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 time we dredged the Choked Estuary for bodies and treasure.
Choked Estuary
The Choked Estuary is an anomaly in an otherwise clean and proper town. It lies at the end of the river that passes through the city, just before it meets the harbor. Here, it passes under a bridge, and there something happens to it, though no one has been able to explain HOW it happens, only that it happens.
At seemingly random intervals, dead bodies materialize under the bridge and drift off towards the city. And it’s never just a single corpse, but 20 or more on occasion. This sometimes clogs up the river’s flow through the city. When examined, all the bodies show evidence of strangulation, leading to the name, the Choked Estuary, having meaning in more than one sense of the word. None of the bodies are identifiable as any coming from the city itself or any of those nearby, and their point of origin has remained a mystery. It has been like this for at least 10 years, so the novelty has worn off for the locals, but a recent development has greatly worried the authorities: some of the bodies have started animating as undead, and while the authorities have kept it quiet, the scale of it is increasing.
Lay of the Land
The Choked Estuary refers to the river itself, just as the river flows into the sea, but the point of interest is an old stone bridge. The stone bridge predates the appearances of the corpses by at least a century, but after the appearances started, the maintenance crews that would otherwise be looking after it have started avoiding it, and it’s slowly decaying. They’ve not entirely stopped, so it’s not in any danger of collapsing, but it has gained a look that doesn’t help, with moss covering much of it, and just generally being dirty.
Dangers
The Choked Estuary itself isn’t dangerous to the people crossing it, but the bodies that sometimes float past below may well be, if they reanimate as undead. Most of them are simply zombies, but the energy has started to attract other, more dangerous creatures. (Obrousian (PF2) / Drowned Maiden (5e)
Somewhat less dangerous, but far more numerous are the murderers and serial killers that have been attracted by the place, as a convenient way to dump their bodies without anyone checking too much. (After all, when there have been no identifiable corpses for 10 years, the authorities become lax in checking).
And that concludes this week. Remember, be careful when near the waters…
Kim Frandsen
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