Thornmere

Thornmere is a low-lying farming village pressed between open grasslands and the dark treeline of the Barovian forest. Its fields are orderly, its people quiet, and its boundaries carefully respected. Life here is intentionally small. The villagers survive by avoiding what lies beyond the tree line—and by pretending that history is stable if left unexamined.

Thornmere was founded generations ago as a frontier farming outpost meant to supply grain and livestock to passing caravans skirting the forest road. Early settlers learned quickly that the forest was not merely dangerous but _attentive_. Entire families vanished during the first decade. Rather than abandon the land, the survivors adapted. Thornmere shifted inward—fewer roads, no expansion toward the woods, and strict communal rules about travel and nightfall. Old records suggest a shrine once stood near the forest edge, but its stones were dismantled after a calamity now remembered only as _the Long Harvest Night_. No one in Thornmere can fully recount what happened that year. They only know that remembering too closely brings unease.