The Bone Vein of the Grim Graves is a Mine within the Hedge dedicated to recover the riches that lie in the calcified corpses of fallen hobgoblins.
Overview
This is the story the wicked barons of this monstrous mining system tell: once, a long time ago, the Hedge was destroyed by some manner of cataclysm (popular theory suggests that somehow, the Gentry did it, perhaps to punish rebellious hobs). The destruction happened in a way that most of the land was swallowed beneath the surface, the ground becoming a great, muddy mouth and sucking it all in and chewing it all up. Whether the story is true or not, one element of it is authentic, and that is what the Bone Vein of the Grim Graves is meant to dig up: bodies.
They mine the calcified corpses of various hobgoblins here in the endless miles of tunnels, chipping them free from the rock and sending them along to... well, nobody knows where, or for what purpose. The barons, of course, don’t do this work themselves. They take slaves — quite often changelings, sometimes borrowed from liberal Keepers (thus making the Bone Vein mine one avenue for potential escape, given that the mine supposedly connects to the subterranean interior of Arcadia itself). So what if their “workers” get trapped in collapsing tunnels, get eaten by nocturnal underground dwellers, or suck in air from a pocket of hallucinogenic gas and get lost in the deep black spaces of absolutely nowhere? They’ll find more. Or steal them.
- The corpses unearthed often have powerful tokens attached to them — either carried by them when they perished, or as parts of their bodies. A character that unearths such a four- or five-dot token may pay for it as if it would only cost them three dots (12 experience points).
References
- Dancers in the Dusk, p. 89