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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Libertad" data-source="post: 9459599" data-attributes="member: 6750502"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/HeBQoa0.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /> The GnarlThis heavily forested region is bisected by a river, and a constant aura of decay can be found throughout. Some interesting locations include a smuggler’s hideout filled with skeletons (at least one of which can talk) and cursed weapons that frequently break upon use; an illusory stone bridge that spans a gorge filled with dangerous worms feeding upon the bones of those who fall down here; and an abandoned cemetery where plants with human faces grow upon gravesites and tell people the secrets of the dead. Some interesting NPCs include Gell o’ the Fens, the Speaker of Ends. She is a scholar of death, who wants to follow the party in hopes of improving her doomsaying skills by predicting how the PCs will die; Denisette the Sorceress, Lady Violeta’s twin who was exiled and her lineage kept a secret, and she hopes to gain enough magical power to kill her sister and rule Gnolune; and the Veteran, a human now turned into a talking elm tree after angering a Onceian god, who knows all there is to know about the Gnarl.The Garden of Memory is a safe, well-tended place in the midst of wild woodland, overseen by a knight known as Sir Vahn the Recollector who lives in a humble cottage. Accompanying him are Spindle-Scribes, helping maintain a magical phenomenon known as the Memory Web. Threads woven between woven stakes are capable of holding memories, and those who know where to look via proper guidance can find a memory and access it, reliving it like the original owner.Via a broken sword known as Self-Stealer or smaller shards of it, Sir Vahn can remove someone’s memory and imbue it within the Web. Sir Vahn is willing to let the PCs access the Memory Web in exchange for finding memories of great value to add to it. This serves as a springboard for quest hooks elsewhere in Gnolune. Sir Vahn has a dark secret: his romantic companion Lyam was stabbed by Self-Stealer’s original owner, a Selenian wizard, and he forgot who Sir Vahn is. The knight fruitlessly searches for a means of restoring Lyam’s memories, but keeps him imprisoned in a shed and will want to be freed if he believes the PCs can help him out with this.<img src="https://i.imgur.com/c31COSD.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />The Midwife & the Breech Born are located in a well-defended fen. There are a variety of huts forming a small community, but the most visible feature is a pair of giant legs poking out of the ground and choked with overgrowth. A woman by the name of Camma believes that the legs belong to a growing godling who will fully form in a thousand years and become ruler of all the world’s forests. She can grow humanoid beings of low intelligence from the entity’s feet, which she refers to as her husbands and who form the rest of the community. Camma fears the Conclave finding the godling, and will order any obvious members to be attacked and killed. But for others who appear more open-minded, she may trust them enough for errands to act as agents in the wider world. Most of these quests tend to oppose the Conclave and Silvered Nobles. In exchange, she can give one Gift of the Godling, a ritual which after 3 days imposes a beneficial ability on the character. For example, one Gift causes a twin to grow on the godling’s feet that animates with the original’s soul should they die. Or once per week being able to ask a plant a question, and that plant taps into the collective knowledge base of all plants around the world to see if any know the answer.<img src="https://i.imgur.com/XnKuJMA.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />The Prison of Sir Thibauld is the Gnarl’s dungeon, home to the ultimate fate of one of King Aerthur’s knights. Sir Thibauld was tasked with gaining aid from Gnolune’s nobility in the war against the Selenians, but they refused. Sir Thibauld and his warriors were taken advantage of by a trickster deity, convincing the knight to bravely offer up his own body to gain the wealth of the world to finance his King’s ventures. Sir Thibauld’s body painfully transformed into collections of gold and jewels, and asked his warriors to hack him apart and take his body as treasure. But this wasn’t to be, as Sir Thibauld became a maddened monster killing all but two survivors, who managed to imprison him in this cave.Although concealed by a boulder, PCs can come upon this dungeon via tracking golden centipedes to the location, gaining visions of it from sleeping under the Festschrift Tree in the Brobdin Wood, or learning of the legend and location from a book at Vilhouse Neel’s auction house in Cimbrine. The prison is a single-story, twelve-room complex, home to vermin and undead as monsters. Two unique types of monster here are golden centipedes who have a venomous bite that bestows the effects of a Confusion spell, and golden skeletons whose forms are coated in gold and whose strikes cause gold leaf to fleck off into wounds. This makes it take longer to naturally heal. Several clues and a hidden room can be activated by placing torches into empty scones, which in one case can open a door and in other cases reveal writing on the walls giving cryptic messages hinting at Sir Thibauld’s curse.Sir Thibauld is naturally present as a maddened being, who can instill in a character a desire to take another party member’s belongings on a failed save vs spells. Even while fighting he will beg the party to take his body back to Aerthur, saying that he needs the wealth within his flesh. Another knight in the dungeon is Sir Gregor, who will reanimate as a unique undead known as a Treasure Wraith who will hunt down the party if they take the coins held in his hands. He has a special Treasure Drain attack that causes 1d6 x 50 gold pieces’ worth of coins or treasure carried by the truck target to dissolve. There’s also a ritual circle which if someone sleeps within (clues from torch sconces can give hints to its purpose) allows a character to make contact with the trickster deity Xyxtyana. She offers to provide wealth and power in exchange for sacrifice of various kinds. The book gives several examples for inspirational purposes, such as having a character’s eye fall out and turn into a pearl or sharing a powerful or shameful secret of themselves in exchange for hidden knowledge of a powerful figure.Thoughts So Far: I really like the Garden of Memory and Prison of Sir Thibauld, as both locations play into themes of gaining knowledge and/or power in exchange for a precious price, and Xyxtyana’s dubious bargains combined with the Breech Born’s weirdness show a darker side of the old gods from the days of Once. I like how that while it doesn’t make the Riverkeepers depraved cultists and the Conclave and Silvered Nobles are still authoritarian, it shows that the rebellions against the prior order didn’t come out of nowhere and likely had justified causes.If I had any criticisms, it would be that the Gnarl doesn’t feel like it has a truly unique theme. The Brobdin Wood already serves as our haunted forest, we already had an undead-themed dungeon last post with the Tomb of the Necropoet, and the Riverkeepers are an already-existing pagan faction aligned against the powers-that-be but without any immediately off-putting weirdness of Camma’s godling. The Garden of Memory is a quality exception, but the prior sections had several novel places rather than one.Join us next time as we explore the deadly wastelands of Ylgotha, containing dreadful places such as a cursed mine or the Tower of the First Heresy, the Conclave’s high-security prison!</blockquote>

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