Remedial Ravenloft: Verbrek

Before - Like playing "Are you a Werewolf" with a bunch of fucking amateurs.

After - Every day is Luprecalia!  Every day is also a free screening of Ravenous.

Where it is - One of the city states in the central west coast of the Core with Dementlieu, Richemulot, Borca & Dorvinia and all those places.

Technical Advancement - A hodgepodge, similar to southern Europe in early 16th century CE on it's good days.  Most lasting structures were built using 1st century CE technology.

Supernatural Advancement - Most people have access to lower level witchcraft and folk magic.  Tutelage is easy to find but limited.  Charms (especially ones to protect against wolves and help find your way) are readily available for purchase.  Supernatural healing is fairly common.

The Land - Verbrek used to be the center of a major empire in the ancient world, and the city itself still holds a lot of that grandeur, though most of the ancient buildings are long since fallen into ruin, and the modern architecture is ...utilitarian.  Rustic, even.  The only thing that remains are the walls, which are high and broad and relatively well guarded, which makes some visitors wonder if Verbrekuns share a common culture with Aralaine, though this is more a case of convergent evolution of two cultures with things they want to keep out.  The countryside around the city is forest, dark and full of wolves, which you expected, because this is Ravenloft, but when I tell you the forest is dark and full of wolves, I mean that it is making a run at being the darkest and most full of wolves.  The major roads into the city are fully covered, raised structures made from timber and stone, and all they manage to do is to kind of restrict the wolves a little in terms of tactical options when trying to eat travelers.  Countryside farmsteads, logging camps and quarries are tucked into high palisades, which, likewise, don't do as much to deter the wolves as anyone would like.

The People - Though they exhibit a lot of different skin tones, hair and eye colors, Verbrekuns trace their lineage to a single man, a hero great in strength, stature (and apparently sexual appetites and potency) who led his lovers, wives and children to this city after it had been destroyed and abandoned by the wolves.  Verbrekuns share their founder's robust size and build, most are well over 6 feet tall with muscular or stout builds, men and women.  This seems to be a dominant trait amongst Verbrekuns, likewise red hair, even on Verbrekuns with darker skin.  Their distinct physiques have made foreigners wonder if they are not some other, closely related species than other humans in the Core, but there's very little evidence of that being the case.  Modern Verbrekuns do not claim to share much of a cultural heritage with the builders of their city, though they have adopted their stone work.  Traders from other places find Verbrekuns direct and expressive; folks from more reserved cultures are often startled by the range of emotion they're willing to openly display.  Families yell and cuff each other a lot, as do friends; scuffling is a Verbrekun display of affection, a fact that makes smaller folks from other cultures really nervous.  Verbrekuns speak Corvino and Rabben, switching back and forth in a local pidgin a lot of the time.  The Borcan church has a little influence here, but most Verbrekuns are unregenrate pagans, either following Hala (the witches are able to operate in the open in Verbrek and have official protection of the government) or their own local Owl and Rooster-themed deities.  All of them, Ezraist and Pagan fear the Wolf, which considering the influence his children seem to have on the place, seems pretty reasonable.
Wag's Eye View - Freeze a Verbekkun in a block of ice and you could sell the body in Dementlieu or Lamordia as a specimen of primordial man.  Take a live one anywhere, and they will never invite you back.

The Other People - Now's about the best time to talk about the wolves.  Wolves in the Realm are not like wolves elsewhere, unless elsewhere is Narnia, and the wolves are Jadis the White Witch's secret police.  Wolves in Ravenloft talk, speak their own language and can pick up human languages.  They are fully sapient and, on average, as smart as humans; the are also hateful, spiteful, thoroughly wicked, basically Always Chaotic Evil.  Their social structure is what we thought natural wolves used to have - a violent top-down hierarchy with a single alpha dominating as many as their strength and organizational abilities allow.  Some wolves develop supernatural powers.  Some press goblins into serivce, when they can find them, or bully and threaten human agents into acting on their behalf.  They can open doors.  Some of them can even pick locks.  This is not just Verbrekun wolves, this is all wolves in the Core, though the ones in Verbrek are foremost in strength, sapience and wickedness.
Wag's Eye View - Did you hear something?

The Boring Stuff - Verbrek is a medium sized city state governed by a representative body that contains both representatives of the Verbrekun clans and well regarded experts (at current, this is comprised of an overseer of trade, the ranger captain, head of the Halan Circle, an Owl Pirest, a Rooster Priest, a treasurer, historian and an engineer).  Appointment to the body is done by the clan or by vote of the body itself, in the case of the experts.  Verbrek mostly exports timber and stone, but does a reasonable trade with the local city states.  Defense from outside invasion is pretty well handled by ALL THE WOLVES; defense from the wolves is handled by rangers, and becoming a Verbrekun ranger is a great path to either social advancement or the digestive systems of several wolves, depending.  When Verbreka was first contacted, they had a technical level around that of western Europe in 9th century CE, but have adopted as much of the more contemporary technology as they're able to obtain.

When the Moon is Round and Full Gonna Teach you Tricks that will Blow your Mongrel Mind - Verbrekun historians are more preservers of history than interpreters, so when you go digging into the history, you get to deal with large, loud and suspicious scholars who might be able to choke-slam you into oblivion and have their own clan's interests higher on their list of priorities than the search for truth.  Also, most of the history is oral, which makes cross-referencing a bitch.  That said, one thing that tends to come out in most accounts is that things only got as bad as they are fairly recently.  A couple of generations ago, the forest grew up overnight and the Wolf blessed his children with words.  If this doesn't sound like transition to the realm to you, then you're in the wrong line of work to be reading this.

Anyway, the closest thing that anyone can find to an inciting incident on the human side of things is the discovery of an extensive set of underground ruins that included the former inhabitants' secret wolf cult's temple.  It's hard to know if the wolf-cult had anything to do with the Verbrekun's Wolf (different cultures, but local to one another and the city was finally destroyed by an invasion of wolves, according to Verbrekun history), but either some of the original explorers, or other folks drawn after seem to have taken up the practices of the old wolf cult, and even now, they are constant trouble for the clans.  Recent investigations revealed the possibility that their members are numerous and well-connected.  As for beliefs of the wolf cult, one of the major things is that, since wolves eat humans to gain their powers, turnabout is fair play.  Also eating other humans to gain their powers.  Whether or not someone gets shape-shifting as a power out of this is hard to say.  It's not as though there is conclusive proof that there are such things as lycanthropes, but there's a lot of anecdote.  And a lot of missing persons.

The Darklord could be... This is just a guess, but if there is a leader or founder of the wolf cult still alive in Verbrek, I'm guessing that's our man.  Or womany.  Or shape-shifter.  That said, it's also possible that the Dark Powers like the sins of Wolf as much as they do the folly of Humanity, which means that the darklord could be out there in the woods, running and howling and we'd never know it.

Running with the Big Dogs - Verbekuns respect strength and ability and still organize themselves in clans, so adventuring clans have unprecedented opportunities to just fit in to Verbekun society, if they want to go legit.  There are a couple adventuring Verbekun clans out there, specializing in witchcraft or the martial arts.  That said, there's not a lot of profit to be found in the woods and a whole lot of wolves, so there aren't as many draws in Verbrek as there might be in other places.  The government would be awfully grateful if someone wanted to investigate the wolf cult, but some members probably wouldn't be, and maps showing where those subterranean ruins actually were don't seem to exist anymore.

Closing the Borders - The road runs out but the forest does not.  Anyone who continues on finds that the forest is pretty well endless and that the dinner bell is ringing for the wolves the whole time.