Location
Coltgrave Junction
Created by Summon Worlds creatorColtgrave Junction sprawls across a dusty crossroads where two major rail lines converge with the Old Merchant's Road, creating a vital trading hub that has grown prosperous and sinister in equal measure. For three decades, Sheriff Wendel Crove has maintained iron-fisted control over this frontier town, having methodically eliminated each of his predecessors to consolidate power—a rise he euphemistically refers to as "promotion." The courthouse perches atop the highest hill overlooking the settlement, and beside it stands a grotesque monument: a cottonwood tree, long since killed and drained of life, kept vertical only by the deep grooves worn into its remaining branches from countless ropes. Each spring, the impossibly dead tree bears small, black fruit the size of apples—leathery, organic, undeniably alive—which the deputies hastily bury before word spreads to passing travelers. The law enforcement here operates under a doctrine of absolute authority, with each badge forged from the melted brass casings of bullets the office deems "justified," and the current tally numbers eight hundred and seventy-two. A grim reputation clings to Coltgrave Junction: in the thirty-one years of Crove's tenure, not a single fugitive has ever escaped south from the town alive. The railroad brings commerce and strangers, yet few linger long once they sense the corruption that has calcified into the very foundation of local governance. Those who call Coltgrave Junction home do so out of necessity rather than choice, bound by economic dependence to a place where justice has become indistinguishable from murder.
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Landmarks
The Badge Foundry
A cramped, heat-warped workshop occupying the basement of the courthouse, where Sheriff Crove's deputies melt down brass bullet casings in a blackened furnace and cast them into badges. The air is thick with acrid smoke and the smell of hot metal. Shelves line the walls, holding hundreds of finished badges in various states of tarnish, each one a record of a 'justified' killing. A ledger sits on a scarred workbench, its pages filled with names, dates, and calibers—a meticulous accounting of every bullet transformed into law. The floor is stained with spilled brass and something darker that never quite washes clean.
The Hanging Tree's Root Vault
Beneath the gnarled, rope-scarred cottonwood stands a sunken stone chamber accessible through a rusted iron grate buried in the earth. The deputies use this hidden vault to inter the black fruit that grows each spring, along with records of their 'justified' killings carved into brass plates. The air within is thick and sweet with decay, and adventurers who investigate may find evidence of far more than thirty-one years of burials—suggesting Sheriff Crove's tenure began long before he claims, or that the tree's dark harvest predates his rule entirely.