Beneath the Parhelion Ice - CoC Project

This piece explores one of the traditionalist settlements of the Jrass, one of the peoples of my ongoing dark fantasy campaign, Chroniques du ChaOs, based on scenarios published in the French magazine Casus Belli and written by Chris & Pat. The heroes discover this village during Act I, Episode 2 of my ongoing TTRPG campaign.

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Beneath the Parhelion Ice lies one of the traditionalist settlements of the Jrass people, a semi subterranean refuge carved into the living glacier itself.

Far from the great modernist cities where frozen aether is mined, traded and burned to power machines, villages such as this one still follow the ancient balance of the polar clans.

The Jrass do not conquer the cold.
They endure it.

Built beneath immense translucent vaults of ice, these settlements are established near natural aetheric veins running through the glacier. The faint heat and residual energy radiating from those deep blue fractures allow frost resistant orchards and cultivation terraces to survive beneath the eternal ice. Fruit trees, medicinal plants and sparse crops grow where no life should normally endure.

To the traditionalists, those veins are not wealth.
They are a pact.

At the center of the settlement stands the great council hall, its roof covered in overlapping Remorhaz bone scales, its entrance adorned with the skull of a slain ice predator, a reminder that survival in the frozen lands is never granted freely.

Around it live hunters, healers, mask carvers, tanners, blacksmiths and riders preparing for expeditions across the white wastes. The inhabitants rarely show their faces openly. Adult Jrass wear rigid bone masks inspired by arctic beasts, each mask marking identity, role and passage into adulthood.

It is here that Aeth Val’Skaern, son of a prominent modernist ambassador, returns alongside the player characters during the events of the campaign.

What should have been a diplomatic passage quickly becomes a political fracture.

Shortly before reaching the settlement, the group rescues a young Jrass hunter during his initiation trial against corrupted raiders and a Remorhaz emerging from the ice. Gravely wounded, the young hunter falls into a coma before he can explain what truly happened.

When the players arrive carrying trophies from the slain creature, suspicion spreads immediately through the settlement.

Among the traditionalists, many believe the outsiders and Aeth Val’Skaern interfered with the sacred hunt, stealing the young warrior’s prey and dishonoring his passage into adulthood. Others suspect something far worse, that Aeth’s father, known for supporting the exploitation of frozen aether, may already have betrayed the old ways of the Jrass people.

As tensions rise between modernists and traditionalists, the settlement slowly becomes the stage of a larger conflict linked to the ancient aetheric wreck buried beneath the ice… and to the corrupting influence spreading through the polar lands.