The Rosefinch Khatun: an ATWC adventure

As promised back in February, here's a quick adventure set in the ATWC setting, involving spirits and stuff. Reading heaps of text on a blog is awful, so I've tried to use images to do as much of the scene-setting as possible. This adventure should be suitable for a low-level party, is heavy on social interactions, and should take a couple of sessions to play through.

The Rosefinch Khatun

Setting: An expanse of taiga on the northern edge of the steppe, someplace. 

Possible Hooks: 

• A leading family within a nearby steppe clan is offering a reward to anyone who can bring home their missing son, Ganbaatar. You like money, right?
• Or maybe the PCs need to find Ganbaatar for reasons of their own. Maybe he owes them money. Maybe he knows something they want to know.
• Or maybe the PCs are looking to build an alliance with one of the clan's leading warriors, and he asks them to ride into the taiga and help his daughter, Narangerel, bring back her missing fiancé. What makes her happy makes him happy, right?
• Or maybe the PCs have some connection with the local inhabitants of the taiga, the Nine Valleys People, and are called upon to help them deal with this bunch of pushy steppe nomads who have showed up demanding to know where this Ganbaatar guy is.
• Or maybe Galiya (see below) hired them as security for her research trip. (In this case, the PCs replace the gun-toting mercenaries mentioned in her description, below.)

The Adventure:

Meet Ganbaatar.

Ganbaatar is a handsome, athletic young warrior from a clan of steppe nomads. He and his friends recently rode into the taiga to do some hunting; but during a chase through dense woods they became separated, and afterwards his friends found no trace of him. They searched for days, but eventually they had to return home without him. This is because he's no longer in the woods at all: he's been carried away by the Rosefinch Khatun (see below), and is now being kept by her in the spirit world, as her lover. He is unaware of how much time has passed in the outside world.

This is Narangerel:

Steppe nomad, expert horsewoman, skilled archer, enthusiastic but ill-disciplined wrestler. She is engaged to be married to Ganbaatar, and is not at all happy about his disappearance. She has rounded up a band of friends and relatives and led them into the taiga, determined not to return until she's found out what has become of him.

These are the Nine Valleys People:

Taiga-dwellers, they inhabit the woods where Ganbaatar went missing, and live by hunting, fishing, and reindeer herding. They are led by their impetuous young chief, Toyon Ayhal, and their grizzled old shaman, Kaskil. The horse-breeding steppe clans view themselves as innately superior to the reindeer-breeding forest-dwellers, but the two communities also engage in trade and relations are normally peaceful, if strained. They are currently a lot more strained than usual due to Narangerel and her band roaming from camp to camp, demanding to know what they've done with her fiancé and threatening dire consequences if he is not returned to her.

Kaskil knows where to find the sacred grove of the Rosefinch Khatun (see below), but will not reveal this to outsiders except under exceptional circumstances. 

This is Batbayar:

A mountain of a man, and the best wrestler in his clan. He's Ganbaatar's best friend, and was with him on the hunt where he disappeared. He also has a massive crush on Narangerel, which he feels very guilty about - he believes that he has successfully concealed this from everyone, but actually it's pretty obvious to most people, including Narangerel and Ganbaatar themselves.

Batbayar has (truthfully) told Narangerel that he thinks he glimpsed Ganbaatar vanishing into the woods with a strange woman, but Narangerel suspects he's making this up in the hope of getting her to give up on her fiancé: after all, none of the hunters were able to find any tracks, and she knows full well that Ganbaatar isn't that stealthy. (She always had to creep into his yurt. He woke her parents every time he tried to sneak into hers.) Whatever Narangerel's suspicions to the contrary, Batbayar does genuinely want to find his friend, and has accompanied her back into the taiga; he now goes around looming menacingly over every young woman he sees, in the hope that they'll confess to having Ganbaatar concealed in a hidden love-nest somewhere. This intimidating behaviour is doing very little to endear him (or Narangerel) to the Nine Valleys People.

This is Tuyaara:

She's a young woman of the Nine Valleys People, and a noted beauty. As such, Batbayar will regard her with intense suspicion, as just the kind of girl who might have turned his friend's head. His suspicions will be deepened by the fact that she makes regular trips into the woods, alone; in fact, these are her visits to her uncle, Elley, an eccentric shaman who lives deep in the taiga and relies upon Tuyaara to keep him supplied with drink. Tuyaara is very popular among her people, and the more that she is harassed by Batbayar, the more hostile the Nine Valleys clan will become to him and his companions.

This is Firebird Woman:

Firebird Woman is a Payna, a woodland spirit who lives in a hollow tree deep in the taiga near the yurt inhabited by Tuyaara's uncle, Elley. She and Elley have a long-term (if intermittently acrimonious) relationship; they're currently on the outs, however, and spend a lot of time yelling at each other and accusing one another of imaginary infidelities. PCs who overhear Elley accusing her of seducing other men may wonder if she is behind Ganbaatar's disappearance, but Firebird Woman is hot-tempered and will react extremely badly to strangers poking around her tree. If anything happens to Tuyaara, Elley will unleash Firebird Woman upon whomever he believes to be responsible. 

Both Elley and Firebird Woman know where to find the sacred grove of the Rosefinch Khatun (see below), but will not share this information without good reason. 

This is Galiya.

She's a scholar from the Wicked City, far to the south, who has come to the woods in the hope of locating and excavating an ancient tower which she believes to be hidden somewhere within this part of the taiga. This tower was once the residence of a great Khatun (queen) of the steppe peoples, and Galiya is eager to find it, partly out of a disinterested desire for historical knowledge and partly because she's hoping to find ancient jewellery that will sell for a fortune back home. She's currently staying with the Nine Valleys People, accompanied by a group of thuggish, musket-toting mercenary bodyguards; she herself carries a multi-barrelled pepperbox pistol, and knows how to use it. Her hosts know perfectly well where the ruins of the tower are, but they have no desire to see it desecrated and have been fobbing her off with claims of ignorance, much to her increasing frustration. 

All the locals - steppe and taiga-dwellers alike - think Galiya looks terribly foreign and glamorous, and Narangerel will suspect her immediately as soon as they cross paths. (As mentioned above, Batbayar's main suspect will be Tuyaara; but Narangerel thinks that if Ganbaatar has been unfaithful to her, it's much more likely to have been with someone exotic and sophisticated like Galiya, rather than the daughter of some taiga-dwelling reindeer-herder.) She may well try tailing Galiya on her trips into the forest, just to make sure she doesn't have Ganbaatar hidden away somewhere. Unfortunately, Galiya has suspicions of her own; if she becomes aware that the steppe warriors are tailing her she will assume it's because they want to follow her to the ruins and steal her loot, and will react accordingly.

This is Terbish:

He's another of Ganbaatar's friends, who was with him on the original hunting trip and who has now returned with Narangerel to find him. He's a rather cynical soul, who believes what he sees with his own eyes, and little more. He assumes that Batbayar's story about seeing Ganbaatar with a woman was simply invented in the hope of driving a wedge between him and Narangerel. His own theory is that Ganbaatar was probably murdered by the taiga people for the sake of his horse and hunting gear, and that's what Narangerel should be looking for.

Although still young, Terbish has already fought in two campaigns in the service of his khan, and his soldiering days have left their mark on him. He's not an especially cruel man, but he does tend to believe that most situations can be resolved through sufficient applications of matter-of-fact brutality.

This is Sayiina:

She's a rather wild young woman who lives on the very edges of the territory held by the Nine Valleys People, with her two younger brothers and her aged grandmother. (Her parents died a few years back.) She found Ganbaatar's horse wandering by a river, and his clothes and weapons scattered on the ground not far away; she assumed that both must belong to some idiot foreigner who'd wandered into the woods and managed to drown himself in the stream, and promptly claimed them for herself. The clothes and weapons are stashed in her yurt, but she rides the horse every chance she gets.

Because of the extremely remote location of Sayiina's yurt, Narangerel's band are unlikely to come across her until they've finished with the main encampments of the Nine Rivers People (and thus with Batbayar and Narangerel's suspicions that Tuyaara and Galiya, respectively, may know what has become of Ganbaatar). If they manage to get this far without antagonising the locals too much, however, it will only be a matter of time before Terbish spots Sayiina riding around on Ganbaatar's horse. If he sees Ganbaatar's clothes, he'll be somewhat surprised by the lack of cuts or bloodstains on them; but he will continue to regard Sayiina as the prime suspect in his friend's disappearance, and will attempt to grab her and beat the truth out of her at the first opportunity he gets. (If he and his friends haven't already totally alienated the Nine Valleys People, then this will probably do the trick!) 

This is The Mourning Khatun:

According to legend, she was the khatun of an ancient khan among the steppe peoples, who - after his death in battle - rode into the taiga to live out the rest of her life in mourning and seclusion. The Nine Valleys People tell a different version of her story: according to them, after three years of mourning she fell in love with a handsome young taiga huntsman, and become the ancestress of their people. They revere her to this day as the Rosefinch Khatun, ancestor-spirit and spirit of the taiga, and will not kill a rosefinch anywhere within her woods, because of the love she was said to bear for them.

The steppe clans know that the Nine Valleys People revere some kind of rosefinch-forest-mother-spirit, but are unaware that she and the Mourning Khatun of their own legends are one and the same. If told, they would find the idea that a heroine of the steppes like the Mourning Khatun could lay aside her sorrows for a simple taiga huntsman highly offensive!

This is the Rosefinch Khatun today:

She has, indeed, become a powerful spirit of the taiga, although she's a bit vague about whether or not she's also the progenitor of the Nine Valleys People. It was she who spirited Ganbaatar away, attracted by his youth, beauty, and athleticism, and his vague resemblance to the khan she loved so long ago. He believes that she is madly in love with him, but the fact is that she's already getting bored with him. If Narangerel (or someone else) could locate her sacred grove and deliver a sufficiently-impassioned plea for his return, he'd probably come stumbling out of the woods a few minutes later, wild-eyed and naked and with no idea how much time had passed in the outside world. Of course, if the person making the plea has already antagonised her by mistreating her worshippers, she's much more likely to keep him with her forever just to spite them. The location of her grove is known only to the spirits and shamans of the Nine Valleys People (Kaskil, Elley, Firebird Woman, and the Shurale), who keep it as a closely-guarded secret.

The idea that the Rosefinch Khatun might be behind Ganbaatar's disappearance will honestly not occur to the Nine Valleys People, despite the fairly clear parallel with their own origin myth, which also involves her being attracted to a handsome young huntsman whom see sees riding in the taiga. They are so used to thinking of her as their spirit that they tend to discount or forget her origins among the steppe peoples, and simply assume that she, like them, will view the steppe nomads as annoying intruders, rather than as countrymen for whose language and culture she might still feel some lingering affection.

This is the Khatun's tower, or what's left of it:

Finding it without a local guide is difficult but not impossible, and if she's not driven out of the taiga first then Galiya will find it eventually. It's overrun by the forest, a haunt of animals and birds - especially rosefinches, which might suggest to alert PCs that the Mourning Khatun of steppe legend and the rosefinch spirit revered by the Nine Valleys People are one and the same. Within it lairs a Siberian tiger of prodigious size, which will defend its territory ferociously.

The upper floors contain some old antiques which would be valuable to the right collector, once all the bird shit was cleaned off them. There are also some old carvings of the Khan and Khatun, from before his death. If either Batbayar or Narangerel sees these, they will comment on the khan's resemblance to Ganbaatar.

Searching the place will reveal an old tomb nearby - this is not the grave of the Khatun herself, but that of her faithless handmaiden, the witch Bolormaa. It does contain some treasures - Bolormaa was buried with her enchanted jewellery - but disturbing the grave in any way will unleash Bolormaa's ghost the following night.

If Galiya finds the tower, she will order her men to shoot the tiger and break open the grave before setting up camp and exploring the ruin more thoroughly. She'll probably become Bolormaa's first victim.

This is Bolormaa:

If unleashed, she roams the woods by night, apparently a bewitching maiden with long, dark, silky hair. She will try to lure any men who see her into the forest, where she will lean in as though to kiss them. Then her mouth opens impossibly wide and she'll suck the breath from their lungs in one, huge, ripping gust. She is semi-material, and it is possible (although difficult) to destroy her with mundane weapons alone.

Once it becomes clear that some kind of ghost-woman is roaming the woods, preying upon young men, the Nine Valleys People will strongly suggest to Narangerel that maybe it was this malicious spirit which took Ganbaatar. If she is persuaded of this, Narangerel won't rest until she's hunted Bolormaa down.

This is the Ill-Luck Forest:

It's a region of bog and taiga inhabited by malicious spirits, and plagued by flocks of ironclaw ravens. At its heart lies an old, desecrated burial ground, haunted by an abaasy ghost. (These graves contain some valuable trinkets if looted, but the only way to search them safely is to placate the ghost with offerings of blood.) Near the burial ground is a thicket inhabited by a Shurale, which will attempt to abduct any woman who comes near its lair, hoping to add her to its collection of pretty things.

The shurale knows the nature of the Rosefinch Khatun, and where to find her sacred grove, but PCs seeking such information from it would have to bribe it with valuable-looking items. Fortunately, it's pretty stupid, so polished glass will do just as well as gems. Alternatively, they could  just kill it and steal its treasure-haul. No-one likes it anyway.

Once Narangerel and her band have made themselves sufficiently unwelcome among the Nine Valleys People, Toyon Ayhal will come up with the idea of telling them that Ganbaatar has been spotted riding into the Ill-Luck Forest, in the hope that a visit to the place will either kill them or convince them to give up. In practise, it will do neither, although enduring multiple ironclaw raven attacks and an embarrassingly unsuccessful abduction attempt by the shurale will make Narangerel very, very angry. Once this has happened, some kind of showdown between her and the Nine Valleys People is probably inevitable unless Ganbaatar can be found very quickly indeed.

This is the Rosefinch Khatun's Sacred Grove:

It's very deep in the taiga, and virtually impossible to locate without the guidance of a local shaman or spirit. Rosefinches nest here in huge numbers, and perch on every bough, watching everyone who enters the grove.

This is where Kaskil comes to leave offerings for the Rosefinch Khatun on behalf of his people. PCs who make it this far can try to strike spirit bargains with her too, if they want to: her preferred gifts are precious objects, as befits her regal status, but she will also accept offerings of food and drink if they are plentiful enough. She has power over birds, forests, and hunting. Anyone digging at the base of her spirit poles will find quantities of (now-corroded) offerings left to her by generations of the Nine Valleys People, some of them quite valuable. Anyone stealing these will suffer continuous and outrageous misfortune - hit by falling branches, attacked by wild animals, falling into rivers, and so on - until they either die, return them, or leave the taiga.

If Bolormaa somehow ends up here, the Rosefinch Khatun will withdraw from the grove in displeasure at such a vile creature being allowed into her presence. All of her spirit poles will immediately explode into rotten splinters, and unless she can somehow be coaxed back with suitable offerings, she will be deaf to all entreaties (including pleas for Ganbaatar's return) for the next 1d6 years.

Spiritually-attuned PCs may glimpse the Rosefinch Khatun here, lurking among the trees, but if they try to interact with her directly she will simply dissolve into a cloud of rosefinches. (Or maybe what they saw was only ever a flock of rosefinches, which they somehow mistook for a woman in the uncertain light?) She will, however, hear every word spoken within her grove, and a sufficiently impassioned plea (or a sufficiently large offering) will persuade her to release Ganbaatar back into the world.

Probable Events if the PCs do nothing:

• The three groups (steppe nomads, taiga dwellers, and Galiya's expedition) will continue to mutually antagonise one another for a while, while Batbayar and Narangerel follow up various false leads, becoming increasingly frustrated in the process.
• Finally tiring of Batbayar's harrassment of Tuyaara, Toyon Ayhal will give Narangerel a false tip about the Ill-Luck Forest, from which she and her companions will barely escape with their lives.
• A confrontation will ensue between the now-furious Narangerel and Toyon Ayhal, which soon turns violent. Blood is split on both sides and the steppe warriors flee the taiga, promising to return with a warband of their kinsmen.
• Meanwhile Galiya will find and loot the Khatun's tower, unleashing Bolormaa in the process. Bolormaa will kill Galiya and her guards in the night and proceed to roam the taiga in search of victims.
• A few weeks later, Narangerel comes back with a small army of steppe horseman and drives the Nine Valleys People from their homes. Bolormaa probably gets hunted down and killed by steppe warriors after preying upon the wrong victim. 
• A few weeks after that, the Rosefinch Khatun finally gets bored of Ganbaatar and he comes wandering out of the forest, confused and naked, believing he he has only been gone for a few days...

Monsters from Central Asian Mythology 12: The Payna

In the mythology of the Turkic and Altaic peoples, the Payna (or Baianai) were spirits of the woods, patrons of hunting and bringers of prosperity. As usual, their legend took many different forms among different peoples: even basic issues such as whether there was one Payna or many, and whether they were male or female, vary widely from one retelling to the next. The version presented here certainly shouldn't be taken as being in any way authoritative; I've simply picked it on the grounds that it strikes me as being useful for gaming purposes. And also because I'm bored of female nature spirits always being sexy barefoot hippy chicks who wander around the forests with flowers in their hair, and thought I'd write one which was a scary fiery bird-woman who lived in a hollow tree, instead.

So: the Payna are a race of magical beings which inhabit the taiga, possibly the female counterparts of the brutish (and all-male) Shurale. Where they come from is unclear; they never seem to age, and while they do occasionally take mortal lovers, any children born from such unions will be humans (albeit humans with a knack for shamanism) rather than Payna infants. They resemble tall, long-haired women, with skin that glows with a subtle inner radiance; they wear long, loose garments hung with hundreds of feathers, and when they wish to fly these garments twist themselves into great gliding wings, allowing them to swoop across the canopy from tree to tree. They live a wild, solitary existence, dwelling in caves deep in the forest, or in the boles of huge and hollow trees; they are great hunters, and a feather-token bestowed by a Payna can bring good fortune to all who hunt and fish in the woods around her lair. For this reason, when a taiga clan discovers that a Payna is dwelling nearby, their young men and their shamans will often come to court her with gifts of meat and fire, and will hold feasts in her honour during the midwinter months when her aid is most required. Such courtship requires great tact, however; for when the Payna are angered their inner fire burns hot and bright within their eyes, and anyone they gaze upon will be stricken with fever and thirst.

For the taiga peoples, the Payna are valuable but prickly neighbours: their gifts can be a blessing to a whole tribe, but they are also eccentric, quick to anger, highly territorial about their homes, and very sensitive to possible insults. A clan which wins the favour of a Payna will enjoy great prosperity, at least until the day comes when she tires of their forests and seeks a new home elsewhere; but a clan which antagonises one will be plagued with droughts, fires, and diseases among their livestock until either the Payna is killed or appeased, or the clan is driven out of the area entirely.

• Payna: AC 14 (agility and gown of feathers), 3 HD, AB +3, damage by weapon (usually bows and spears), FORT 10, REF 10, WILL 10, special attack: burning gaze.

Burning Gaze: When a payna is angry, anyone she gazes upon is filled with terrible feverish heat and thirst. They must make a FORT save; if they fail, they are at a -2 penalty to all rolls (including damage rolls) until they get a chance to drink lots of cold liquids and lie down somewhere cool for a few hours. (In combat, assume the payna is gazing at whomever she's currently attacking.) Anyone who passes their save cannot be affected by the same payna's gaze again that day. By staring fixedly at fields, streams, herds of livestock, or houses, a sufficiently angry payna can induce localised droughts, crop failures, and epidemic fevers among herd animals, or cause wood to dry out to such an extent as to massively increase the risk of it catching fire. 

Feather-Gown: A payna can cause her gown of feathers to twist into wings, allowing her to fly or glide for short distances - no more than a mile or so at a stretch, after which she must land and refold her gown for 1d6 minutes before taking off again.

Feather Token: Anyone to whom a payna willingly gives a feather token will be blessed with good fortune when hunting and fishing in the forests around her lair. The yield of any such hunting and fishing expeditions is increased by (1d6x10)%. 

The sable gold of the taiga: adventures in the early modern fur trade

To everyone except the indigenous peoples who actually lived there, early modern Siberia was about as uninviting as places got: a vast and pathless wilderness of bogs, forests, and tundra which stretched away endlessly to the east of the Ural mountains. For the Russians of the period, the nightmarish months-long journey over the Urals and into the taiga, replete with opportunities for being mauled by bears, mutilated by frostbite, or wandering the forests in circles until you starved to death, was made worthwhile by just one thing - a small, furry thing, about two feet long. The sable.

It may be cute, but your PCs will kill it anyway once they find out what its pelt is worth.

Being smooth, lustrous, and absurdly difficult to get hold of, high-quality Siberian sable furs commanded extremely high prices among the nobility of Persia, China, and Europe. In the Middle Ages, being unable to access Siberia themselves, the Russians had to trade for them with Komi middlemen in the Kingdom of Perm; but the last prince of Perm was deposed by the Russians in 1505, the Russian conquest of the Sibir Khanate from 1580-98 removed the last rival power in the region, and in 1597 the Russian explorer Artemy Babinov charted a new path over the Ural Mountains that allowed much more direct access to Siberia. Over the years that followed, Russian labourers hacked their way through the taiga, gradually changing the Babinov Route from a line on a map into a physical reality on the ground: a road, dotted with Russian forts, along which Russian hunters and fur traders could travel directly into the sable-rich Siberian forests of the east.

The seventeenth-century Siberian fur trade strikes me as being extremely fruitful terrain for gaming, partly because of its many similarities with another setting which almost all players are already going to be familiar with: the American Old West. In each case you have a rising power (Russia / America) pushing beyond its traditional borders to the (east / west) and into new territory, in search of a highly valuable, highly portable luxury good (furs / gold). In each case, obtaining this resource is extremely hazardous: the terrain is hostile and borderline impassable in places, and new infrastructure (roads / railways) are required to open it up for economic exploitation. In each case, there's an indigenous population (native Siberian / native American) who are less than thrilled about all these weird white people turning up in their territories with their guns and their bibles and their interesting new infectious diseases, leading to the construction of a network of forts manned by highly mobile cavalry forces (Cossacks / US cavalry) who are capable of inflicting reprisals on any native groups that step out of line. 

Indigenous Siberian hunter, c. 1700.

It's often been remarked that, in many ways, D&D really resembles a Western much more than it resembles medieval Europe. Small communities separated by vast wildernesses; dangerous landscapes roamed by large predators; high levels of tolerance for 'adventurers' and similar social misfits; central authority weak or distant, and probably represented only by the occasional Keep on the Borderlands: all this sounds a lot more like the Old West than, say, thirteenth-century France. In many ways, early modern Siberia (or a fantasy analogue thereof) provides a happy medium between the two. PCs can try their hand at fur trapping, or fur stealing, or hire on as guards to protect someone else's fur stash from raiders or opportunist thieves; they can get mixed up in the regular bouts of violence between the indigenous peoples and the Cossacks who are trying to extort valuable furs out of them at gunpoint; they can map out new paths through the taiga and sell them to the tsar for a fortune; they can get sentenced to convict labour building a road through some godforsaken forest somewhere and have to work out how to escape without getting eaten by bears. Just resist the temptation to replace either the Russians or the indigenous Siberians with non-human races and you should be fine.

The big difference between this and the Old West is the reduced sense of inevitability. The whole mythology of the Western is pervaded by an awareness that the Old West is only ever a transitional moment in history; at the end of the story the cowboy rides west, into the sunset, and in his wake come the railroads and the banks and the lawmen and the big mining companies, turning the mythic Frontier into just another chunk of America. Manifest Destiny marches on: the outlaws or the Apaches can win individual battles, but ultimately they cannot win the war. (I've never studied the actual history, so I've no idea to what extent this is just self-congratulatory fantasy masquerading as historical inevitability, but it's certainly how it's usually presented in the fiction.) But the situation in seventeenth-century Siberia was rather less one-sided: early modern Russia was a ramshackle autocracy rather than a modern industrial state, and its priority was to extract valuable resources from Siberia, not to settle and absorb it. If your PCs decide to ally with a local tribe and stand up to Russian pressure, then if they can make enough of a nuisance of themselves the Cossacks will probably just give up and ride a few hundred miles on in search of someone easier to intimidate. They're adventurers hoping to get rich quick (just like your PCs!), not ideologues out to Tame The Wilderness And Make It Safe For Civilization. One look at a Siberian bog would be enough to convince anyone that that was a terrible idea.

Have fun civilizing this!

In ATWC, the fur trade is still in its earliest stages. The taiga is gradually being penetrated by strange men from the west, with big beards and big mustaches and really, really big guns. They come in search of furs, and they build forts and roads in lands where no-one has ever built anything more permanent than a yurt before. They make great quest-givers, great trading partners, and great enemies - if I ever did an ATWC monster manual, then 'hairy foreigners with guns' would definitely be one of the entries - but their roads are narrow, and the taiga is immense. For now, at least, they are a curiosity rather than an existential threat.

But they have big plans, and big maps, and they say that their day will come.

When all else fails, try burying wooden dolls!

In Yakutia, as in most parts of northern and central Asia, it was widely believed that bad luck and diseases were caused by malicious spirits; and when the spirits proved particularly persistent, the Sakha had a folk tradition for how to get rid of them. They would hide the blighted individual inside their home, where the spirit hopefully wouldn't see them; then they would construct a wooden effigy of that person and bury it, just as though it had been a real corpse, complete with loud lamentations and expressions of grief at the person's death. The idea was that the evil spirit responsible for their sickness or misfortune, hearing all this, would assume that their target had finally perished; believing their horrible work to be complete, they would thus go off and find someone else to torment instead, leaving their real victim free of their malice at last.

PCs being PCs, there are any number of ways that one of them might end up attracting the attentions of hostile spirits during their travels in the deep wilderness. Deliberately or accidentally, they could end up killing a spirit's human lover or favoured devotee; they could damage its shrines or spirit poles, interrupt or steal its offerings, trespass in its sacred places, or just say the wrong thing at the wrong time. If this happens in the taiga, then any locals who find out about it will strongly advise the PCs to hide their afflicted comrade in the nearest house or yurt and get to work carving a wooden effigy of them as quickly as possible.

You might think that this would only work if a spirit was very, very stupid. But spirits are distant and alien and strange, and many of them don't really understand humans very well; some of them, no matter how intelligent, might genuinely have trouble telling the difference between a wooden carving and a human corpse, while others might pay so little attention to the people they've cursed that any kind of deception might suffice to persuade them that the job is done. After all, from their perspective, humans are like mayflies; we die all the damn time. Why question reports of any particular demise?

If this happens, really make the PCs play this out. Make them act. Make them over-act. If they're terrible at acting, good: their characters probably are, too. Make them deliver incoherent grief-stricken speeches over the grave of their wooden friend, talking about how much they admired her and how much they'll miss her and how life will never be the same now that she is totally, completely, definitely, unquestionably dead. Encourage them to really ham it up. Most spirits are not very big on subtlety.

The base chance of the deception working is 25%, modified by any or all of the following:

• Spirit doesn't care all that much about the PC: +15%
• Spirit has a deep-seated grudge against the PC: -20%
• Effigy is expertly carved to resemble the PC: +15%
• Effigy is very crudely carved: -10%
• Effigy is actually just a log with an unsmiley-face cut into it: -20%
• Effigy is buried wearing the PC's clothes: +5%
• Effigy is buried with substantial grave goods and/or offerings: +15%
• 'Mourners' seem really upset about the PC's 'death': +15%
• 'Mourners' don't really seem to care very much about the PC's 'death': -10%
• For each heartfelt funeral eulogy delivered over the grave: +5%
• Loud, elaborate, day-long funeral: +10%
• Brief, tokenistic funeral: -10%
• PC is really well hidden during the funeral (e.g. in a sack under a bed in a darkened room): +5%
• PC is really badly hidden during the funeral  (e.g. in a nearby bush): -10%
• PC fails to remain hidden for the complete duration of the funeral and at least 1d6 hours thereafter: -20%

This trick can only be attempted once per person per spirit; if a spirit sees through it the first time, they're not going to fall for it in future. If a spirit has been tricked into believing that a PC they've been afflicting is dead, they will also be deeply unamused if that same person turns up alive and well in their territory a few days later. Moving on to another part of the taiga as quickly as possible after the ceremony is probably a good idea.

Monsters from Central Asian Mythology 10: The Abaasy

Image by Matt Gretton.

The Abaasy are the demonic beings which haunt the mythology of the Sakha or Yakuts, the Turkic inhabitants of eastern Siberia. Descriptions of them vary, but they are most famously described as monstrous creatures with one arm, one leg, and one eye. They are the inhabitants of the underworld, and servants of the powers of darkness; in the Sakha epics they are the enemies of the heroes and heroines, while in other Sakha folktales they serve as punishers of those who sin against the world of the spirits. In the epics there are whole tribes of them, living in clans, and riding to war on dragons against the heroes of Yakutia; in other tales they are more like spirits, lurking in dismal and unlucky places, bringing madness and disease and death. So I'm going to treat them as two related monster types: Abaasy proper, and Abaasy ghosts.

So: in ATWC, the Abaasy are the demons of the deep taiga. Some scholars who hear of them speculate that they are purely symbolic, a poetic representation of the idea that a soul given over to evil is only half-human, the positive half of it having withered away; but, sadly, they are all too real, having ridden out of the underworld on their two-headed, eight-legged lizard-beasts uncounted generations ago. Their lives resemble those of humans in many respects, in that they live in clans, herd livestock, fish in rivers, hunt game, and perform shamanic rituals to propitiate the (inevitably evil and vindictive) spirits which watch over them. But on closer examination, the similarities fall away: their interactions with one another are mere brutish hierarchies of dominance rather than actual relationships, and their chief motivations appear to be lust, greed, and rage. Contact between human and Abaasy tribes usually ends up flaring into warfare, with the Abassy launching raids to seize humans for use as slaves or food. Individual Abassy are much stronger than men, and just as intelligent, but cunning humans are often able to play upon their lustful, greedy, and generally foul-tempered dispositions to lure them into actions which lead them to self-destruction.

Abaasy live primitive and squalid existences. They practise only the crudest forms of metalwork, which frustrates them deeply, as they are acutely conscious that they would be much better at hurting people if only they could make metal swords and guns of their own. They fight with clubs and sharp wooden spears, which they throw with horrible accuracy. They almost never bother with armour, trusting to their own hard, iron-grey skin to protect them in combat.

• Abaasy: AC 14 (tough hide), 2+2 HD, AB +3, spear (1d6+1 damage), FORT 12, REF 12, WILL 14, morale 7. Abaasy can hop along on their single leg as quickly as a man can run, but cannot perform any task which requires two hands, such as using bows or firing guns larger than pistols.

An Abaasy riding a two-headed dragon. Image by Skleggle.

Abaasy get on badly with horses: instead, they breed great two-headed, eight-legged lizard monsters to use as mounts. The secret of breeding and taming these savage beasts is known only to the abaasy, but a skilled human rider might eventually learn to ride one if such a creature could be captured in battle. The beasts ridden by Abaasy chiefs are often high-quality.

• Abaasy Battle-Dragon: AC 14 (scales), 4 HD, AB +2, 2 bite attacks (1d6 damage), FORT 10, REF 12, WILL 14, morale 7. 

Cruel and dangerous though living Abaasy are, however, the dead ones can be much, much worse. Being creatures of the underworld, they find the passage between the lands of the living and the lands of the dead much easier to navigate than humans do; and the most vindictive of them often come creeping into the world before their births or after their deaths in order to plague the living, unencumbered by their physical forms. These spiteful Abaasy ghosts haunt old, abandoned burial grounds and other unlucky places; treat them as spirits, except that the only offering they ever desire is blood. Anyone who enters the territory of an Abassy ghost without making a suitable blood offering must make a FORT save and a WILL save, with results as follows:

• Passed FORT and WILL save: No ill effects; your indomitable spirit shields you from the ghost's malice.
• Failed FORT save, passed WILL save: You become dangerously ill 1d6 hours after entering the area; symptoms include weakness, pains, fevers, and bloody vomiting. The illness persists for as long as you remain in the haunted area, and for 1d6 days thereafter. If you remain in the haunted area for more than 2d6 days, you will die, and your ghost will become the Abassy's slave.
• Passed FORT save, failed WILL save: The evil influence of the Abaasy ghost taints your mind, making you cruel, irrational, and suspicious. This effect begins within minutes of entering the affected area, and continues for as long as you remain within it, and for 2d6 hours thereafter. If you remain in the haunted area for more than 1d6 days, you will go completely mad.
• Failed FORT and WILL save: 1d3 hours after entering the area you become feverish, then delirious, then completely incoherent. 1d6 hours after that, you will leap up, full of insane energy, and try to murder your travelling companions, your mount, and finally yourself as blood offerings to the Abaasy ghost. If physically prevented from doing this, you will sicken and die within 2d6 hours unless removed from the affected area. If removed before this point, you recover after 2d6 days of bed rest.

A shaman can bargain with ghost Abaasy just like any other evil spirit. They flee from the presence of genuinely holy individuals.

Random Encounter Tables: the Taiga

Getting back to the wilderness random encounter table series for ATWC. This one deals with the immense reaches of bog and forest that lie north of the steppe and south of the tundra, in a vast band a thousand miles across. The taiga is sparsely inhabited by humans, but the birds, animals, monsters, and spirits are plentiful there. Go deep enough and who knows what you might stumble across, lurking among the swamps and trees?

Random Taiga Encounters (roll 1d12)

1: This part of the taiga is the territory of a Wise (talking) wolf and his pack. The Wise wolf is hungry for decent conversation; the rest of the pack are just plain hungry. They will stalk the PCs at a distance, growling and howling and looking for opportunities to pick off vulnerable pack animals or similar, while their alpha calls out from between the trees that all he really wants is an opportunity to talk to someone interesting for a change. If a well-read and/or well-travelled PC is willing to sit down in the middle of a circle of hungry wolves and indulge his appetite for long, rambling conversations about art, philosophy, and current affairs, he'll agree to call off the rest of the pack and lead them off to hunt musk deer or something instead. 

2: A group of Children of the Pines, busily engaged in carving fantastical totems for the local spirits. They are superb woodcarvers, but have no other materials to work with, and eagerly offer to barter with the PCs for items of gold, silver, copper, or other precious metals that might be pounded flat and used to ornament their woodwork: in exchange they offer carved goods, the pelts of animals that they have shot, the healing sap from their veins, and knowledge of the nearby spirits. PCs who treat them or their totems with disrespect will be directed into the domain of a particularly psychotic bog spirit, who loves nothing better than drowning groups of stupid travellers in his bottomless swamps.

3: A band of hunters, armed with bows, guns, and traps, looking for any animals whose pelts might fetch a good price in the markets of the south. They are expert woodsmen, but extremely superstitious, living in a state of constant anxiety that they might accidentally anger the spirits of the deepwoods by killing some favoured beast. They are an excellent source of information on the surrounding woodlands, but will not associate with any group who they think are likely to anger the spirits by their words or deeds, knowing full well that such entities are usually firm believers in guilt by association. 

4: An absolutely enormous bear, regarded as sacred by all the nearby inhabitants. They are not mistaken in this: the bear is the favoured pet of a local spirit, which will be very upset if it is killed, although a competent shaman should be able to calm it down with the aid of some suitable offerings. The bear itself isn't especially aggressive, but it doesn't like being bothered and may lash out at people who refuse to leave it alone. Its pelt, if intact, would fetch a considerable price in the markets of the south.

5: A young married couple, emissaries from a taiga clan, on their way to the distant shrine of the Golden Lady: their people are planning a great migration, and they have been sent to beg the Lady for oracles regarding the fates that would await them in the various lands which they are considering moving to. (The young woman is also pregnant, and she secretly hopes that the Golden Lady will bless their unborn child, as well.) They are both skilled travellers, but they have never been so far from home before, and their supplies are starting to run low after navigating their way through the seemingly interminable boglands. If the PCs assist them they will offer to ask questions to the Golden Lady on their behalf, although the PCs will obviously need to go back into the taiga to meet their (now-migrated) clan in order to hear the answers!

6: A grove inhabited by a shurale, which recently stole two adolescent girls from a nearby village, hoping to keep them as the jewels of its collection of precious and beautiful things. One of them tricked it into letting her go within a few hours of being caught, but the other is slightly slow-witted and is still stuck inside its lair; the escaped girl is camping in the woods nearby, trying to work out some way of staging a rescue so that she won't have to make the difficult journey home alone. She will implore the PCs to help her in this, but begs them not to actually kill the shurale, as her community rely upon its knowledge of the spirits to avoid accidentally trespassing against them. The shurale itself is in a foul mood because of the girl's escape, and is determined not to allow itself to be tricked again. 

7: A flock of ironclaw ravens inhabit this part of the taiga, sharing their lair with a filthy and demented outcast whom they regard as a kind of human pet. They know better than to attack armed groups, but will send their outcast out howling and gibbering, to lead them into the most dangerous and treacherous parts of the forest; their hope is that they or their horses will perish there, and the ravens will feast upon the resulting carrion. They try to keep their distance from the PCs, but observant characters may spot huge ravens with glinting beaks and talons high up in the trees, watching them from above...

8: A shaman and her assistants, on a hunting mission; the chief of their clan has fallen gravely ill, and the shaman has discerned that this is due to his soul having passed into the body of a nearby elk, which she is now trying to hunt down for use in a healing ritual. She will gravely insist on the PCs not killing any elk they encounter for fear that they might end up killing the chief by mistake, and would be happier if they accompanied her until the hunt is over so that she can keep an eye on them. The elk in question is weirdly intelligent due to the human soul inhabiting it, and will be extremely challenging to catch. 

9: Outriders from a deep taiga clan, riding through the forests on domesticated trees, which creak alarmingly as they scurry through the woods on their innumerable root-feet. Their riders are odd folk with a not-quite-human air about them; they are searching for another deep taiga clan whose camp they believe to be nearby, and question everyone they meet in exhaustive detail as to whether or not they have seen any sign of it in their travels. They are an excellent source of information on all tree-related matters, but they are utterly uninterested in the outside world. Any PC who performs a truly extraordinary service for them - locating the rival clan and helping them to ambush it, for example - may be rewarded with a domesticated walking sapling of their own.

10: This part of the taiga is haunted by a mad, shape-changing Hortlak, which sneaks from shadow to shadow looking for creatures to devour. It can take the shape of any animal, but its mind is so shattered that it's constantly forgetting to actually behave like the creature it's pretending to be, meaning that the PCs are likely to be in for what will seem to be a series of extremely bizarre encounters with oddly behaving animals (a bear that hisses like a snake, a wildcat awkwardly walking on its hind legs, etc) as it tries to spy upon them 'in disguise'. Sooner or later its hunger will get the better of it and it will attack, preferably while the PCs are separated from one another or asleep.

11: A war party of taiga nomads, heading home with the spoils of a successful raid on a rival clan: furs, weapons, horses, reindeer, and slaves. They are jubilant and drunk and high on their own success, and their captives are eagerly watching out for any possible opportunity to escape and flee into the trees. PCs investigating the feud that led to the raid in the first place will discover it has involved generations of tit-for-tat raiding, with any pretence of moral high ground on either side lost decades ago. If the PCs do anything to distract the warriors then 2d6 captives will immediately make a break for it, with both sides loudly demanding that the PCs assist them: the captives yell wild promises of riches with which the PCs will be rewarded if they can help them escape back to their homes, while the warriors make blood-curdling threats against anyone who helps their slaves get away.

12: The domain of an angry spirit. Her mortal lover recently died in a hunting accident; now, enraged and inconsolable, she takes out her grief and frustration on anything that comes nearby. Terrible weather, falling trees, flooded rivers, runs of incredible bad luck, and forests that seem to rearrange themselves whenever no-one is looking are just some of the ways in which she will afflict anyone who intrudes upon her sorrow. The local inhabitants have learned to avoid the area, but if the PCs can somehow manage to console the spirit - through offerings, distractions, grief counselling, building a really nice tomb for her dead lover, or whatever else they can think of - they will be celebrated as local heroes. Attempts to contact the spirit are best made at her sacred pool, deep in the woods, where she sometimes deigns to appear amongst the reflections in the water's surface.

Monsters from Central Asian Mythology 6: Shurale

All the taiga cultures have stories of the strange not-quite-human creatures that dwell in the forest depths. In some tales, they're clearly spirits, like the Leshy of Slavic mythology: forest guardians, shape-changers, teachers of sorcery, rulers of the beasts. In others, though, they're basically just weird, wild beast-men who live in the woods, and it's in that form that they're probably most useful for D&D purposes. The Shurale, which appears in the legends of what was once the Khanate of Kazan (now the Russian Republic of Tatarstan), is a good example. In Farid Yurullin's ballet, Shurale, the eponymous creature is clearly a (malevolent) nature spirit, complete with a court of servitor spirits; but in Tuqay's 1907 poem it's just a rather dim, troll-like creature lurking in the woods. According to Tatar folklore, it resembles a furry man with long claws and a single horn on its forehead; it hides deep in the forest, where it plays spiteful tricks on passing humans, hiding the axes of woodcutters, stealing women, and luring unfortunate victims into its thickets where it proceeds to tickle them to death. Unfortunately, the Tickle Monster of the Taiga doesn't quite strike the requisite note of dread, so it's probably a good idea to downplay that bit if you want them to be taken seriously by your players.

So: deep in the taiga, far to the north of the Wicked City, live the Shurale. Tall, shaggy, long of limb, and covered in greenish-brown fur, they blend easily into their woodland environment: seen at a distance they are usually mistaken for mossy trees. Their fingers are too long for their arms, and their arms are too long for their bodies: a six-foot Shurale could easily have four-foot arms ending in twelve-inch fingers, allowing them to suddenly snatch up people or objects from surprising distances. They aren't quite men, or beasts, or spirits, and no-one's really sure where they came from, least of all the Shurale themselves. They all seem to be male, and unless something kills them they live pretty much forever. Given the chance, they will steal pretty things - clothes, jewels, young women - and hide them away in the depths of their thickets, where they will spend long hours laughing and gloating over them; and this, along with their taste for the playing of cruel tricks and their habit of murdering travelers who trespass too close to their hidden lairs, mean that they are usually regarded with deep hostility by nearby communities. Fortunately, they are not nearly as clever as they think they are, and quick-witted woodsmen and maidens are often able to turn the tricks and traps of the Shurale against them.

Most Taiga clans would love to shoot the Shurale on sight: but the creatures, as well as being weirdly difficult to actually kill, are also astoundingly knowledgeable about the woodlands they inhabit. They know the lairs of every animal, the health of every tree, and the personal history of every local spirit: it's often not clear how they know this, given their general dimness and laziness, but the information they provide always turns out to be correct. As a result, most communities grudgingly permit the Shurale to live unless they go too far; even when a beloved daughter has to be stolen back from them, the taiga peoples prefer to beat and humiliate the Shurale rather than actually kill them, in case their knowledge turns out to be needed later. When a deal is to be struck, the trick is to always allow the Shurale to believe they are getting the best of the bargain: and many a Shurale has sneaked back to its thicket with a bag full of worthless glass baubles, congratulating itself on its cleverness in obtaining such priceless gems in exchange for their knowledge. They are vengeful beasts, however, and if they ever discover that they have been tricked they will be ruthless in their pursuit of retribution.

The Shurale consider themselves to be the honoured brothers of both the Wise Folk and the Children of the Pines. The Wise Folk and the Children do not always share this perspective.

• Shurale: AC 15 (agility, tough skin, and thick fur), 3 HD, AB +3, claws and headbutt (1d6 damage), FORT 12, REF 12, WILL 14, morale 6. Heals 1 HP per hour. 

If a Shurale hits someone in melee, it can chose to grab them instead of clawing them: this does no damage, but its grip is so strong as to be effectively unbreakable, allowing them to carry their victims deep into the forests. (Armed victims can keep attacking them, of course, so the Shurale usually only do this to unarmed targets.) In forests, the Shurale is so stealthy that it has a 5-in-6 chance of surprising its enemies. They can move at full running speed through even the heaviest woodlands, weirdly contorting their bodies to fit through the spaces between the trees as they go. They have perfect, intuitive knowledge of all animals, plants, and spirits who live within a hundred miles of their lairs.

Konstantin Zverev performs the title role in Shurale.

Monsters from Central Asian Mythology 5: Ironclaw Ravens

Remember the Buryat version of the King Gesar epic? In it, all kinds of evil beasts are sent into the world by the evil spirits born from the corpse of the dead sky-monster, Atai Ulaan. The first ones are rats with brass muzzles. The next ones are ravens with iron beaks and claws:


From the very beginning of the east,
In an ugly land,
In a meagre country,
In a place withered and dried by grief,
By three marshy rivers,
In a place of slippery slopes,
A dwelling place of demons and evil spirits,
A scorching hot land,
A dark and sunless country,
A place dry and devoid of plants,
Two ravens came flying,
Cawing and croaking.
They hovered over the face of Bukhe Beligte,
They planned to blind him by pecking out his eyes.
The baby Bukhe Beligte lay in the cradle gathering his strength,
He quickly grabbed the wings of the two black ravens.
“What kinds of devils are you,
Flying about the wide world,
With beaks and talons made of iron?!”

If one wanted to go full-on science fantasy with this, it would be easy to imagine Atai Ulaan as some kind of immense bio-mechanical construct - a space station, an aerial warbase, whatever - which, after it crashes, continues to churn out cyborg monsters and unleash them onto the surrounding world. (Maybe its malfunctioning programming leads it to grab local lifeforms, like giant rats or ravens, and replace random chunks of their bodies with cybernetic prosthetics.) Given that ATWC doesn't go quite that far, though, I'm going to keep them, like the Brass-Snouts, as weird monsters of uncertain origin, possibly created by some long vanished civilization out on the steppes. They're bigger than normal ravens, with a six-foot wingspan, and they weigh as much as a small child; their beaks and claws are made from black iron, and are as sharp as knives. Like all ravens they are primarily scavengers, but their size and their fearsome natural weaponry makes them much braver than their mundane cousins, and a flock of ironclaw ravens will not willingly yield up their carrion even to a pack of wolves. Their talons can slice flesh to ribbons, and their beaks can stab a man to the heart.

Well: if that were all, they'd just be another hazard of the steppes and the taiga, like the wolves and the tigers and the bears. But the ironclaws are clever: not quite in the same way as humans are clever, or even in the way that the Wise Folk are, but with a weird, cold, avian intelligence all of their own. They communicate with one another across immense distances, and when they spot an opportunity to create a true carrion feast - a drover's bridge that could be sabotaged, for example, sending a whole herd of cattle tumbling to their deaths where the ironclaws can devour them, or a warning sign that can be stolen, leading horses and riders into dangers from which they might never escape - then entire flocks of them will descend in great flapping clouds, slicing through ropes, pulling away markers, and even killing witnesses if necessary. The worst of them make common cause with outcast bands of robbers, outlaws, and scavengers, in which the ravens provide the aerial scouting and the humans provide the opposable thumbs. In such pairings, it is not at all clear who has domesticated who.

Ironclaw meat is rank and foul-tasting, but the ravens are widely hunted: their talons make excellent knives and bladed tools, and their beaks need only be mounted onto handles to become cruelly effective punch-daggers. Many a nomad tribe, with no access to iron ore or forges, relies upon the hunting of ironclaws almost exclusively to provide them with the metal implements they need. The price for such hunting is high, however; the ironclaws mark such tribes out as their enemies, and their members exist in a state of continual low-level hostilities with the vicious birds, never daring to let their children out of their sight for fear some knife-clawed bird will descend upon them and mutilate them out of revenge before flying away.

Ironclaw ravens have an instinctive affection for members of the Unkindness, and will happily become their henchmen if offered the chance.

• Ironclaw Raven: AC 12 (feathers and agility), 1 HD, AB +1, iron beak and claws (1d6 damage), FORT 14, REF 14, WILL 14, morale 6. 

Ironclaw ravens have an instinctive knack for slicing open arteries and stabbing vital organs. If one rolls a 6 for damage, then it has hit an artery or impaled something vital, inflicting an extra 1d6 damage on the target.

Foes of the Wicked City 5: The Children of the Pines (Character class)

Left alone for long enough, pine trees can easily grow to be over 150 feet tall. Take a look at that photo: a landscape of giant pines is one in which anything human-scale is going to feel like an insect, crawling between the feet of giants. Out in the deep taiga, where the pines go on forever in all directions and tower a hundred feet above your head and are so huge and so heavy that any one of them would crush you to jelly if it fell on you, it's natural to not really feel entirely comfortable. In the giant pinewoods, no human traveller can ever truly feel at home. 

These woods are inhabited by the Children of the Pines: a strange race of silent, snow-faced men and women who creak softly when they move, and bleed sweep sap instead of blood. Their legends claim that their earliest ancestors were a band of siblings, three brothers and three sisters, driven from their homes by a cruel queen who hated them for their great beauty; they wandered north until they came to the pinewoods, where the spirits of the pines saw them, and fell in love, and took them as their husbands and their wives. Now their descendants dwell amongst the conifers, living in hide tents or log cabins between the great trees, or in precarious-seeming treehouses raised fifty or sixty or seventy feet above the forest floor. They are skilled hunters, great wood-carvers, and magnificent climbers. They never seem to feel the cold.

A Child of the Pines, somewhere in the deep taiga.

Thematically, the Children of the Pines are the counterpoint to the Children of the Sun. Just as the Children of the Sun are emanations of the southern deserts, and the primarily monotheistic religions which flourish there, so the Children of the Pines emerge from the boreal wildernesses of the north, where the animistic spirit-religions hold sway. The Children of the Sun know that this world is not their true home; they come from something higher and purer, and insist on holding the world to the same standards, driving always towards perfection. The Children of the Pines accept that the world is just the world: they live in it, but they have no special longing to change it for the better. The Children of the Sun live by truth and righteousness. The Children of the Pines just... live.

They seldom emerge from their pinewoods, save when the great spirits of the north lay some task upon them, or when they commit some crime amongst their own people that leads to them being driven forth into the world outside. They are regarded with superstitious dread by the inhabitants of the taiga, who view them as being closer to spirits than mortals; if some band of nomads or hunters chance across one, they will treat them with extreme caution and courtesy, while one of them runs off to fetch a shaman who will know how to deal safely with such an unusual visitor. Further south, in the steppe or the desert, they are mere curiosities, freakish beings far from home. They grow uneasy in open spaces. They will never feel comfortable without a pine canopy above their heads.

A few years back, one of the Greater Ministers of the Wicked City sent a team of thieves to the land of the Children, to steal the bones of one of their founder-heroines for use in some deranged necromantic rite. The bones were stolen, alright, even if most of the thieves never made it out of the forests alive; but no sooner did she have them in her hands than orders arrived from Head Office, stating that they were to be sent upstairs at once. Neither the bones nor the messenger they were sent with ever returned; but, since then, a number of the Children of the Pines have been troubled by strange dreams in which their ancestress appears to them, weeping, chained by her ankle to the roof of some immense tower. 'Free me!' she implores them. 'Bring me home to the pinewoods! This tower is no place for the dead...'

And so they shoulder their bows, these snow-faced, sap-blooded dreamers, and they climb onto the backs of their reindeer mounts and set off on the long, long journey to the Wicked City. They will not rest until her bones lie once more in her tomb of carven pinewood, deep amidst the snows of the north.

Blood of Sweet Sap, Body of Snow: You can play a Child of the Pines, if you wish, although everyone else is likely to find you pretty weird whenever you're not out in the taiga. Game information is as follows:

• You must have Constitution and Wisdom 12 or higher.
• You are proficient with simple weapons, with bows, and with armour no heavier than heavy furs (+3 AC). You are not proficient with shields. 
• You gain a bonus to all your to-hit rolls equal to half your level, rounded up.
• You gain 1d6 HP per level.
• You aren't immune to the cold, but your cold tolerance is very high: you could sleep outdoors in a blizzard and only be moderately uncomfortable. Any cold damage you take is halved, rounding any fractions down.
• Only half your nourishment comes from food; the other half comes from photosynthesis. On the plus side, this means you only need half as much food as other people. On the minus side, it means that if you're deprived of sunlight for too long you'll feel weak and listless, regardless of how much food you eat. Being completely deprived of sunlight for weeks on end will make you very, very ill. 
• When cut, you bleed thick, sweet sap, which rapidly hardens into resin and seals the wound. Effects that cause continual damage from bleeding will not affect you. Your sap also has extremely potent antiseptic, antibacterial, and anti-inflammatory properties, and can be used for sealing other people's wounds as easily as your own. By cutting yourself and bleeding 1 HP worth of sap into someone else's open wounds, you can heal them for 1 HP. You can do this as many times as they have wounds to treat. For obvious reasons, this doesn't work on other Children of the Pines.
• You are closely attuned to the spirit world. You can automatically enter a trance-state at will just by meditating for 2d10 minutes, and your percentage chance of identifying evil spirits is equal to three times your combined Intelligence and Wisdom score.
• You are an absolutely amazing climber. If something could possibly be climbed by a human, then you can climb it, no rolls required. You also have incredible natural balance, and can walk across branches, tightropes, and so on without needing to worry about falling unless you are actually pushed.
• You can talk to trees, by making weird creaking noises at them and then listening to the creaking noises they make in return. Trees are much more aware of their surroundings than they like to let on, but their awareness is all vibrational; they can tell a man from a horse by the vibrations of their tread on the earth, and tell a shout from a whisper by the vibrations they leave in the air, but visual details like colour mean nothing to them. Their language is also very, very slow, requiring a whole minute to communicate a single word. Each species also has its own dialect: you are fluent in the language of the coniferous trees, but the deciduous speech confuses you, taking twice as long to comprehend and imposing a 30% chance of misunderstanding on each communication. 
• You smell of pine resin. This is far cooler than smelling of sweat like everyone else, but it does make you rather easy to track by scent whenever you're not in a wood! 

Child of the Pines Summary Table

Level	Hit Points	To Hit Bonus	Fortitude save (FORT)	Reflex save (REF)	Willpower save (WILL)
1	1d6	+1	14	14	14
2	2d6	+1	13	13	13
3	3d6	+2	12	12	12
4	4d6	+2	11	11	11
5	5d6	+3	10	10	10
6	6d6	+3	9	9	9
7	7d6	+4	8	8	8
8	8d6	+4	7	7	7
9	9d6	+5	6	6	6
10	10d6	+5	5	5	5

Starting equipment: Animal hide clothing (+2 AC), spear (1d6 damage), longbow (1d8 damage), traps and snares for animals, tame reindeer for riding (replaces normal riding horse), set of wood-carving knives, 2d6 decorative amulets and trinkets carved from pinewood, pine-fresh scent, 1d6x10 sp.