DF Game - Rumors

Here are the news and rumors my players have just picked up in my DF on the Borderlands game. I won't vouch for the accuracy of this stuff, it's just what the PCs heard.

Big news - a merchant and his guards got massacred just west of the Keep! They were bringing a load of assorted goods from the keep to Arras. The merchant, Jovan, and his son Tada and two mercenary guards were found torn to shreds, with some of their organs taken from their corpses, and their pack mule was missing. Their money, the goods the mule was carrying, and a few weapons were missing. As a result the Castellan is offering an unspecified "generous reward" to those who can bring in the still-living transgressors (or their heads, if necessary) and sufficient proof of their involvement. What that proof is, is unspecified.

You hear a bit about the swamp to the south. It's call the Cold Mire, because a) it gets cold up here [and the snow is starting soon - pretty much as soon as we get it in the real world, you'll get it in game] and b) it's a mire. It's considered a very, very bad place. It is known to have sharp-toothed flesh-eating frogs, big crocs, giant frogs, eight-legged lizards, and lizard men viciously hostile to men. From high points on the road travelers have spotted some kind of flying tentacled monstrosity hovering over the mire. But local legend also claims that there is a frog-like "swamp oracle" who can accurately any one question you have, once in your life, in return for a certain weight of gold . . . or some of your blood. And further legends say that the lizard men in the swamp have a long-standing feud with the elves of the southlands, who drove them out of the warmth into the cold, cold north.

Finally, Honus asked about furs - there are a few exotic creatures in the wilderness. These include the ravenous owlbear, for one, and the farrier at the Keep has a buyer who'd love to get his hands on an owlbear fur-and-feather cape . . .