Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Finder’s Archives.
In this column, we take some of the lands from Magic: The Gathering and turn them into something you can use for your fantasy games.
The stats given in each entry assumes that you’re using Pathfinder 2 for your games, but they can easily be converted over into any fantasy system. This week we join the reclamation efforts of the blighted fen.
Blighted Fen
The blighted fen was created by the same disaster that created the blighted cataract. When the waters turned to ash and dust the fen no longer received the life-giving waters necessary to maintain its former life. But not all hope is lost, as a circle of druids are fighting to restore the natural balance of things in the area. They’ve had little success so far, as the run-off from the blighted cataract (and the insidious effects of the Immortal Ichor that resides there) has kept them far too busy fighting off the living dead. They have managed to restore a section of the fen however. To do this they’ve raised giant stones, created from the bones of the earth, to set up a sort of “artificial leyline.” This is not something the druids would normally use, but they are desperate to create some sort of balance in what is going on.
Lay of the Land
The blighted fen no longer has any natural flow of water through it, and its many waterways are now dried up and filled with dusty muck. The muck is several meters deep in many places, and anyone who falls into one of these holes – that are very hard to detect – risks drowning in the stuff. More importantly, any creature that dies in the fen is raised on the following morning as a zombie. The only place where this doesn’t happen is the Reclamation Zone.
The Reclamation Zone is a small area, about a mile across, where gigantic stones rise a hundred feet up from the ground. Inside the zone, trees grow abundantly as do various grasses and mosses, and it TEEMS with life. Water is supplied by a few water elementals that have been recruited for the purpose of restoring the balance in the area.
Dangers
The blighted fen is filled with minor undead threats like zombies and skeletons. Something about the area not only creates them, but seems to lure them in from miles around. There is something more dangerous though: The druid circle itself. It consists of a number of powerful casters, but their leader is actually the main danger. It is a Dryad Queen (change her alignment to CE) that has gone insane after her forest died in the catastrophe. She now believes that she is the only way that the fen can be restored (which is probably true), but that it needs to be drowned in the blood of living creatures to do so. And the only way to do that, is to lure enough people here that she can sacrifice them all at once.
Kim Frandsen
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