Dreadbone Shelf
Stonefield is Rift’s first proper taste of the Plane of Earth, all bulging hills and sourcestone scars, and the Dreadbone Shelf sits up on its western side as one of the stranger pockets in that landscape. It’s a broken terrace of rock and scrub, threaded with narrow paths and gullies, where you can’t go far without tripping over something’s bones—most of them far too big to belong to anything you’ve actually seen alive. Those colossal skeletons jut out of hillsides or lie half‑buried in the dirt, their ribs and jawbones forming makeshift arches and overhangs that trolls have turned into lairs.
The local troll clan, the Dreadbone, treats the area and its remains as their own. They’re a splinter of Stonefield’s wider mountain‑troll population, and in practical terms they exist mainly to make your life difficult: warriors, shamans and youngspawn packed tightly around the Shelf’s chokepoints, happy to mob anyone who wanders too close. Quests and carnage objectives send you in to thin their numbers—“War on the Dreadbone” tasks you with killing a quota of trolls and planting Defiant banners at each victory, while follow‑up carnages have you cutting down youngspawn and other variants until the local population is noticeably lighter. It’s not subtle, but it does a good job of making the Shelf feel like hostile territory rather than just another stretch of anonymous hillside.
What the Dreadbone are actually guarding is left deliberately vague. Stonefield’s wider lore talks about long‑ago Eth sorcerer‑kings summoning titans from the Plane of Earth, binding them to guard sourcestone mines, and eventually being overthrown by their own creations; the titans were finally defeated and interred beneath the hills, their bones occasionally breaking the surface in places like Titan’s Rest. The giant skeletons littering the Dreadbone Shelf look very much like they belong to that same story—massive ribs and skulls cracked open by time and violence—and it’s easy to imagine the trolls’ reverence or possessiveness growing around those relics, whether as trophies, totems, or something closer to ancestors. Meridian’s scholars and treasure‑hunters have reasons of their own to poke around, but in practice anyone trying to study or salvage the bones tends to end up in the same place as the Defiant banners: buried under a pile of angry trolls.
There is vegetation—a few hardy shrubs, patches of grass clinging to the tops of ridges—but the dominant impression is bare stone and weathered bone, the ground scored and pitted as if something vast once dragged itself across it. That contrast with more obviously fertile areas elsewhere in the plane underlines the idea that this is a wound in the landscape, not a thriving piece of it. Between the dense troll packs, the awkward footing and the constant sense that there’s more to those bones than the game is quite ready to say, the Dreadbone Shelf ends up doing a lot of quiet world‑building work: a side pocket of mystery and menace that makes Stonefield feel older, stranger and more lived‑in than its quest markers alone would suggest.
