(Dear Reader: What follows is a marvelous guest post--with additional notes for the DM--written by the formidable veteran
Forgotten Realms game designer Steven Schend!)
PRIAPURL - A massive caravan of more than two dozen wagons has arrived in Priapurl from the Threecrowns Road—a collective affair of the Thousandheads and Goldsheaves trading costers and the faiths of Deneir, Tymora, and the Hand of Harmony.
While most goods and supplies have customers in Elversult or parts farther east, the town benefits from an excess of quality longbows and short swords from
Tethyr as well as an abundance of wines coming from the Ollake Boughs, a small but productive vineyard making higher quality wines than many more established vintners.
Other trade goods blessing Priapurl’s markets include dried fruits and fruit preserves, millet, flour, various raw ores and unpolished crystals, and a large shipment of vellum and parchment whose original client—Maestul Torrux, bookbinder and owner of Torrux Scribnus—unexpectedly died of heartstop in Tarsakh.
His apprentice unexpectedly sold the business to the newly arrived Hand of Harmony quintet, much to the consternation of another recent arrival with the caravans—Alavandur Helgulkh, Holy Hand of Oghma from Zazzesspur, who allegedly had some business with Torrux.
Folk now whisper that the five—two humans, two young elves, and a dwarf—talk of raising one of their Harmonium temples on Priapurl’s outskirts, as the town won’t allow them to build it in the footprint of Torrux Scribnus.
FOR THE DM:
The Hand of Harmony is a religious order new within the past dozen decades and confirmed to have come from Rhymanthiin, the hidden City of Hope in the northern High Moor.
Its Hands preach of companionship and alliances beyond one’s own kin and the sharing of skills and magic and lore written “in one’s books or one’s stars.” While yet rare along the Dragon Coast, the Harmonia and their message are deemed agreeable by all but the most dogmatic priests of Oghma, Dumathoin, Corellon, Sehanine, or Mystra, who claim they “dispense lies from the heretical preachings of those once called Pentad.”
All Hands claim they bring both new messages and ones far-older and long forgotten, their entwined five faiths helping to heal and strengthen all by bringing Faerûn’s scattered peoples together.
Their most notable actions often are the raisings of their Harmoniumanse temples—five priests casting in unison (to summon from the landscape or craft by magic) for a full day that grow two- or three-story temples of stone and wood in a day and a night. Even the most skeptical engineers have to admit their buildings are sound, and clerics of all faiths can hear the walls sing of sanctity and holiness.
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