The Sorrow is the corruption that has consumed most of the world beyond the Silver Vale. A creeping blight, it spread across the land after the Starfall and killed or corrupted everything in its path, including the gods. Only within the reach of the Silver Flame’s light does its advance halt, which is why Argentum and the farmland around it remain safe.
Effects
The Sorrow is a slow, virulent decay. It rots plants, drives animals to madness or listlessness, and turns those exposed to it into hollow, corrupted versions of themselves. Hazel knows that trees it afflicts do not grow toward the light and that plants wither and blight, and she had heard that a badly corrupted plant can become a hazard.1 Beasts it takes are reshaped, like the corrupted dire wolves that came out of the forest at the Standing Stone.2 Hazel says such things are still animals, with hearts, lungs and brains that stop them when they stop working.2 People who succumb to it become Sorrowsworn.3
Hazel told Iva that, from what she understood, the Sorrow feeds off emotion rather than working through the body, though she did not understand much about it.4 Rhea Larnas told Temerity that magic hastens the Sorrow, but that used correctly it is a weapon against it.5 The figure in Temerity’s vision spoke of the Sorrowsworn as rising from those too consumed by grief to live as human any longer.6
In the shape of a wolf, Hazel found a faint tinge of the Sorrow on the air at Crick's Bend, stronger than in Argentum, where everything is cleared of it, and much weaker than what she lived with day to day in Silverthorn.7 The Festival of Bells is declared in late autumn or early winter, when the chill of the Sorrow is felt most, and fills the air with chiming to drown out its silence.
Beyond the Vale
The Synod teaches that nothing civilized survives outside the protection of the Vale, and that those who live beyond it are corrupted by the Sorrow, or else cultists, brigands or madmen. Amber Deepdraft had never heard of anyone surviving the Sorrow.8 Dorian Draken claimed to have survived it by superior fortitude, calling it a slow-acting toxin that one can steel oneself against. Nobody who heard him believed him except Luma.9 He named the City of Ghosts, far beyond the eastern edge of the Vale, as a city the blight of the Sorrow had doomed.9
Rhea Larnas told Temerity that mages who accept conscription fight beside the Order of the Lantern, and sometimes the Dragoons of Bahamut, beyond the borders when needed.5 A Sorrowsworn, she said, is nowhere near the worst thing the Sorrow has to offer, and the worse things are what the Dragoons are for.5
The Vale’s Defenses
The Silver Flame’s light holds the Sorrow back across the floor of the Vale. Hecate told the party that at the edge of the Vale the protection is weaker, always has been, and seems to grow weaker year over year.2 Near that edge the Sisters of the Shattered Mother ward the country around their farm from the Standing Stone. Each ring of incantation cut into the stone runs longer than the one before it, because words strong enough to keep the Sorrow back grow harder to find every time.2 Hecate said a renewal of the wards once bought a decade of protection, and that the one the party helped with might last a year at best.4
The Order of the Lantern protects the city from creatures corrupted by the Sorrow. Its Light Wardens dispose of lesser corrupted creatures.6 When a person turns, dealing with them is the work of the Inquisition’s Purifiers.4 Cassia Brightshield called the Dragoons of Bahamut the most sacred and noble order in the fight against the Sorrow, and its first and last defense.1 Maren Frostburn’s mother, a Light Warden, died in a Sorrow incursion.1
Beliefs
Wellby Emberthumb understood that the corruption of arcane magic created the Sorrow through the Starfall.3 Ashryn holds that the Sorrow is a name men gave to something they do not understand.7 Temerity came to believe, from what she glimpsed when she died, that the dead go somewhere dark, alone and sorrowful: that they return to the Sorrow.110 Asked whether the Sorrow could ever be cleared, Hazel did not think so, since no one had ever eradicated it.10
History
Session 4
Temerity told the party she would not carry it on her conscience if their magic invited the Sorrow in. Hazel answered that the spell she meant to cast would hold the Sorrow back.11 Calypso passed on word from Hecate that the Sorrow was getting worse.11
Session 5
Before the party left Argentum, Hazel warned them that word from Silverthorn said the Sorrow had grown worse in her absence, and that they might meet things it had mutated.7 At Crick’s Bend, Ashryn told the party that the Starfall brought to the world what mankind has called the Sorrow.7
Session 6
The Sisters’ warding ritual drew three corrupted dire wolves, and a concentration of the Sorrow’s corruption in the woods stopped it half done.2 Hunting it beyond the edge of the protection, the party found three Light Wardens with a pale, gaunt man who said he had been so sad and so lonely that he needed to be around people. Black ooze poured from his mouth and eyes, his arms stretched and split, and the Wardens’ captain named him a Sorrowsworn.2 He had been the farmer who went missing.3
Session 7
With the Sorrow’s presence gone, the Sisters finished their ritual.4 Iva spent the evening asking whether she would turn into one of those things, having been stabbed by it and covered in its ichor.4
Session 8
Iva had taken the stories of people turning into Sorrowsworn for Order propaganda.3 On the road to Crick’s Bend, Temerity worried that the ritual had only moved the Sorrow somewhere else.3
Session 11
At the Dancing Sword, Dorian Draken told the party he had survived the Sorrow and found his sword in the City of Ghosts.9
Session 13
Deep under Argentum, the party met a stretch of pressure in the mineshaft that felt like nothing they had met before, the Sorrow included.12 Hazel knew the cloaker they killed for a creature of the world below, not of the Sorrow.12
Session 14
Temerity told Hazel that what she glimpsed when she died felt a lot like the Sorrow.1 Reading Eliath Drace’s letter, Rhysaene asked whether the sickness it described was the Sorrow. The Sorrow is no secret, so it was strange that Eliath would avoid the word.1
Session 15
Sparring with Temerity, Emeric Vael asked why she had come. “To fight against the Sorrow,” she said, and he told her that was something to do, not a reason to do it.10 Later Temerity told the party what she believed about death and the Sorrow.10
Session 16
Hazel asked Temerity to spar with her, since the Sorrow twists, mutates and changes the natural order, and Temerity should face something that worked the same way.8
Session 17
Rhea told Temerity that purification means purifying the Silver Vale, not the mage, and that mages are conscripted to fight the Sorrow.5
Session 18
The figure in Temerity’s vision told her, “Your enemy is the Sorrow itself,” and that she was chosen by divine providence to be a champion against it.6 When Rhysaene told the party that Lathiel had been a devil, Hazel said the Sorrow does not discriminate, and she did not believe they should either.6
Session 19
Madam Kulp told the party on 9 Nightdeep, 1714 PSF, that her tut-krogh caterpillars might be the only ones left in the world, if the Sorrow has taken the others.13