Oldfen
“These walls are not built in cruelty, but in necessity.”
— 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 crisis, a perimeter wall was built around the town to keep the afflicted population inside. The town was effectively sealed and abandoned to its 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 wall made the town's social contract brutally simple: safety for everyone outside depended on denying escape to everyone inside.
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 around the perimeter with orders to prevent escape. The sealed population was left inside as conditions deteriorated.
The policy failed. Enough of Oldfen's dead eventually broke through the perimeter to create a major outward movement of Blighted. That breach contributed directly to later disasters in the surrounding region, including the fall of Ashenmoor.
Present Day
Oldfen remains overrun and hazardous. 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 provide.
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 settlement's pre-Blight life.