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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 6133395" data-attributes="member: 20323">[MENTION=62721]MortalPlague[/MENTION] I've got two ideas, one riffing off your "healing magic is witchcraft" and the other off of the fey vibe the eternal rain lends itself to.Your setting has distrust of divine magic, especially healing magic. That's unusual, particularly because people are distrustful of what is clearly beneficent, rather than something clearly for killing like a fireball. Something terrible must have happened. Maybe there was a cleric who fulfills the role of a Dr. Frankenstein? Perhaps the cleric's beloved contracted a plague which began disfiguring them,so the cleric kept them alive (and looking pretty) by healing them. Unfortunately the cleric did not have magic strong enough to cure the plague, only abate its obvious signs. Thus the cleric's beloved became a carrier of plague and infected much of the town. Eventually the townsfolk realized the truth (or a version of it) and took the cleric's beloved to be burned at the stake. Then they raised a mob and went after the cleric in his temple-manor. The rain is the tears of the cleric's god which will fall until the ghosts of the cleric and beloved are put to rest and the the townsfolk prove they've changed their ways.Eternal rainfall feels very fey to me, and I think shadow fey make excellent (unexpected) gothic horror monsters. Maybe the laws of healing magic are warped in this realm, such that any healing causes another to karmically take the same wound that was just "healed"? In other words, there's a law of conservation of hit points in effect. It's the shadow fey of course. The rain, then, is the result of humans causing something to go bone dry...perhaps an aquifer human mining punctured and drained? Or once damp moors humans dredged for agricultural lands? Perhaps a 100-year flood plain that became salt flats after a human dam checked the river? This caused the death of several aquatic fey like nixies, naiads, vodniks, etc. The survivors entreated the King of the Fairies or an equivalent figure who lay down the curse: "The humans of this realm will neither create nor destroy anything. They shall have their water - one hundred years of rain - for what they've done."Some other thoughts:Encounter tables change with severity of rain. For example, there is something that hunts with the rain like a mooncalf, scrag troll, or freshwater lacedon ghoul.Moors can be part of Nature's system for absorbing heavy precipitation in a temperate forest environment like you describe. Plus, moors are gothic genre appropriate. Having will'o wisps, buried treasure, and secret meetings on the moors should get the players interested.Harnessing rain power should be a viable option for an enterprising NPC...it could be as simple as a series of waterwheels...or as complex as magical Pelton wheels.A rain shaman/rain doctor claims to be able to reduce the rain to a mere trickle, and has fleeced several villages of all their gold with this ruse.</blockquote>

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