Galadin | Glimmerstone | The Ghost Road | The Whispering Dark | Fernwood
Welcome to the Sunday Supplement, Raging Swan Press’s weekly email for GMs. This week, we have one free download, one piece of legendry, one piece of lore and three miscellaneous campaign components for your game.
Should we develop any of these idea further? Comment below.
01: Fell Doings at the Owl & Weasel
Download
Ehtaro Raita runs Low City’s Owl & Weasel Inn and has, by all accounts, made a success of it. But he has a dark secret. Ehtaro is a purveyor of misery—he kidnaps vulnerable guests who won’t be missed and sells them to his friends among the Takolen—consigning them to an unknown but likely hideous fate. Ehtaro’s operation has run like clockwork for the best part of five years until a certain group of adventurers arrives on the scene…
This week's free download comprises the first four pages of Languard Backdrop: Fell Doings at the Owl & Weasel. You get the Languard Backdrop's background, rumours, local lore, random tables for fleshing out the characters' visit, a map and more.
02: Galadin
Ashlarian Legendry (Hero)
The legendary hero, wanderer, traveller and carouser Galadin explored the world centuries ago. Legion are the stories of his cunning, his wit and his charisma and quite unbelievable are the tales of his epic carouses and appetites. He was also famed for his enchanted, tireless steed—a sleek, black magical horse said to be the better of any mundane flesh and blood steed.
Galadin was a wanderer and a friend-maker. He had friends everywhere and wrote extensively about his travels throughout Ashlar, Yex and many other distant lands. These travelogues are now centuries out of date but are still prized by historians and travellers alike for the many nuggets of information recorded therein. As well as possessing great charisma, Galadin had a keen mind and saw much that others did not. His travelogues are replete with insights into other cultures and are illuminated with wondrously detailed maps.
Hundreds of mourners attended Galadin’s funeral after his untimely death brought on by a surfeit of wine during a banquet held in his honour. His wonderfully embellished tomb lies in Languard’s cathedral of Conn, the Father’s Hall, and many folk come to pray there before setting out on their travels.
Galadin’s travels made him wealthy beyond compare, but after his death, distant relatives, creditors and chancers argued over, stole and divided up his riches. Within a few years, there was nothing left. Although his fortune is long gone, his legacy—of epic, joyful and fearless exploration—lives on.
03: Glimmerstone
Ashlarian Lore (Mundane Item)
This soft, easily carved light grey rock, harvested from rich veins running below the fallen dwarven hold of Vongyth was once much in demand throughout Ashlar. Slightly warm to the touch, the rock, when properly treated, emits an unwavering and undying warm, natural light akin to torchlight.
It was fashionable hundreds of years ago for Ashlar’s nobles and well-to-do merchants to commission chandeliers or statues carved from glimmerstone. A few families sheathed entire ceilings in glimmerstone or commissioned skilled stonemasons to create intricate geometric shapes or star constellation decorations for their homes.
Glimmerstone is ill-suited to outside use as harsh weather can quickly erode it. Some adventurers, however, commissioned torches or lanterns carved from the stuff—undying light being a useful boon to underground exploration. Such items are still occasionally found for sale in Ashlar’s marketplaces or amid the ruin of some long-dead adventuring party.
04: The Ghost Road
Campaign Component (Tribal Burial Ground)
This ancient hollow way was sacred to the original inhabitants of the land, but they have since declined, subsumed by waves of settlers and displaced by wars and famine. Legends of hauntings, apparitions and ghostly processions of mourners smother the Ghost Road. The hollow way, now shunned and all but abandoned, has been left to slowly crumble and decay.
This narrow path, worn deeply into the very fabric of the land and in places barely ten feet wide, snakes upwards from the lowlands through the hills to a tribal burial ground sprawling atop the highest, most exposed hills—the so-called Hills of Bones. Waymakers and burial cairns litter the Ghost Road’s flanks and its environs; goodly folk rarely travel the hollow way, and they never do so at night.
Atop the Ghost Road, across the Hills of Bones, the tribe practised sky burials. The leavings of their ancient, primitive burial ceremonies—yellowed and pitted weathered bones, tumbled cairns, and strange monuments can yet be found—across the four domed hills. Yet more legends of ghostly processions, haunted cairns and of grim, blasphemous necromancers going about their terrible business cloak the burial grounds. The occasional faint lights seen flickering atop the bones are studiously ignored by the locals.
05: The Whispering Dark
Campaign Component (Wish-Giver)
Amid the sun-scorched, wind-lashed depths of the deep desert, a nameless crag of wind-sculpted rock rises from the endless sand sea high in the blue, cloudless sky. At the base of that barren crag lies a certain cave, and in that cave lurks the Whispering Dark.
Sometimes hidden by the desert’s shifting sands and often whispered about around the nomad campfires, the cave, sand-worn and seemingly innocuous, is sought by the greedy and the power-hungry and avoided by the content and the sane.
Something lurks in the deep dark of the cave, something possessing great power and great malignity. This nameless spirit can grant wishes to those seeking it out, but the consequences of these wishes are often horribly bastardised and warped so that eventually they bring great woe and suffering to their recipient. Despite this, misguided, arrogant or uninformed travellers are often spotted wandering the desert in search of the Whispering Dark. Some return sunburnt and exhausted, while others disappear—victims of the harsh, merciless desert or its many ever-hungry denizens.
06: The Fernwood
Campaign Component (Woodland)
Dim, dark and dank Fernwood grows thick and wild over the north-facing ridges and dells of a range of low, steep-sided hills. Fernwood is an old, primal woodland, little touched by humanity’s civilising hands. An old druid, Otava Ikuturso, dwells peacefully in the woods. He tends an ancient, tumbled temple now half-sunken into the soft, loamy earth, raised long ago to some forgotten nature god and welcomes all respectful visitors to his home.
The depths of the Fernwood hold greater, stranger wonders, however. In a small secluded dell dense with trees and choked with shadows, a vast swath of ferns grows thickly amid the folded shadows of the ever-cool forest floor. Some of the ferns reach truly monstrous proportions, and one—a gargantuan individual-has gained sentience. This treant-like creature lumbers about the dell, tending to its flock as a shepherd tends to their sheep. Woe betide any being who shatters the peace, quiet and sanctity of Dingle Dell.
Ashlarian (proper noun) of Ashlar; Campaign (noun) a connected series of adventures; Component (noun) a constituent part; Legendry (noun) a collection or body of legends; Lore (noun) knowledge and stories about a subject
Thank you for reading the Sunday Supplement; I hope some of the above material makes it into your game or sparks your creativity.
Remember, Everything is Better with Tentacles!
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