The Beast Fears Fire - Unexploded Munitions

History has a window; on one side, things too recent and unfinished to really get a narrative put on them, and on the other, a long, long stretch of past which lost records and context make damned dim and murky. The Ash people and their culture are just far enough in the past of that window that no one debates that we can really try to understand what was going on with them.

They lived to the west and north of Crickton, in or beyond the Surlycrow; they were wiped out by another people who lived in or north of the plateau, their bloodlines live on in some of the more fair-skinned of Cricks and Savels, maybe, and they made monsters. There's more details to the history left over than that, but nothing sufficient to resolve a picture of their politics, culture, daily life... They made monsters. Because they were dying. Now they are gone, the ones who wiped them out are gone, but the monsters are still around. Because the monsters are always still around.

The weapons of the Ash stick to highlands and mountainsides. We assume it's because both the Ash and their conquerers lived in the mountains. Some remain from those days, but even the most sociable of the Ash weapons have very narrow, focused minds. They were meant to harm only those who harmed them, but the bloodlines of their enemies, well, they were conquerers and traders and slave-takers, and you have to travel a long way to find someone who lacks some hint of the blood that makes Cricks, Savels and Murrens targets for these creatures.

There remain the means of making more of each variety of the Ash weapons. The formulae aren't terribly mysterious or tricky. A couple are dead easy and survive in numbers as curiosities, cautionary tales, and, occasionally, something someone uses. None of them are a good idea. They were the last gasp of a dying people that long outlived their enemies and their memory.