We’re getting outside of the city proper now! Helm’s Hold is a small town located on the edge of the Neverwinter Wood, built around a monastery and cathedral dedicated to the god Helm. It’s about a day’s travel northeast of Neverwinter.

The town’s proximity to the Wood and its traditions of rugged individualism give it big “American frontier” vibes, tempered a bit by the monastery’s own culture. Helm used to be the god of guardians, and the monastery’s purpose since its ancient founding is to give sanctuary to those who have none. The monastery came first, and the town slowly grew around it.

About a year before the Spellplague, when the inhabitants had just laid the foundation for the cathedral, Helm died. The grieving priests and citizens finished the huge building as a monument in his honor, and kept its purpose as a sanctuary, welcoming people of all faiths.

My experience of Helm’s Hold from the computer games and reading this book is that the place’s narrative purpose is to be infiltrated and secretly taken over by the current campaign’s Big Bads. It happened in the first computer game (ancient underground civilization), it happened again shortly before the Spellplague (Netherese), and now it’s happening once more (the aboleths). We’re headed for a plot pileup here because the Netherese are also trying to infiltrate the town anew, via their werewolf minions.

Lurking Threats

Those mysterious disappearances and murders are caused not by the spellscarred, but by the Grey Wolf Uthgardt, who have been ordered by their Netherese masters to infiltrate the town and cause chaos. They’re proficient at disguising themselves as locals or pilgrims, which lets them get into position to wolf out at night and go hunting. The core of their force hides out in the Wood. The Netherese don’t think the Hold is strategically valuable, they just want to keep the barbarians occupied until they’re needed in their true function as expendable muscle to throw against the Thayans.

The two barbarian-themed PCs are quite likely to end up here, and a peaceful resolution to the Grey Wolf plot would involve convincing them the Netherese are both evil and not interested in the tribe’s well-being. This has to be done subtly, though, as they are likely to attack the Pack Outcast on sight.

And of course there’s also the cathedral itself, which is currently being run by Rohini’s group and thus is a secret aboleth center of power. No one else knows about this currently, though ironically the AbSov is also interested in solving the murders because it will reduce the suspicion currently directed at them.

The Hold and Environs

The Hold’s mission as a sanctuary turned into the region’s premier treatment center for Spellplague victims, a duty which only became heavier about a year ago when Lord Neverember made it his official policy to send any such victims he finds in Neverwinter to the cathedral.

The rest of the region tends to see the spellscarred as dangerous freaks, but the inhabitants of the Hold see them as unfortunate victims affected by a horrible curse. Still, the overwhelming influx of new patients has been testing their open stance, as the city had to do a lot of rush construction to accommodate them all, with limited success. You can find newer buildings haphazardly constructed between older structures, their quality dubious due to the Hold’s chronic labor shortage. Most skilled builders are over on Neverwinter, where the work pays better.

The Hold’s citizens are further stressed out by the recent spate of mysterious murders and disappearances, which the more conservative among them have started blaming on the spellscarred. A group of spellscarred activists calling themselves the Heirs of Azure has sprung up to try to counter the distrust heaped upon their community. However, the Mintarn detachment sent by Neverember to help keep the peace isn’t having much success tracking down the real culprits, tensions keep increasing.

The city is governed by a council of elected Speakers who meet at a former tavern named The Dragon’s Gauntlet. They’re also split on the issue of the spellscarred, though the official stance is still receptive since current Chief Speaker is in that camp. The council’s collective power is waning, as there are enough mercs in town that they could declare martial law unopposed. Their commander, however, is uncharacteristically responsible and dutiful, so the order won’t come from him.

Heartward

The market plaza, so named because there’s a shrine to Sune here. Fights are frequent because resources are scarce and prices high. Every now and then, at night, a major haunting happens here and a bunch of ghosts goes through the motions of market life. Some crew the stalls, some walk around making purchase and talk to each other. Most of their words are gibberish, but some are prophetic.

Old Dirty Dwarf

And old, respected, and dirty tavern, with a reputation as the place for new arrivals to go in order to get the lay of the land and hear the latest news from the Hold. The owner is friendly to the spellscarred, but some of the staff aren’t. Agents of the Prophet keep an eye here at all times and report news to their boss.

Scar Alley

The ground under this neighborhood softened during the Spellplague, causing many of its buildings to sink and crack. Nowadays it’s a barely-standing, precariously-patrolled slum that is home to the most deformed of the spellscarred, those even the Hold shuns. It’s also filled with shady characters and the occasional monster hiding out in an abandoned ruin.

Helm’s Cathedral

The aging faithful of Helm’s Cathedral now share it with a contingent of Oghma’s priests who arrived to set up a sanatorium for spellscarred patients. Brother Satarin commands the former: he’s a 160 year old dwarf who was an acolyte before Helm’s death. Rohini the Prophet officially commands the latter, and is the de facto boss of the whole place. As we learned a few posts ago, she’s a former succubus turned aberrant creature, and serves the Abolethic Sovereignity, as do all her subordinates. She holds the loyalty of Helm’s old priests because some of her (fake) prophecies hint at his return.

The surface levels of the cathedral are airy and well-lit. The underground is far less pleasant and houses the sanatorium for the most “severe” cases. Rohini spends a lot of time down there “treating” them (i.e, turning them into foulspawn). They go out for exercise every day, and the foulspawn among them are only detectable as such by people specifically looking for them.

The Warrens

This was a failed attempt to expand the city’s drainage system, abandoned when the dig broke into the monastery’s old crypts and was overwhelmed by monsters. It became a kind of unofficial sanatorium for monstrous humanoids afflicted by the plague, who find no acceptance even in a tolerant city such as this. Goblins, kobolds and others venture into the city to steal food for themselves, and this has given rise to rumors of fey hauntings. I think it still connects to the rest of the crypts, described below, and would be a good alternate route for parties who want to sneak in. I’d probably run that as a negotiation focused adventure rather than a classic murdery crawl, at least until the PCs get to the crypts where the actual bad guys are.

Crypts of the Vigilant Eye

These crypts lie beneath the Cathedral, and predate its construction. Though the levels closer to the surface were clearly used by priests of Helm from the older monastery, things get more ancient and mysterious the deeper you go. There’s a big vertical pit full of side niches that could only be reached by flight or teleportation, and is now full of gargoyles. There’s a hallway full of gigantic robed skeleton statues that don’t resemble any sort of Helmite iconography.

And all that is without counting the twisting of the place by Spellplague energies and its current occupation by AbSov agents and foulspawn. Or the trapped Grey Wolf recon force that still hasn’t managed to find a way out through all of that.

The deepest levels turn into caverns that were excavated and mutated by the Symphony of Madness, turning into a fungal underground swamp. These are Chartilifax’s hunting grounds, so they probably contain all sorts of creatures that are tasty to dragons and dangerous to adventurers. From here you can enter a pulsating tunnel to the brain-like chamber containing the Hex Locus, a bronze coffer that acts as a repeater for the Symphony of Madness.

The Locus chamber can also be reached via a teleportation circle somewhere in the crypt levels, and Rohini will use that as soon as she learns someone is inside. She is linked to the artifact and can feel when someone enters its room. This is likely where any final confrontation against her and her pet dragon will occur.

Plot Hooks

The Spellscarred Harbinger will most likely be told to go here soon after the campaign starts. The Pack Outcast and Uthgardt Barbarian’s pursuit of the Grey Wolf might also bring them here early.

The city’s werewolf problem and the creepy happenings at the cathedral should be obvious enough to get the PCs investigating, and the growing tension between locals and refugees would make a fine secondary plot line.

Rohini herself would not appear immediately villainous - she would instead attempt to coopt the PCs and get them to help with her goals. By default that’s serving the AbSov, but the book offers a few alternatives. Perhaps she wants to break free of them and would secretly help them destroy the Hex Locus instead of protecting it. She is of course still a devil, so she might double-cross the PCs once she has what she wants.

Independent of that, Mordai Vell is working hard to woo her, aware that she’s a devil in disguise but unaware of all the rest. So he might hire the PCs as go-betweens in his courtship efforts. That’d be a fun way to introduce the AbSov and Ashmadai to the campaign.

Impressions

I tried to be fair and write a complete summary of the material in the book, but the truth is that I have a hard time caring about what’s going on in the town of Helm’s Hold proper. The original Neverwinter Nights computer game colors my perceptions here - it skipped the “town” bit entirely and placed you directly inside the monastery, which it treated as a dungeon. I only learned the Hold was an actual town once I read this book.

I feel like most campaigns will go a similar route, focusing all of their “urban intrigue” creative energy on Neverwinter itself and treating the Hold as a mostly-skipped prelude to the big delve into the cathedral and the crypts beneath. On the other hand, it would also be possible to do the reverse and ignore the big city depending on your party composition. There are several themes that have more reason to start at the Hold than at Neverwinter, like the Spellscarred Harbinger, the Uthgardt Barbarian, and the Pack Outcast.