The Order of the Emerald Claw

Proscribed paramilitary organization · Cellular structure across Khorvaire · Origins: Karrnath, 896 YK · Status: Outlawed, designated terrorist organization

"What arose as an order of militant knights within the nation of Karrnath fell into disgrace and became a shattered remnant."

The soldiers of the Emerald Claw are fanatical and driven. They are easy villains — immoral, zealous, and unapologetic — the kind of adversaries a party of adventurers can fight without moral ambiguity. And yet, a party fighting against them may find themselves wrapped in a web of intrigue, because the Order's leaders can be charismatic and relatively powerful, its cells have connections to sympathetic Karrnathi expatriates in every major city, and its foot soldiers include people who genuinely believe they are fighting for their nation's honor.

The Order of the Emerald Claw is a proscribed terrorist organization operating in scattered cells across Khorvaire and beyond. Officially condemned by the Karrnathi crown, classified as war criminals by royal edicts, and rejected by the mainstream Blood of Vol faith they claim to represent, the Emerald Claw persists through fanaticism, compartmentalization, and the patronage of a powerful figure known to most followers only as the Queen of the Dead.

On the surface, the Order presents itself as an instrument of Karrnathi nationalism — a brotherhood of warriors and necromancers who believe their nation was betrayed by weak kings and an unworthy peace. That self-presentation is not entirely false. Many members genuinely hold those beliefs. But what common investigators discover quickly is that the Order's leadership pursues goals that extend well beyond Karrnathi patriotism, and the rank and file are, in most cases, the last to know it.

History

Origins: Blood and War

The Order of the Emerald Claw was founded in 896 YK, during the early years of the Last War, when Karrnath was losing badly. Chronic plague and famine had hollowed out its armies, and Aundair and Cyre were advancing on multiple fronts. The Blood of Vol — a faith with a longstanding presence in the region — pledged its full support to King Kaius I in exchange for being elevated to the state religion and for the establishment of several chivalric orders of devoted Seekers. Kaius, desperate and out of options, accepted.

The Blood of Vol provided two things that mark Karrnath to this day. They created undead to bolster and replace Karrnath's living troops, stemming the tide of Thrane's advance. And they provided the elite corps that became the Order of the Emerald Claw. Combined with the necromantic forces, Karrnath gained ground against Thrane, Aundair, Breland, and Cyre all at once.

The Order that emerged was one of several chivalric orders founded by devoted Seekers during this period, all built around the necromantic traditions that became central to Karrnath's war effort. These orders included bone knights trained to raise and command the undead troops that allowed Karrnath to survive. Of them all, the Emerald Claw was the most infamous: renowned for battlefield effectiveness, repeatedly sanctioned for brutality against enemy soldiers, and formally accused of slaughtering civilians for conversion into undead — conduct explicitly forbidden by Karrnathi military command.

Disbandment and Defiance

In 976 YK, Regent Moranna — ruling in the absence of the previous king's heirs — turned against the Blood of Vol. The Sovereign Host was reinstated as Karrnath's state religion. The Seeker chivalric orders were commanded to disband. The Order of the Onyx Skull and others complied. The Order of the Emerald Claw refused.

Rather than surrender, the Order went underground. Its original membership scattered. A number of rebellious knights began reforming in independent cells, rallying veterans who wanted to see Karrnath achieve what they believed was its rightful destiny — and who believed that the crown had betrayed that destiny by pursuing peace. When the Treaty of Thronehold was signed in 996 YK, the Order experienced a significant surge in recruitment. Many Karrns saw the treaty as a humiliation and a betrayal. For those people, the Emerald Claw offered a place to put their rage.

Kaius III formally condemned the Order and designated many of its members as war criminals. Many who had served in the Order's wartime ranks were imprisoned or executed. Those who escaped became the core of the surviving cell network.

Shortly after Kaius III's accession, a figure known as the Queen of the Dead emerged publicly as the leader of the reconstituted Order. Few of her followers know anything about her beyond her extraordinary skill as a necromancer. She commands absolute loyalty from an inner circle and uses promises of power — immortality, the eternal life of undeath, Karrnath's eventual triumph — to maintain the fanaticism of the rank and file.

Structure and Membership

The Order operates through a cellular structure designed for survivability and deniability. Cells operate with significant independence; a unit commander typically knows only her immediate superior, often by a false name or face. This compartmentalization protects the upper echelons from exposure and makes the Order exceptionally difficult to dismantle from the outside — destroying a cell does not reveal the next one.

The rank and file include die-hard Karrnathi patriots who believe the Order is the only institution still fighting for their nation's honor, Blood of Vol extremists whose devotion to the faith has curdled into violence, and Last War veterans who never found another purpose after the fighting stopped. Not all are ideologues; some are simply soldiers who know how to follow orders and have decided that the Order's orders are worth following.

Bone knights and commanding officers are warriors forged in the Last War, experienced in raising and commanding undead. Some of the Order's senior leaders are themselves undead, having been turned by higher servants of the Queen of the Dead. An undead commander is both a reward for loyalty and a practical asset — they do not tire, do not fear, and cannot be interrogated if captured.

Necromancers are central to the Order's operational capability. The Order deploys undead minions freely — a practice that unsettles even other Karrns, who lived alongside undead soldiers for a generation but generally understood those formations as military instruments under state control, not the property of a proscribed terrorist organization.

What the Order Claims to Want

The Order presents a consistent public ideology: Karrnath was betrayed. The nation that won battle after battle during the Last War was abandoned at the negotiating table by a king unworthy of its history. The Blood of Vol — the faith that gave Karrnath its undead armies — was outlawed by that same king and replaced with a return to the Sovereign Host. The Treaty of Thronehold ratified a world in which Karrnath's sacrifices meant nothing.

The Order claims it will correct this. Members believe — with varying degrees of sincerity — that the Queen of the Dead will ultimately raise Karrnath above all other nations, and that those who serve faithfully will be rewarded with immortality or at least the eternal life of undeath. Others are less concerned with divine ascension and simply believe in Karrnathi supremacy.

These beliefs function as recruitment and retention tools. Whether they accurately describe the Queen of the Dead's actual intentions is a question the rank and file do not ask, and the inner circle does not answer.

FROM THE VOICE OF BRELAND

CORPSE CLERIC CONDEMNS CLAW

Last month, the Emerald Claw took credit for the ghoul outbreak in Wroat. This terrorist organization has a new and unusual critic: Hask Malevanor, an "abactor" of the Blood of Vol and high priest of the Crimson Monastery, a temple in the city of Atur in Karrnath. Something else you should know about Abactor Malevanor: he's been dead for over fifty years! This putrid priest says that there's nothing unholy about his condition, swearing that his people revere all life. Despite the fact that the terrorists included priests from his church, Malevanor insists that his parishioners despise the Emerald Claw and harbor no hostility toward Breland. While we'd like to take the abactor at his word, our research shows that Malevanor was personally involved in the program that produced the infamous Karrnathi undead soldiers. After decades of driving the Karrnathi war effort, this foul creature expects us to believe that he has nothing to do with the necromantic attacks on our people? Here at the Voice of Breland, we think something smells rotten, and it's not just the mummy.

Known Operations and Tactics

The Order has been linked to the theft of powerful items imbued with necromancy magic. It maintains a network of library vaults — heavily defended caches that double as bases of operation — where it collects dark materials and forbidden magical knowledge. These vaults serve operational and scholarly purposes simultaneously: repositories for necromantic research as well as secure storage for weapons, relics, and incriminating information.

Tactically, Order cells favor guerrilla operations: strike, acquire, and withdraw before an organized response can form. When they deploy undead, they do so to amplify their effective numbers rather than as the primary fighting force — the living soldiers of the Order are capable and fanatical, and they fight alongside their undead with the discipline of trained veterans.

EMERALD CLAW ADVENTURE HOOKS

What at first appears to be a renegade group of Aundairian soldiers turns out to be undead under the Order's control. The Order strikes at a small keep, demanding the inhabitants surrender a particular volume from their library. Investigating strange lights and sounds emanating from a crypt in the dead of night reveals the Emerald Claw experimenting on the corpses within. The Order violates graves near a small village, animating the corpses into undead laborers to help build an eldritch machine.

The Blood of Vol Disclaimer

The Order claims membership in the Blood of Vol faith. Most actual Seekers reject this claim entirely and do so loudly. The distinction deserves emphasis, because understanding it matters for anyone operating in Khorvaire.

The mainstream Blood of Vol community views the Emerald Claw's violent fanaticism as a perversion of their faith's principles, a disgrace to the Seeker tradition, and — practically speaking — a liability that has made all Seekers targets of suspicion across Khorvaire. The Order's crimes have cast all followers of the Blood of Vol in a poor light, and the genuine faithful have not forgiven it.

The Blood of Vol is a widespread faith with sincere practitioners in every nation. Seekers of the Divinity Within value community, urge the faithful to stand together, and see nothing wrong with using the bodies of the fallen to serve the living — but they do not embrace death, they do not want to become undead, and they do not support necromantic terrorism. The undead of the Blood of Vol are martyrs who have sacrificed their chance at divinity to guide the living, not monsters to be envied.

The Emerald Claw is a terrorist organization that exploits religious language for recruitment and cover. Treating them as the same entity as the Blood of Vol is an error that serves the Order's interests more than anyone else's.

FROM THE SHARN INQUISITIVE

Abactor Malevanor insists that his parishioners despise the Emerald Claw and harbor no hostility toward Breland. The priests of the Blood of Vol and the soldiers of the Emerald Claw are not the same institution, however much the soldiers may claim otherwise.

Key Relationships

The Karrnathi Crown. Karrnath officially condemns the Order, and many former members are designated war criminals. The Order targets what it calls Karrnath's "weak king" alongside its other enemies. The relationship is one of active hostility in both directions, complicated by the fact that the Order retains infiltrators in Karrnathi power structures and that some Karrns who served loyally in the Last War feel residual sympathy for the Order's nationalist grievances, even if they oppose its methods.

The Church of the Silver Flame. Natural and permanent enemies. The Silver Flame is devoted to the destruction of undead and the forces that command them. The Order employs undead as weapons and is led by an undead master. Templars and Emerald Claw cells have clashed directly. The Silver Flame's templars regard the Order as exactly the kind of threat their mission exists to address.

House Tharashk and Independent Inquisitives. The Order's covert network, library vaults, and ongoing operations make it a recurrent subject of investigation. Inquisitives who dig too deeply into operations with Emerald Claw connections tend to experience complications. The Order does not tolerate surveillance and treats investigators who get close as targets.

The Mournland. The Order operates in the Mournland with relative freedom, precisely because state authority over the territory is absent. The former wartime infrastructure — including abandoned fortifications and buried caches — provides operational assets.