The Great Dolmewood Treasure Hunt, part 2: Hex Descriptions

 This is part of a series of blogposts

• Campaign framing, timeline, and general details
• Minor tweaks to hex descriptions (this post)
• The Lost Wing,
• The Dawnward Path, and coda.

In this post, I'll be noting details of the Dolmenwood hexcrawl that relate directly to the treasure hunt, or that have been altered to provide more clues for, keep consistency with, or enforce the themes of the main treasure hunt. Outside of involved stuff like the dungeon in the next post, this is really where the meat of the adventure lies. It's not too much to look at of course, because it's meant to let the Dolmenwood setting book do all the heavy lifting, running across different threads the book has already set up like the treasure of Dewidort, the legacy of the Aubrathon, and so on. You might not get much out of this if you don't have the book with you.

art by Honor C. Appleton

Hex Descriptions

• (0301) Smerne. In the ruins, Dewidort's safehouse can be found. It contains incomplete ledgers of his many robberies, clothes useful for disguise as olde timey travelers, evidence of embezzling and stealing from the Summer Lodge (including the theft of "a certaine masque engaging in my Passes of Chelle", and research into the meaning of the word Egrydgenn. He theorizes it means "Show me favor," citing a story about the founding of Smerne.
• (0605) Fort Vulgar:
• The dockmaster's cottage was once a meeting place for the lodge, and PCs in the know will spot signs-- the four-pointed snowflake carved over a door, the three nails in an old painting, and so on. Boglemn has no direct knowledge of the order, but does keep some memorabilia found while re-thatching the roof-- A Scholar's Cap (DWC p. 407), a scroll of the Aubrathon's Drune-language philosophizing, and the seal of the lodge member Brother Shankius, which would be taken as a high-ranking seal by a churchman.
• In Keep Vulgular, the weeds in the courtyard break up a faded mosaic of a monk battling a snow elf, wielding the Heavenseeker Key instead of a weapon.
• (0607) Wight Falls. In Smerne's Lost Hoard, in addition to the standard treasure, is a map of the Ring of Chell with most of the Summerstones marked, with a note "No foole in Dolmenwode is so overfoolishe to set those plates to the inscriptione." There's also a vaguely-sketched plan to steal the Heavenseeker Key and sneak into Heaven, as soon as he can find a convincing angel disguise.
• North of (0901), sort of a 0900 if you will, is the Flayed Queen's Lands. In this hilly hex, hundreds of skeletons cavort and gamble by night, resting or drilling by day. The queen's manse, which is carried about the hex on the back of suffering undead fairies, is home to the Flayed Queen herself, an undead enchanter 10. She is the cursed earthly remains of Saint Grace, brought about by the profanation of her body by servants of the Nag-Lord. Hating the living, she has all memories of Saint Grace's life, and would be a useful source of information to those who can somehow extract the information. If targeted with a remove curse spell, she must save or fall apart, destroyed. If captured PCs beg for their lives or offer to do her a good turn, she will lay a geas on them to locate the body of a giant which she has heard tell of, hoping to animate it as a powerful servant.
• (0904) Court of the Nag-Lord. PCs who make it here may fear that they have to enter the Nag-Lord's flesh palace, but if they're observant, they will spot a dump of sorts, a boggy camp in the shadow of the oozing dome where refuse is thrown-- baubles that do not please the cruel inhabitants, chapes and other holy signs too meager to bother profaning, and bits of flesh, hair, and the less appetizing bones. Miserable goblin misers pick through the remains. In the hut of one of these goblins, fate has placed the Heavenseeker Key, an 18"-long gilded device with intricate ward-teeth, a heart-shaped empty setting in the bow, and a sense of indefatigable patience. If brought through the gate of any fairy road, it will transition from its normal course to that of the Dawnward Path. Many, many humans would kill to get this artifact, and the servants of the Cold Prince would do anything to destroy it. The Nag-Lord's cruelty has so blinded it that it cannot easily remember the key's existence at all.
• (1009) The Anti-Prism. Use this hex as the site of the tomb in Winter's Daughter, if you want to use that adventure. It's suitable as a way to introduce more interest in the Cold Prince, but totally optional.
• (1110) Dreg. Tamrin Tweede of the Mermaid's Arms is the daughter of Sweamy Tweede, the lodge's leader before the schism 100 years ago, and will recognize any lodge symbols or bywords. She remembers stories about Sweamy's acquaintance with a living saint, frequent visits to Morrigan's Crag (1408), and a frightening friend of her father's with a dark cloak and an owl necklace (last Hooded Man member of the lodge, Mirador Unlight). Madame Shantywood is clued into the lodge's existence as well. The shadow manse in her magic mirror belongs to the immortal shadow of Dewidort of Smerne, splitting away his gentility and society and trapping it within the glass to become a better thief. The shadow, Trodiwed, remembers the thief's early days— his fascination with the wolf of Smerne (0301), his explorations around Lake Longmere, and a visit to the lost wing of Castle Brackenwold. He can advise on some of the dangers found there- roll 6d20 and check out the rooms whose area number in the Lost Wing correspond to the numbers that come up.
• (1403) Odd: within the church's meager library can be found Sucha Geas notes-- adversarial research on Saint Grace (her affinity with mossling and fungi, her weird devotion to those Pluritine freaks, her study of the Heavenseeker Key and her quest to attain salvation) and Castle Brackenwold's lost wing (connected to witches and the curse on the Brackenwold line, accessible by anomolous architecture like balconies from nowhere, folds and unfolds in space). The Orbstone contains the soul of a Hooded Man from 750 years ago who was part of the Sucha Geas, so if PCs can talk to souls he would be a useful person to talk to.
• (1405) Orbswallow: still has a cultural memory of Saint Grace's visit, considering her the most polite and well-intentioned of missionaries. It is also remembered that some members of the lodge were often hosted moving back and forth between here and Blackeswell in the weeks after her death.
• (1408) Morrigan's Crag, remembered as a Drune lodge, was in fact created as a convenience for the Sucha Geas, and thus holds some Lodge clues-- roll twice on the d12 Clue Table or come up with something more specific.
• (1508) Brackenwold:
• The church's theological library has single copy of a book on Saint Grace, "Saint Grace, Her Life and Its Questions", running through her alleged status as a devout elf, her soteriological research, her ministry to mosslings and the crookhorns, her visit to Brackenwold's cathedral and inspection of its gargoyles, and her destruction, said by superstitious locals to have come at the hands of the Nag-Lord. If PCs make it onto the roof of the cathedral, they can follow the gaze of gargoyle to gargoyle to gargoyle to eventually find an elven inscription hidden in a niche of the roof: "No gate's strong lock can lack its key/ A church cannot thwart the long-devout/ If they bar you, know they barred me/ beseech lord God and find your own way out."
• Duke Brackenwold's armor, which belonged to King Hadryg in the days of the Triple Compact, features a stylized torc with three empty gem fittings, and over the heart the breastplate shows a lodge sign-- a lockhole with five lines coming off of it.
• The Lost wing of the ducal keep is where to find the ancient well and the Derphan Arch which contains the lodge's original headquarters. More on that in its own blogpost.
• (1604) Blackeswell:
• Site of a Summer Lodge base, now abandoned. There can be found a precis on the Heavenseeker Key, an artifact that can "redirect a fairy road to lead unto the very gates of Heaven". The precis mentions that the Heavenseeker Key is to be kept at the main headquarters of the society "by the gate and well." A message left for members of the order by one "Dame Lythe" boasts that "the plates which show the way to the original Lodge headquarters have been moved to the shrine of Saint Grace." The message is dated to about a century ago. 
• If using the module "The Fungus that Came to Blackeswell", I would recommend introducing it after PCs have gotten a chance to poke around the town a couple times and get sad about the townsfolk dying. The module's map has a broken-down abandoned building (area 11) that would be a convenient place for the lodge.
• (1605) Shrine of Saint Grace in the fungal chasm. Inscribed with the divine spell Beseech (2nd level, opens divinely-locked doors and asks for heavenly pardon. Sort of a niche spell, but necessary to pass through the Derphan Gate these days.), as well as a bronze sheet with rectangular, irregularly-placed hioles in it. If you hold up the plate to an inscription in the side of a Summerstone (one of those stones that make up the Ring of Chell), a message appears in the holes: "Stand by the Brackenwold well keep the der phan arch by fire the gate be shut no more"

Bronze Plate

Summerstone inscription

Overlaid