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 or 5e for your games, but they can easily be converted over into any fantasy system. This week we take you nearly into the clouds to enjoy the view. Just, don’t look or jump down.
Canopy Vista
The Canopy Vista lies like a thick blanket across one of the world’s jungles. An area about 10 miles wide where the area below is too deadly for its elven population, and where the branches above are thick enough for them to build buildings permanently upon.
People normally only travel here when they need information or advice from the elves, as the area has been turned into a hotbed of druidic activity.
Lay of the Land
The Canopy Vista itself consists of branches that are at least 20 feet thick, and many are more, up to 100 feet thick. The trees below the canopy are even thicker and clustered so tightly together that anyone bigger than a pixie can’t squeeze in between them. These trees rise over a mile into the air, and atop them sits the Vista. The Canopy Vista has been populated for several centuries, and in all that time it has been ruled by the Archdruid Mek’vor – Mek’vor looks elvish, but in reality, he is a winter eladrin, who has been disguising himself as a normal elf for all these years. In fact, not only that, but he is an envoy, specifically sent by a god (or goddess) of nature to keep the area underneath the Canopy Vista under supervision.
Mek’vor has never revealed who it is exactly that sent him, nor what it is that he is guarding, but for all these years, he’s upheld only one single law: “Do not enter the undergrowth beneath the Canopy Vista. To do this means exile.”
Dangers
The Canopy Vista is quite safe, except when something comes up from below. This tends to be megafauna (like giant sloths (pf2 / 5e) or mammoths (pf2 / 5e)) or dinosaurs, but there is something else that lives down there. What it is no one knows, but most people have either seen or heard of, black tentacles that appeared from underneath the Canopy (or more terrifyingly, from WITHIN the branches) that reached out and grasped anything they could. While they did not seem to do so with any form of purpose, anything they touched and which they didn’t drag down, started to decay away into nothing within minutes of being touched. Only a very few of the “touched” as they have become known have survived after limbs were amputated to stop the rot from spreading. All of them have turned rather crazy and have seen what they believe are prophetic visions of the black tentacles reaching up from the Vista and grasping the sun, slowly killing it and causing it to rot away.
We hope you enjoyed the view and the local wildlife, and we’ll see you next week. 😊
Kim Frandsen
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