A city in Morrschatten — the last holding of the deposed House Bethlen, and the seat of a university whose dean was Gandolfini.
What We Know (all S5, via Madeline Foussard)
- House Bethlen ruled Morrschatten until it was deposed after the Third Crusade (1446) and the kingdom was split into three princedoms. The house was reduced to holding Krenau alone.
- Constanza Bethlen comes from a side branch of that house.
- Knight-Confessor Gandolfini was the dean of the University of Krenau — and was stationed in Morrschatten for a long time, with a good reputation.
The 1720 Massacre (S6)
The Bethlens did not simply decline into obscurity here. They were murdered.
- House Bethlen were the lords of Krenau until 1720, when the whole family was murdered — supposedly including Constanza, who would have been an infant. She has been officially dead her entire life.
- Kristof Gruben, lord mayor, took over the city after them. He died about three years ago (~1736).
- Amalricht von-Haup, the Bethlens’ court magician and tutor, survived and entered the service of Matthias Melnich — the prince who was secretly raising the surviving Bethlen. Uncle and Ismad speculate he might have been capable of the Kraus’s Folly warp-circle ritual; nothing confirms it (GM). He also died about three years ago.
Speculation
Nobody has asked who killed them, or why in 1720. The house had held one city for 274 years and threatened no one — unless someone had worked out what the wiki now believes: that the Bethlen line carries the Betrayer Queen’s gift and a better claim to Morrschatten than any of the three princes. On that reading, 1720 is not a crime, it is a solution — and sparing one infant is not mercy, it is keeping the claim somewhere you control.
Speculation
Two men from this city died in the same year, ~1736 — the magician and the lord mayor — which is also the year the Order of the Owl was dissolved and its members executed. Get causes of death before building on it. Then build on it.
The Sack and the Fire (GM)
Fall 1731. Owl knights doing research on the sanctums arrived at the University of Krenau. During their stay the city was besieged by Prince Udo. It fell unexpectedly quickly, a sack began, and a fire started at the university.
This was six months after the Owl found its first sanctum in northern Averoigne, and two months after their commander was assassinated in Vyones. See The Fall of the Order of the Owl.
Why It Matters
The party has spent two sessions looking for a western scholar who can read the star/leyline diagrams (S4). It turns out the man who was carrying those diagrams into Hazad ran a university — in the city belonging to the house whose runaway daughter is now tangled up with Kraus’s Folly. If Gandolfini’s own faculty, papers, or correspondents survive, Krenau is where the answers are.
Caution, though: the party’s plan has been to go looking for Gandolfini’s faculty, papers, and correspondents at Krenau. As of Fall 1731 the university burned during a sack, in a house-city that had already been stripped to nothing, in a kingdom that has been at civil war ever since. What survives — and who carried it out — is now the actual question.
Speculation
A city that falls “unexpectedly quickly,” a fire in the one building where owl knights were researching sanctums, in the same season the Owl’s leadership was massacred in another kingdom. Sacks burn things; that is what sacks are for. But if somebody wanted the sanctum research destroyed, Fall 1731 in Krenau is where they did it, and Prince Udo is either the arsonist or the alibi.
Speculation
Gandolfini being a dean reframes S1 entirely. A knight-confessor and a university dean carrying encoded sanctum interrogations and a bound elf into a country the Phoenix has been banned from for forty years was not a courier — he was the man who could read them.