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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aeolius" data-source="post: 4012483" data-attributes="member: 2072">It’s a genuine pity that WotC never finished the environmental series with a rainforest/swamp/jungle/coniferous woods supplement, as one is sorely needed.   Are their any woods, nearby? If so, try walking there at night - without a flashlight. If you need a light, keep it small. The darker the better. Use your senses; listen to the wind as it dances through the limbs above, feel the leaves as they move beneath your feet. Smell the freshly turned soil. Now, imagine there is someone following you. Invoke your gamers’ imagination to awaken your Willing Suspension of Disbelief. There IS someone behind you. Frightened yet? Good. Bottle that fear, so that it can be used later.    Your most valuable NPC is the swamp itself. The marsh is a living amalgamated entity. Its breath emerges as dank air afoul with the stench of rotting flesh. It reaches out with twisted tree branch fingertips draped in a cloak of sphagnum moss. When it speaks, you are mesmerized by the cacophonous melody of leaves rustling in the distance, water cascading over hidden river stones, and whispering winds sharing secrets in the distance. How will the adventurers travel, within the darkness of the woods? Do they dare travel on foot within the perilous marsh? Will they instead travel by boat, a ready source of curiosity to the indigenous alligators, snakes, and unnaturally large catfish.   Let’s examine your choice of villains, the greenhag. As “usually chaotic evil” monstrous humanoids, more than half of their population are deemed evil. That leaves quite a few that might be as callously neutral and unforgiving as the swamp itself. Greenhags often keep company with ogres, as you have surmised. If you subscribe to certain Ecologies, the union of greenhag and ogre produces an annis.   Hags are notoriously fond of the taste of human flesh. Such creatures see humans as naught by cattle; dumb animals to be deceived, demoralized, and destroyed. Her lair would thusly be strewn with the skeletal remains of past victims, her cauldron bubbling as flesh falls from the dismembered limbs within. Her root cellar would be filled with earthen pots containing the pickled remains of fingers, toes, ears, and eyes. Her attic adorned with strips of human skin drying by the smoke of the central fire. Ever resourceful, the greenhag would use the skulls of past repasts to mark the edges of her territory; warding away the weak while beckoning the foolhardy to their inevitable deaths. Wind chimes made from bleached finger bones echo eerily in the treetops.   Her lair would no doubt be near a ready source of water, as the greenhag is comfortable therein. Envision  a massive beaver lodge, it’s submerged entrance hidden beneath stagnant waters emerging within a hollowed thicket of thorns and ivy. Her innate powers of mimicry would serve her well, here, luring the innocent into a maze of inescapable roots and branches.   If you have access to DRAGON #125, you will find “The Ecology of the Greenhag” by Nigel D. Findley. I highly recommend this article to any who find themselves fascinated by hags.</blockquote>

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