refuge gradually became a permanent enclave, concentrating resources in the hands of newcomers while making access to ordinary necessities less equal.
Southvale's dark purple plums were expensive even before the Blight and have become nearly impossible to obtain outside the settlement, a small luxury that now carries outsized symbolic value.
Present Day
Class tension defines Southvale. Food, medicine, silver, protected housing, and armed security are distributed unevenly, and resentment toward wealthy residents has hardened as the wider crisis continues.
An executioner or persona known as the Copper Judge is blamed for killings of wealthy or corrupt figures. Victims are associated with copper coins forced into the mouth or throat. To the town's elite, the Judge is a murderer. To some among the poor, the figure represents vengeance against people believed to have purchased survival at everyone else's expense.
Notable Locations
The Gilded Pits
The Gilded Pits are an established Southvale location associated with the town's wealth and social divisions.
The Hearth & Oak Tavern
The Hearth & Oak Tavern is one of Southvale's established public houses.
The Lantern's Hollow
The Lantern's Hollow is another persistent location in local accounts, though its fuller role has not yet been firmly established in current public Lore.