Come in, child. Come in. I’ve got fresh sweet rolls and a cup of chilled goat’s milk to go with it. Don’t worry, I don’t bite. Mind your hands around Nippers though. That rascal will take your fingertips off if you let him. Oh-ho! He actually likes you! That’s good. Sit down, sit down. Make yourself comfortable. That’s better. Now – tell your Granny Horns what you’re doing in her village.
No one knows where the being known as “Granny Horns” came from, but local stories suggest that she has existed for as long as the small village where she lives, making her home at the far edge of the village. She appears to be an elderly Tiefling woman, but if the stories are to be believed she should be several hundred years old at that point which points to a different ancestry. The adults and other older people as a general rule try to avoid contact with her, but can’t give you a good reason as to why they feel that way. The kids in the village on the other hand love to visit their “Granny Horns” whenever they can to tell them about their days. She always has fresh baked sweets for them to snack on and chilled goat’s milk to wash it down. She seems to encourage these visits and spends as much of her time as possible chatting with the kids. She either doesn’t seem to notice the adult’s reticence to talk to her or she doesn’t take offense. But given there have been several generations of adults to remember spending their youth with Granny Horns. When or why their feelings changed on the old woman they couldn’t tell you, but it’s a shared experience among every adult who grew up in the village. They also understand that the village has never suffered calamity from an outside source, so it’s readily believed among the adults of the village that they are somehow protected from outside danger by the old woman.
Granny Horns also insists that any travelers through the village are sent to her hut so that she can meet them. The more adventurous they appear, the more insistent she is that she meets them quickly. These meetings are the only time that she doesn’t allow village children to be in her hut as she judges the newcomers and asks them what their business in “her” village is. Her nearly feral cat Nippers that she keeps around as a general menace is an important judge in this process as well. Those that she judges as safe and that Nippers likes she allows to spend time in the village. Those that she judges as a threat are encouraged to leave as soon as the meeting is done. Those that don’t listen to their Granny Horns… well, no one is really sure what happens to them. But they aren’t seen in the village after that.
Using Granny Horns
Granny Horns is an NPC that can be used a number of different ways. The most obvious is that she can become an ally and a ready source of information for the PCs whenever they pass through the village. This of course doesn’t mean that she has to be nice to them as she gives them the information – you could easily frame the relationship as somewhat antagonistic with Granny Horns giving the PCs the information they’re after so they leave her and her village alone.
Another way that you can use her is as an obstacle – the PCs need to earn her favor to enter the village to pursue some kind of lead. But she’s not easy to please. She doesn’t like adventurers. She learned long ago that they bring trouble more often than they bring anything good. But she understands the need they possess to enter her home and so she sets a task before them. Perhaps it’s some trouble stirring on the edges of the village that she is unable to deal with for whatever reason. Maybe it’s just a task that she just doesn’t enjoy doing and makes the PCs be her errand-runners for a few days while they do her busy work in an attempt to earn her favor.
The last way is that she can be an antagonist. One could easily reframe her “protection” of the village into something more sinister. She wants to keep the outside world from infecting the idyllic paradise she has created for the village’s children. There’s some strong potential to put the PCs into a very precarious moral choice where they have a living shield of the children standing between them and their target. (Obviously this is something you need to approach with the utmost care and with everyone’s okay.)
Ben Erickson
