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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tristissima" data-source="post: 8010574" data-attributes="member: 6162">The Fields of Pain’s Forgetting grow a wide variety of narcotic and hallucinogenic plants, most of which commit the Nidalese sin of dulling or negating pain. All are addictive. Mushrooms are mentioned (of the luminous sort) and poppies (specifically white ones), too, but the most notable among them is flayleaf, a muscle relaxant and analgesic that increases suggestibility and can be made into a very hallucinogenic drink called Riddleport tea. As that suggests, flayleaf is mostly associated with Varisia.The Umbral Court, who operates the fields by means of the grumpy and jaded Mistress Cultivator Preali Dhat (N fetchling alchemist 4/druid 2 whose anger stems from not being in the Court), loves to mix these drugs with poisonous substances to help them find weakling infidels who try to avoid Zon-Kuthon’s teachings. I imagine these poisons cause particularly spectacular deaths and Umbral agents across the realm have been trained to listen for sudden outbreaks of such deaths, allowing them to locate the users and dealers of these drugs.I kinda like that Nidal has a War on Painkillers like this. It’s a neat little extrapolation from their premise. I also like Preali Dhat ~ her alignment is a welcome break from the waves of evil and could provide for quite interesting interactions with PCs, and her class combination is both unusual and appropriate.Of course, there are sometimes uses for removing the touch of the Midnight Lord, and so the Fields’ primary beneficiaries are churches, cathedrals, and the wonderfully termed “independent houses of torture.” Pragmatism wins out every time.Leading through the Minspin Mountains to Molthune, Ghorvaul’s Crossing is home to an ancient bit of tribal revenge. Enemies of the main Nidalese tribes, the Ehrotai tribe refused to seek refuge with Zon-Kuthon after Earthfall. Their spiritworkers committed ritual suicide, hoping to preserve the mory of their people by becoming ghosts.Instead, they rose as a multi-limbed monstrosity known as a charnel colossus (CR 19), that did retain their memories and traditions. So that’s nice, at least.Shadowcallers trade sacrifices for questions. The sacrifices have their bodies and minds incorporated into the Speakers of the Ehrotai, as the colossus is named. Usually, it’s one person per question, but if the Speakers can learn a lot from the person, they might allow more. Giving yourself over to the Speakers is well-known amongst the jaded members of the Kuthite faith as a way to both end their ennui and to have, at least, a novel kind of suffering accompany your death.The Speakers of the Ehrotai are a wonderful way to keep the Kellid history of Nidal present. It fits right in with the themes and ways of the culture while still allowing for a relationship with PCs other than “kill it!” and provides a nice element for any deep-immersion role-player to include in their character’s backstory. How did their ancestors relate to the Ehrotai 10,000 years ago? This could also provide backstories for ancient Nidalese magic items untouched by the Midnight Lord, which might also prompt involvement with the Speakers, who won’t say anything (such as a command word) without a sacrifice. What are your good-aligned Desnan and Milanite PCs gonna do in that case? How deep is their dedication to revolution? Or just think of what it might mean for the Molthuni, if they ever manage to get it together to invade Nidal? An invasion of Nidal seems like the one story I might tell involving Molthune, which is largely pretty bland in my limited reading of that realm.Caustic, poisonous crimson smoke that will slay any living creature in minutes and blackened stone walls herald the rich deposits of gems in the Godsblood Crevasse, which cuts through the hissing wastes southeast of Ridwan known as the Weeping Fields. Wow, that’s a region that really calls forth the purple prose and heavy metal imagery, isn’t it? Specifically, the crevasse holds pigeon’s-blood rubies, and its stores (mined by alchemically-petrified skeletons) have seemed inexhaustible for centuries. Surely, it’s a gift from the Midnight Lord! The rubies are the only colored gemstones considered in good taste by Nidalese fashonistas.Grenda of Elith Lorin, a LE female graveknight fighter 9 and member of the Umbral Court, oversees the bony miners. I bet Preali Dhat hates her for being on the Court. She gets her skeletons, officially speaking, from Kuthites who have sold their labor after death. However, the smoke wears away at them, even through their alchemical processing, and so her overseers are less than strict about their methods of replacing them.A curiously cold basin of water surrounded by frost blighted plants sits near the outlet of the Usk Lake to the Usk River. Despite the local’s dismissal of fisherfolk stories about seeing ice deep below the surface, this basin hosts a qallupilluk by the name of Kialuk. The qallupillk is based on an Inuit creature, the qalupalik. She’d fought with her sisters over a stolen child and was exiled, travelling south (presumably from the Crown of the World or damn near) til she came here. Several crates of liquid ice stolen from an unlikely Kuthite caravan made her hovel at least livable and intimidated the merrows, scrags, and other monsters of the lake. She is now a petty queen living in fear of running out of the very limited resource that allows her to live and maintain her power. This fear drives her to command her servants to travel Nidalese rivers in search of a replacement, preferably a permanent one.Kialuk is nice ~ she connects Nidal (somewhat randomly) to the outer world and feels pleasingly like the kind of kids’ TV villainess common to the many cartoons and shows I watched as a child. I simply cannot help but imagine Rita Repulsa’s voice bubbling out from Kialuk’s mouth. Aristotelian ideas of dramatic conversion want me to tie her into Alkaiva of the Uskwood’s winter wolf, but my interest in immersion and mythopoeia would want to resist that as being unrealistic.</blockquote>

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