A Landmark for Heart: The City Beneath
Domains: Warren, Wild
Default Stress: D6
Haunts: The divers’ outpost (D6 Blood)
A colossal bramble thicket spilling up from a yawning ravine, hundreds of feet across and miles deep. Individual vines are the size of tree trunks wrap and twist around each other, covered in vicious corkscrew thorns and dotted with occasional brilliant white flowers. At the edge of the ravine where the bramble crawls up onto the cliffside, an outpost houses the small collection of markets that have arisen from this deadly curiosity: a smithy fashioning blades out of thorns (they’re brittle, but razor sharp), a small church hosting pilgrims who come to prick themselves upon the remarkable thorns and offer sacrificial drippings to their deity, and a diving outfit that lowers huge, heavy diving bells from a clever crane contraption into the depths of the bramble. And, of course, a dingy tavern that plays host to the divers, in need of drink and with harrowing tales to tell.
The divers have been descending to the bottom in an attempt to clear out the bramble below with machetes and machines. Most who stick around insist that slow progress is being made, and strange wonders or treasure-filled ruins lie deeper within. Unfortunately, diving is treacherous and unpredictable. Elusive and terrifying polinators squirm and crawl lizard-like through the brambles in search of flowers; they seem to nest deeper below, defensive of their territory. Not only that, some divers meet even stranger fates: they’re pulled back up impaled by thorns despite no evidence of the bell being breached, or perhaps entirely alive but with thorns sprouting from their flesh.
Resources:
Potential Plots:
Styrgard, a burly long-time diver, has become convinced that the bramblebeasts in the deep might leave well alone if a sturdy group of delvers accompanies his crew on the next dive. Should they attack, he hopes to rely on the delvers’ number, their weapons, or (if necessary) their flesh instead of his own.