The Frost Crows

Raider Fellowship — Nord-Vast#

"They are not the worst things in the north. They are merely the worst things in the north that will negotiate." — Pine Oath warden, coastal territory

The Frost Crows are the dark counterpart to the north's more honorable raiding clans: a fellowship of coastal hall-keepers and black-sailed inlet captains who have abandoned the customary limits that most northern raiders observe around kin-groups, sacred sites, and the line between hard bargaining and outright slavery. They operate through a network of isolated coastal halls whose locations are known but whose approaches are difficult enough to discourage casual enforcement, trading in salvage, extorted passage fees, hard-bargained protection contracts, and, when opportunity presents, the southward sale of prisoners.

The prisoner trade is the thing that makes the Frost Crows genuinely hated, including by their northern neighbors. The northern raiding tradition draws a reasonably clear line at selling people south into Umbra Magni's labor markets or the Corsair Coasts' various forms of indentured service; the Crows regard this line as a sentiment rather than a rule. Lakeglass Kin-Moot assemblies have formally denounced the practice on four occasions and done approximately nothing about it, which the Crows interpret as permission expressed through inaction.

Adventurers dealing with the Frost Crows should understand that the fellowship respects demonstrated capability and despises demonstrated weakness in roughly equal measure, and that negotiations benefit from coming to the table with something the Crows cannot simply take. Recovering prisoners sold south almost always leads eventually to Frost Crow territory, and the Crows have a long memory for individuals who disrupted their commerce.