The Moon-Fang Hearths

Werewolf Clan League — Deep Forests and Abandoned Hunting Lodges#

"The charcoal burners in the Arkwood do not like strangers after the second bell. I took this advice. The merchant who did not take this advice is no longer taking advice." — road surveyor, Ash Banner Companies

The Moon-Fang Hearths are a league of lycanthropic kin-clans occupying the deep forests, abandoned hunting preserves, and marginal agricultural lands of the Reach's highland rim. Their founding mythology holds that the Magnus Empire broke ancient territorial compacts with the wild — specific agreements between early imperial administrators and the forest-clans that had governed the highlands since before recorded history — and that the collapse was the wild's accounting for that breach. Whether this account is historically accurate is debated; that the kin-clans take it seriously enough to organize around it is not.

Individual Hearths maintain covers as charcoal-burning communities, seasonal hunters, and woodland craftspeople — occupations that explain their forest presence, their irregular schedules, and their disinclination to receive visitors. Hearth-members are indistinguishable from ordinary rural workers in daylight hours and function as such; the Moon-Fang's territorial enforcement role is strictly nocturnal and oriented toward specific targets: encroaching lords attempting to re-extend their hunting-right claims into Hearth territory, road-builders whose projects require clearing old-growth sections, and occasionally noble hunting parties who pursue game into forest zones under Hearth protection.

The Hearths' league structure connects otherwise isolated kin-clans through a system of annual gatherings and messenger-runners who travel between lodge-points on routes unknown to outside parties. The league council negotiates with Iron-Bound march commanders, Ash Banner Companies, and occasionally Nine Bell Republic factor-ambassadors when the Hearths' territorial interests require external recognition rather than direct enforcement. Adventurers who manage to establish trust with individual Hearth members sometimes gain access to forest route knowledge, pre-collapse site locations, and intelligence about the deeper wilderness that no cartographer has mapped.