Alfield

Alfield is a small, rural town in the Marrow Valley in the Western Wynandir region of Wildemount. It serves as a trade stop on the Amber Road between Trostenwald and Zadash. The town falls under the rule of the Dwendalian Empire and is overseen by Starosta Kosh.

In 835 P.D., Alfield suffered significant loss of life and arson of several buildings during a gnoll attack.

Layout
Slightly smaller than Trostenwald, Alfield is an open farm village with occasional waist- to shoulder-height partitions. With open fields to the south, the town is flanked by clusters of trees on the eastern and northeastern sides. Two main streets bisect the village in its central square, one spanning from the northwest to the southeast, and the other from west to east.

Broad Barn
Located on the western edge of town, the Broad Barn store sells farming and basic supplies. When the party visited after the gnoll raid on Alfield, the store's proprietor was an extremely old gentleman with a giant, gnarled tuft of a chin beard that merged with a lion's mane–like halo of white hair. He had a thin, long crooked nose.

History
This store got its name from the barn that it had been at one time, though poor crops led to the farmers giving up farming and to the sell-off of the tools they didn't need. As it happened, the farmer saw that they made more money that year from their tool sale than from the crops, so they started importing more tools and converted the barn into a general store, which has been serving this part of town since 805 P.D. Due to the store's success, the town eventually grew in to fill the gap between it and the town proper.

Inventory

 * Cleaning supplies
 * Thick, heavy pieces of cloth
 * Buckets
 * Burn balm kits
 * Healer's kits
 * Hundred-foot coils of rope
 * Bags of ground herb incense
 * Farming supplies
 * Metal keg taps
 * Insecticide (diluted acute poison; 1 sp/vial)
 * Mishmash of materials for creating acid (12 gp/vial)

Trivia

 * Jester, inquiring about if the store had pickles, purchased a mason jar containing two pickles from the owner, who had pulled it out of his paper bag lunch.  Wanting 3 cp for the jar, Mollymauk gave jester 2 cp so that he could share one of the pickles.
 * Caleb Widogast, wanting to buy about 20 gp worth of incense, had the owner bag anything that could have some semblance of being considered incense into two burlap sacks.  Filled with various ground-up herbs, Caleb was willing to pay 17 gp for them and proceeded to count out the sum slowly on the counter.  Distracted by other customers and with Nott's help, Caleb swindled the shop owner by having counted out and paid the owner only 16 gp for the bags, then saying that he was giving the amount agreed upon.

Candleglow Inn
Located in the central square, the Candleglow Inn was ransacked and burned down during the gnoll attack. Thadius Candleglow owned the inn, and due to the cost—estimated in thousands of gold pieces—to rebuild it, he expected to leave Alfield to start his life over someplace else. The owner was proud to say that his inn once had, though perhaps not the greatest quantity, the highest quality of salted, dried, fresh, and butchered meats in town.

Ruddy Top Butchers
Located near the Candleglow Inn, the Ruddy Top Butchers building was still standing after the gnoll raid, but it had taken quite a bit of fire damage, resulting in its roof collapsing down into the floor below. The gnolls seemed to specifically target this building and completely took its entire stock of meat during the attack.

Feed and Mead Tavern
Not the most comfortable establishment, the Feed and Mad Tavern was where the Crownsguard lodged the party in appreciation for their help in fighting the gnolls—and they would have continued paying the party's stay as long as they continued helping deal with the aftermath of the gnoll attack. With two rooms for rent upstairs, the party was lodged in one of them that had four twin-sized beds tightly jammed in the room.

The owner of the tavern, Passedon "Croot" Tecroot, was an ornery, salty-looking, old dwarf with tousled, white-grey hair and a single tuft of a beard that dangled down toward his belly button before ending in a ring of gold. Poor of sight, he tended to look above or at a person's shoulder when talking to them.

Menu
For the cost of three silver pieces, Feed and Mead offered the party a top-shelf drink in a deep green, corked, glass bottle. Poured into a shot glass, the liquid was a deep sea-teal green. When drunk, it had a smoky, oak barrel flavor on the tongue, though this was quickly followed by an herbal and charcoal medicinal burning taste.

On the Wind Stables
Located in the northern part of town, On the Wind Stables sustained fire damage as a result of the gnoll attack. The next day, Reggie of the Crownsguard procured a horse from the stables—under the effects of Mollymauk Tealeaf's Charm Person spell—for the party to use during their mercenary mission to slay gnolls and recover the abducted townsfolk.

Gnoll Attack
When a Crownsguard patrol reported seeing a small hunting party of gnolls to the south, Watchmaster Bryce Feelid sent out a troupe of more than half of the town's guards to find and slay them. This decision left the town vulnerable, when—not as a coincidence—a large force of gnolls struck two hours later while they were unguarded and unprepared for such an assault.

During the raid, approaching Alfield at night about half a mile from the south, the party noticed several flashes of orange light and the curl of flames spreading from rooftop to rooftop. They saw a handful of buildings on the eastern side of the village that had already been consumed by flame.

Quickly making their way closer to within a few hundred feet of the western side of the village, the party saw a few hundred people running out of town into the fields.

Reaching the Alfield's central square, the party engaged the gnolls in battle. A brief battle ensued but ended when two of the party members were knocked unconscious, leading to the gnolls escaping in an east-northeasterly direction. With smoke and fires of the eastern quarter shielding their escape, the gnolls took three carts full of various loot, corpses of villagers they had slain, captives, and almost all of the village's meat supply.

Casualties

 * Rubin Cole:  The town's former lawmaster.
 * A village straggler:  A hundred feet outside the village, while people were running out of town, this young human man with scrappy, tattered, brown hair and a bit of blood dripping down his face was shot by a gnoll in the back by an arrow.  A gnoll then proceeded to leap onto his back and bite and tear out a chunk of flesh from his shoulder before dragging the corpse back two hundred feet into the depths of the burning village.
 * A Crownsguard soldier:  This guard had been hunkered down behind a wall with Watchmaster Bryce Feelid.  They wielded a crossbow and had been exchanging volleys with the gnolls during the attack.  They were killed when they took an arrow to the back of the head.
 * Lehman:  A regular patron of the Candleglow Inn, all that remained of him within ruins of the inn was a charred and crushed skeleton.

Captives

 * Herma and Jules: This human mother and child pair were taken to the Rill's Mouth Mines and kept in cells within the Y-intersection. Herma was in around her mid-thirties and was wearing an apron that covered in dirt and spatters of blood. Her hair is ratted. Her son, Jules had been kept with her but was in the process of being taken elsewhere in the mine, sustained a mortal injury by a hyena's bite to the clavicle and chest. Bleeding out they were later stabilized and reunited with their mother, with whom he traveled back to Alfield.
 * Petrov: In his older-years, this half-elven man had sharp features, dark brown-black hair that was greying to a salt and pepper on the sides. Looking disheveled, he suffered a large claw gash around his midsection that was possibly infected. He has just been passing through bringing some of his armor wears up to Zadash when his group was waylaid on the road to Alfield, hitting them before making their way to the town.

Villagers

 * A family of five halflings ran out of the town during the gnoll attack.  The family included a mother dragging two younger children and a father running beside his eldest daughter, who was in her teens.  The father wore simple farm clothing, a leather cap, and had a handlebar mustache.