The Crowns
The northern extent of the Kingdom and the highest ground in it: snowfields, glaciers and ice-covered cliff where the air is too thin to fly. The Leprechauns cut their halls into the rock, keep the forges lit around the clock, and produce the finest metalwork in Everdew.
The Land
Rugged and treacherous, rising steadily northward to peaks nothing lives on. The lower slopes support hardy plants, a few animals and fewer predators; above that there is microscopic life and the occasional lost bird.
Everything here is a consequence of thin cold air. Wings that work in the Heartland generate a fraction of their lift at altitude, so a courier who tries the passes without acclimatising stalls, drops, and becomes a statistic. The Leprechauns solved this with machinery — cable lifts, spring-catapults, geared funiculars, prosthetic wings — and every one of those solutions is a thing that can break.
Beyond the peaks lie the Hinterlands, a province of the Goblin Kingdom in all but name, and past them the Rustlands, where everything the Crowns ever made eventually goes to rot.
The Leprechauns
Stoic, hardy and almost impossible to impress. They live indoors and underground by necessity and have made that necessity an aesthetic: Leprechaun halls are warm, close, loud with the forge, and lit at every hour.
They produce the Kingdom's best weapons and armour and would, by their own cheerful admission, do it for nothing — the gold is pleasant but the work is the point. This has made them very easy for the Crown to bargain with, and they know it.
Encounters
Roll d100. Thin air, and machinery in place of wings. Half the danger here is what happens when the machinery stops. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.
| d100 | Encounter | CR |
|---|---|---|
| 01–09 | 1d6 Leprechaun riggers servicing a cable lift, delighted to explain all of it | — |
| 10–16 | 2d8 snow fleas swarming a thaw patch — harmless, and a warning the ice is moving | 0 |
| 17–23 | 1 spring-catapult crew shooting freight over a col, with one seat going spare | — |
| 24–30 | wing failure at altitude: 1d3 couriers down on the glacier, and still alive | — |
| 31–36 | 2d6 ice-mites out of the glacier itself — a delegation, with a written grievance | ¼ |
| 37–42 | 1d3 ground beetles working the scree below the snowline | 2 |
| 43–48 | crevasse field under fresh snow, and every marker wand gone | — |
| 49–54 | 1d2 bark scorpions in a sun-warmed rock face | 4 |
| 55–60 | 1 frostbloom harvest party cutting at altitude, short-handed and paying well | — |
| 61–66 | 1d4 voles off a high pasture, wool-warm and worse-tempered | 6 |
| 67–72 | 1d2 shrews working the moraine, incapable of stopping | 7 |
| 73–77 | 1 fence lizard on the only warm rock for a mile | 10 |
| 78–82 | 1d2 ptarmigan — not predators, simply enormous, and not looking down | 10 |
| 83–87 | avalanche across the pass, with a hall's entire winter freight beneath it | — |
| 88–91 | 1d2 hedgehogs at the treeline: walking siege engines whose diet is people your size | 13 |
| 92–94 | 1 stoat, white, killing far past hunger | 15 |
| 95–97 | 1 hawk working the ridge lift, unhurried, with all day | 20 |
| 98–99 | 1 barn owl over the snowfield, silent, hearing a heartbeat beneath it | 19 |
| 00 | 1 great horned owl — the landlord of these peaks, and everything else pays rent | 23 |