#halaster

In the Year of Scattered Stars (168 DR), a wizard of unknown ancestry calling himself Halaster Blackcloak built a tower and fortified ramparts in the middle of the Deepwater Plateau, to the north and west of the burgeoning farms along the harbor shore. 

Halaster quickly convinced the local populace to leave him and his apprentices, known as the Seven, alone, and then retreated into his new stronghold. 

Unbeknownst to the local populace, Halaster Blackcloak had built the hold as a secure base from which to explore the Underhalls of the Melairkyn and claim the delvings for himself.

Halaster’s Hunts—held at various times from 171 DR to 308 DR—brutally exterminated large pockets of drow and duergar, driving them out of the Underhalls, as they had previously done to the dwarves. 

Halaster ruled the Underhalls by the Year of the Cascade (309 DR), and the drow, forced into the lowest levels of the Underhalls, abandoned the former dwarf home entirely by the Year of the Ecstatic Priest (493 DR).

Meanwhile, the Seven left Halaster’s Hold in the Year of Sundered Sails (307 DR), hoping to establish their own holdings in the depths. The tower and surface holding fell into decay and ruin, and the tribes of Blackcloak Hold, as the settlement had come to be known, quickly learned to avoid this “cursed” enclosure.

In the Year of the Deep Bay (302 DR), the inhabitants of Tavaray were forced to abandon their city by the rising waters of the Lizard Marsh. 

This event marked the waning of Illuskan influence along the coast south of the Sword Mountains. 

Located deep beneath the city of Waterdeep, the Slitherswamp is a largely unexplored sublevel between Levels Four and Five of Undermountain. 

Halaster stocked the Slitherswamp with abductees from Najara in the Year of the Sighing Serpent (1289 DR), and it is still populated primarily by dark nagas, ophidians, and snakes of all sorts. 

Contact between the Slitherswamp and Najara was not reestablished until the Year of the Serpent (1359 DR), when a dark naga dwelling in Under-mountain discovered a portal. 

This particular portal linked the Slitherswamp with an area of rolling grasslands in the shadow of the Serpent Hills some 3 miles west of what is now Ithkyxan’s Lair.

More than half of the Slitherswamp’s inhabitants vanished via a second portal during Halaster’s Higharvestide in the Year of the Gauntlet (1369 DR).