The Monastery at Darnisol

Beyond the western borders of the Kingdom of Mercia, in the rugged foothills of the Tellarn Mountains above Pelican Lake sits the fabled Monastery of Darnisol. Darnisol is home to a secretive group of warrior monks of strange and wondrous abilities.

Darnisol Monastery (Hexographer, 6 mile scale)

The Monastery itself is carved high into a series of nearly inaccessible granite cliffs, and towers over the  hills and valleys below. It is said that the visible cliff-hugging walls and fortifications hide a vast complex of tunnels and chambers carved into the living rock behind. The Monastery is home to an order of monks who are famed for practicing the art of unarmed combat and whose amazing agility and body control is legendary. Many of the monks of Darnisol train from a very early age, and the blue and gold robed monks of the order can sometimes be seen in Mercia and the surrounding lands where it is said they are selecting those gifted few children who they believe can learn the discipline of their order.

Darnisol

Some of the Darnisol monks never leave the monastery, but there are those who venture out into the outside world and follow many different career paths. Some become great warriors fighting for the cause of good, protecting the defenseless and the weak. Others become the very terrors that others of their order serve to protect against. While many great warriors have come out of Darnisol, it is also said that some of the most dangerous assassins in the Northlands have also trained there. Disciples of Darnisol practice their art to good or evil as each sees fit.

Darnisol was founded in the year 499, when the North was still a very wild place. It served as one of the original bastions against the hordes of evil creatures then inhabiting the area. This may not necessarily have been purely in the interests of good, but may just have been because, as Master Kermon has been quoted by the sages as saying, "monstrous hordes are good practice."