ADVENTURE LOG: February 15, 2019

The following occurred between game sessions, after the adventuring party has departed the island of the Thune. It is a stand-alone adventure modeled on a classic D&D module.

Part One

Days ago, the adventurers joined a caravan of traveler people led by a cousin of the Marchioness, a trader in medicinal plants who calls himself the Lord Baron Ti Bon Ange, or Baron Angel. The blood of his clan runs with the stellar light of the Seven Caravans that circle the heavens around the Polaris star, and Baron Angel, having heard the legends of how these four adventurers saved a traveler child from the clutches of a ghast, grants them safe passage with his clan on the guild road. The “road” in question is little more than a narrow footpath snaking through the equatorial rainforests of the feywild, which the clan traverses on foot, harvesting medicinal and psychoactive plants from the thriving jungle canopy and preparing tinctures and powders that will eventually find their way into the hands of buyers in the communes and city-states. The baron’s medicines and narcotics travel across the whole of the continent, distributed by the far-flung commercial networks of the guilds.

But the rainy season has begun and a terrible monsoon strikes unexpectedly, separating the party from the rest of the caravan. When the rains die down, the adventurers find themselves alone in the jungle. The caravan of Baron Angel is nowhere in sight. The deluge has obscured the guild road in the dense tropical growth, and the party, having strayed from the route in the blinding downpour, has lost its bearings.

The party attempts to head east with Nik acting as navigator, periodically winging up above the forest canopy to take sightings of the positions of the sun and stars, but progress is agonizingly slow and the jungle seems go on forever. Days pass. Sant’oka keeps the party alive on edible plants and berries. Korric manages to spear a slow-moving boar-like animal, which is clearly of exoplanetary origin, but the meat sickens the group. Exhausted, dehydrated, and feverish, the party succumbs to a peculiar kind of gnawing madness. Baron Angel gave a name to this jungle delirium. He called it the “feywild sickness.”

When, on the ninth day of their ordeal, the party sights a peculiar figure up in a tree wearing an animal mask, they think they are hallucinating. The person is naked except for the carved wooden tribal mask and the tangles of brightly colored beads around her neck, and her skin is painted in blue clay. She is intently watching the party with an almost childlike curiosity. The young woman, who is beautiful, is no hallucination, however. She climbs down out of her tree and eagerly gestures for the adventurers to follow, and takes them to a remote jungle community whose inhabitants nurse them back to health over the next several days. The adventurers are saved . . . or so they think.

The commune members describe themselves as a “collective” and hold rather extreme apocalyptic beliefs. They have chosen to live intentionally in the feywild—the literal and symbolic heart of the Greening—certain that their isolated group represents the nucleus of a bright new civilization that will rise after the current one is swallowed up by the Greening. Korric, recalling his readings in his sixties-era Life magazines, remarks under his breath to Ven one morning as the entire commune heads off en masse to skinny dip together in a nearby spring, “A bunch of damn hippies is what they are.”

The commune members spend most of each day in a weird narcotic dream, induced by smoking a psychoactive poultice made from a blue flower that grows in the uppermost canopy of the jungle, found only in this region of the feywild. While tripping on the blue flower, they paint their naked bodies in colored clays and pigments. Sometimes they wear masks of animals or gods from the multiverse. There is much free love that happens under the influence of the blue flower, which the collective regards to be its holiest sacrament. Only commune members are permitted to imbibe it, and one may join the commune only after being “born again” into the commune. But there are other flowers that grow in the area with properties of their own, such as the white, the yellow, and the black.

Hell Mouth

In a grove on the outskirts of the commune there stands a large and somewhat grotesque sculpture of Orcus with his mouth wide open. Ven believes that it is very old, and that it most certainly predates the arrival of the “hippies,” as Korric calls them. Ven tells his companions that he encountered something very much like it on the Sword Coast of Faerûn, explaining that the Orcus mouth on Faerûn led to an underground ritual complex similar to those of the Mithra cults of ancient Rome, in which secret rites and feasts were said to take place. The ritual complex on the Sword Coast, Ven explains, symbolized the underworld, which candidates for initiation had to pass through in order to be reborn to new life.

“And who better to symbolize the underworld,” Ven remarks, “than Orcus, demon prince of the undead, master of wights, specters, and wraiths? On Faerûn, the open mouth of the sculpture was referred to as the “Hell Mouth.’”

The commune members do not know who built the Orcus sculpture or why, and are evasive about its relevance to the community today, saying only that nobody in these times of Greening is ever really lost. It is one’s own destiny that leads a person in out of the feywild. The commune teaches that no traveler who stumbles across this oasis in the jungle does so by accident.

TO BE CONTINUED . . .