dailyadventureprompts:Ally: Relv Abbasi, Steward of the Tangled Palace “ A li
dailyadventureprompts:Ally: Relv Abbasi, Steward of the Tangled Palace “ A little bird told me you were having a problem and that I could help. No, really, a sparrow saw how badly you and your friends messed up and is guilting me into helping you. Lets get this mess dealt with soon, it got all its little feathery friends together and I won’t be able to get any work done if they keep tweeting at me all day.”Setup: What gets lost in all that “speaks for the trees” stereotyping is that druids serve a vital purpose for any settlement that lives close to nature, whether it be a town on the edge of the forest or a frontier desert settlement. Mortals are fragile creatures compared to the destructive power of nature, and the fragile societies we built are easily brought to ruin when the natural rhythms upon which we depend are knocked out of balance. Druids are Emissaries between the needs of people and the environment that sustain them, and work to prevent oncoming droughts and field blights as much as they do overhunting and the reckless clearing of woodland. None of these responsibilities weigh more heavily than on young Relv Abbasi, an aggravated and overworked scholar of the natural world who had a whole kingdom’s worth of obligations heaped upon his shoulders when several years ago the elven archdruid he was apprenticing under was murdered by a rival, leaving Relv to pick up the pieces and carry on the work of ensuring that the land and the people who live upon it don’t end up destroying one another. Forced into near constant activity as he heads off one crisis just in time to circumvent another, Relv works tirelessly to uncover the centuries of wisdom and primal lore stolen by his mentor’s murder, his work largely unseen and unappreciated by those of more civilized lands to whom the young scholar seems nothing more than a mystical eccentric. Adventure Hooks: The party is likely to meet Relv when seeking out a healer, cursebreaker, or authority on the natural world, after hearing tell of the traveling sage from nearby townsfolk. Druid Abbasi is likely to help them with no charge and only a little snark, but is unlikely to let them leave his care without doling out a share of his own troubles upon them. Would they mind looking into those livestock disappearances in the town one stop over?, what about the drumming noise coming from the old fort in the woods? There’s an old well in some village ruins nearby that people keep getting lost down, and a bear friend of his was recently ousted from the forest cairn that was her home by some rather rude individuals, could they perhaps have a word on her behalf? Satisfying these delegated obligations are keys to earning Relv’s trust, as well as freeing up more of his time to deal with some of their responsibilities. Before he was a druid, Relv was the eldest daughter of a pair of out of touch but loving minor nobles who wondered why their child spent so much time sneaking out of their home to wander the woods “in disguise”. Concerned both with their social standing and with their child’s flighty nature, the couple arranged Relv’s betrothal to the son of an ambitious noble family who’s lands bordered their own. Relv wanted nothing to do with this arrangement and fled to the wilds, but the family of his “jilted” suitor peruses him to this day, eager to acquire the Abbasi lands and integrate them into their own holdings. The players are likely to encounter bounty notices looking for a woman vaguely of Relv’s description, as well as meet with a few hunters paid off by the spouse’s family looking to drag Abbasi back to the altar whether he likes it or not. On the edge of the hinterlands there’s an abandoned fortress, large enough to host a great army and once sturdy enough to weather any siege, today it sits empty and crumbling before an encompassing tide of green. This is the Tangled Palace, once the seat of power for one of the land’s petty kings, and now a lair for a great and creeping evil that desperately wishes to spread to the outer world. Relv’s foremost duty is keeping this evil at bay, but with so many other responsibilities weighing him down, his attention is split between this great tasks and a thousand other crises demanding his attention. -- source link