BRACKENWALL VILLAGE
It’s toward evening when you cross the marsh back to the west road and arrive in the Horde’s populated zone. And if you’d ever been worried that the Horde had planned to start aggressing on Theramore while you lived there, the sight of Brackenwall Village soothes your fears considerably. Village is not underselling it - where Theramore is a bonafide castle town supporting over five thousand in the surrounding areas, Brackenwall is a crude little hub (by anyone’s standards), with a resident population of perhaps a hundred, and another hundred or so scattered through a few little hamlets nearby. You passed one of these hamlets on your way to Brackenwall, but elected not to stop there. Toiling away within, you exchanged wary stares with the occupants (principally orcs, with a smattering of dark furred tauren) who went about the work of trying to wring some lasting value out of the marshland. Like the humans on the other side of the region, they appear to be building retaining walls and digging drainage ditches to make more of the swampland farmable. A variety of small, nonuniform plots of vegetation suggestion a scattergun approach to farming, though they have enough visible, operable silos to suggest they aren’t starving; and neither are the constantly squealing and grunting pigs they seem to farm everywhere.

Spoiler: {Fluff} Pigs!
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These are big, red skinned beasts with fine fur and a nasty temperament, but the capacity to eat just about anything they are fed including decaying swamp matter: a marvellous breed of swine known to the Alliance as rouge hogs. Produced by the efforts of a small cartel of half-orc swineherds after crossing the Draenic felboar with the Azerothian common forest boar, the breeders selecting the least demonic offerings in each generation until arriving at the the final result that retains the felboar’s incredibly omnivoracity with the forest boar’s not poisonousness. They aren’t the tastiest bacon, but you can raise them anywhere and feed them anything even vaguely organic. Just remember to use stone fencing.

Spoiler: {Fluff}Jakk’ari’s Herbalism: Routine Success
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As a child of the desert, you know a little about trying to coax some mercy from a harsh land. It seems like these villages are under local direction to experiment agriculturally. You recognize some of the plants in these plots - strains of salt-tolerating tubers and soil enriching grains which speak to a longer term plan of taming the recalcitrant earth here. The silos, you presume, must be topped up with grain shipments from the more productive farms in the Barrens, or the Horde’s bread basket, Mulgore.


The sloppy maintenance on the palisades walls of Brackenwall shows the ravages of peace clearly, while the pair of orc grunts guarding the maingate both appear to be well into the second half of their lives; both the exposed midsections of the male and female guard showing the slow but steady victory of paunch over abs. But they wear their iconic spiked shoulder plates and leather chest harnesses proudly, each leaning lazily on their oversized axes as they wrap up their conversation and turn their attention to your arrival. And getting into the village isn’t as hard as you might have thought, either. There’s a moment of discord when Jakk’ari steps up and the guards try to converse with him in orcish, but the single guard in the village’s only gate tower, a Darkspear troll girl who couldn’t be more than fifteen, calls down from her perch and cheerfully facilitates the exchange.

They want to know if the elf and the human are Alliance. Your group tells them they’re not, just Theramoran civilains. They want to know if you’ve come to trade. Your group tells them you’re not, just looking for information. They want to know what information. Your group tells them you’d rather not say, and would it be possible to speak to the village authority. They let you pass, tell you not to make trouble, and seem to take for granted that you won’t be too much to handle if you do.

Spoiler: OOC
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Jakk’ari can roll me persuasion here. His routine persuasion is enough to mean that they’ll get into the village no matter what, but the quality of this roll with determine the general mood of the Brackenwall locals to the group.


Inside the village, the streets are flanked by rows of housing of various states of permanency; some ragged huts with linen walls that seem to have been doomed to half construction; some more respectable residences of clay brick, solid wooden frames, and the Horde’s popular red shingle roofing with carved wooden horn ornamentation. It’s only a short walk down the main thoroughfare towards the village hall, and you keep close to your group as you get the side-eye from the locals.

Notably in the village square, you have easy access to all the staple buildings you’d expect. The comforting song of hammer on metal rings out from a nearby blacksmith, in which the towering, hunched figure of a tauren bangs together the chain links of some kind of animal harness. What passes for a stubby wizard tower, wooden and crooked and festooned with tribal fetishes, has its doors open at the bottom floor, and it radiates the same arcane glow you expect from the business level operations of such places. It’s like a troll mage, or perhaps a particularly scholarly witchdoctor is the proprietor, but you hear a peal of elvish laughter come from within before the inaudible, normal conversation resumes. A large open air cooking pit is being used by numerous villagers with pots and grills projected over the coals, though the display is dominated by a huge, brawny ogre who is cooking a plucked and stuffed plainstrider the size of a small horse. He cranks the rotisserie with one thick arm, the one cyclopean eye in is singular head tracking naturally to Mor’Lag with curiosity as you pass by. And a big, bustling building which must be an inn or tavern is just beginning to vibrate with the rhythmic dum-da-da-da-dum-da-da-da recreational drum beats. It’s big enough to rival the village hall nearby, and is probably larger than the taverns back in Theramore; presumably, because it’s the only gig in town for Horde folk passing through from the Barrens. There’s no rain yet; but a grumbling sky suggests it’s going to be another miserably stormy night; and the idea of sleeping in a warm room with a locked door and a belly full of a hot meal and ale enters your mind, weighing itself against a miserable, rainy alternative and another cycle of make-camp-break-camp.

Spoiler: Your Options!
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There’s nothing stopping you from shuffling into the city in tactical diamond formation, speaking to the village chief, and then strafing warilly out again to camp in the storm. But it might be more fun to indulge your character’s curiosities in a Horde village that seems not to be hostile to them. To further your primary objective, Jakk’ari probably wants to head into the village hall and look to talk discreetly to the village chief about the cadet. Everyone else can do what they like. I’ve described a couple of locations, but if you want to skulk around looking for some more specific trouble, let me know and give me a roll and I’ll see what you find. I have seeded the scene with things that might be of interest to your characters, but the bait is yours to take, or spurn.