The player characters make their travel plans, decide how they are going to transport the owlbears, and prepare anything they will need. This is also an opportunity for the players to explore the Adventurers Academy.
Illustration of a brown owlbear sitting in the back of a wagon. They have a feathered owl head and a furry bear body. A band of feathers encircles their waist. The owlbear has an intense, focused look on their face as they sit awkwardly on their tush with their hind legs splayed out. This adorable work of art was created by the amazing Meghan Dornbrock.
Goals
The player characters need to choose:
- Their method of travel
- Their general plan for transporting the owlbears
- What they are going to spend their money on
This is also an opportunity for players to get to know the Academy a bit and for the characters to research and go on side quests.
Travel Options
After working out your budget for necessities, you have three main options for getting to Island Town.
#1: Travel by the Roads
- Time: This will take the full two weeks, requiring you to leave right away and report in as soon as you arrive at Island Town. You have at most two hours to pack, run errands, and cast rituals before you leave and it will be the same when you get to Island Town.
- Money: Because this is the cheapest option, most of your budget can go to purchasing or renting useful things, allowing you to acquire five helpful things (see the Helpful Things Options list below).
- Route: You will be following the main road that goes up the bank of the Boundary River to the town of Fork.
- The Main Downside: Your group won’t have time to prepare for or cast any advanced rituals, which means that you are limited to basic rituals. Rituals are needed to cast more powerful magic, such as magic that lasts more than a day. While both basic and advanced rituals can accomplish the same things, the likelihood of magical side effects is higher for basic rituals (see the details of each below).
#2: Travel by the River
- Time: Traveling by the river will take one week, giving you six days that you can use to prepare before you leave or after you arrive in Island Town. This time can be used researching owlbears and preparing for advanced rituals.
- Money: This is the medium-priced option. If you choose this option, your budget will allow you to purchase or rent three helpful things.
- Route: You will be traveling by boat up the Boundary River to the town of Fork.
- Balanced Option: This option gives the characters a medium amount of preparation time and a medium budget.
#3: Teleportation
- Time: If all goes well with the teleportation, the entire process of hiring someone and traveling will only take an hour or two, giving your characters thirteen days to prepare. There is, however, a risk of magical side effects and complications.
- Money: If you need to hire someone to teleport you, this is the most expensive option. It will only leave you enough money to purchase one helpful thing.
- Route: The Teleportation System consists of a set of Core Stations that all connect to each other and a set of Local Stations which only connect to one Core Station each. Using this system, the group can teleport directly from the Core Station near the Academy (in the city of Stopoverton) to the Core Station in Fork. Even though there is a Local Station in Island Town, the group does not have clearance to use it. Professional teleporters can be hired at all Core Stations and most Local Stations.
- The Main Downside: This option is so expensive that there is little budget left for helpful things.
All of these routes lead to the city of Fork. Once there, the group needs to head east overland for one day to reach Island Town. Fork is where the player characters will encounter the thieves in Stage 3.
Helpful Things Options
- Rent a cart.
- Rent an animal, like a horse, donkey, mule, or migriary.
- Purchase a large quantity of smoked fish. This is enough fish to feed the owlbears for the journey and is tasty enough to keep them happy.
- Purchase all three components for one basic ritual.
- Purchase one of the three components for an advanced ritual. Finding one advanced ritual component to purchase takes half a day.
- Purchase a sedative that will work on the Owlbears. They can get something that will knock the Owlbears out completely, or something that will make them docile, but awake enough to continue incubating the eggs.
- If the player characters have time and they get a recently opened Fog Flower, they can ask the head Healer, Imani Khaled, to brew either sedative for them. The brewing process takes a day. The player characters can get a fog flower by making a deal with Bristle, a full fae who lives in a walled off swamp on the Academy Grounds. She has many rare magic plants in her swamp.
Basic Rituals
- No research is needed.
- Use three basic ritual components that can be purchased in any town.
- Take thirty minutes to cast.
- Are cast by one person who isn’t considered prepared.
Advanced Rituals
- Require research. This is a simplified group roll. Each character makes one dice roll for each day they participate in research. This roll can be any skill they can justify. When the group has achieved 6 total successes, they have found the information they need. They can ask Head Librarian Barb (Barbara) of the Rocky Hill Nest for help researching. She is a sapient (feathered) velociraptor rogue.
- Require three advanced ritual components. If purchased, each of these components is expensive and takes half a day to track down. Alternatively, the students can use the resources available at the Academy to harvest these ritual components themselves.
- Take three hours to cast.
- Can be cast by an individual or the group. If cast by the group, use the group roll mechanic with an average difficulty. Either way, the person or people casting the ritual are prepared and, if it is applicable, they can get a die for having help.
Harvesting Advanced Ritual Components
The player characters can ask Lina the Patient, the Head Farmer of the Academy, where they can find these three ritual components. She is a minotaur druid.
- A Floating Puffball Fungus spore bubble caught in flight. This is tricky because the spore bubble is delicate and must be kept intact as it is collected. Lina knows that there are puffball funguses in Bristle’s swamp. The player characters can make a deal with Bristle to get access to them or wait for a gently-windy day and try to catch a puffball once it has floated outside the swamp boundaries (roll a six-sided die each day, on a six the weather has the right amount of wind).
- The tip of an Armadillo Vine, harvested while extended. Lina will let them harvest from an Armadillo Vines in one the Restricted Greenhouses if they have an advanced druid student with them. Druid player characters count as advanced druid students. If the group doesn’t have a druid, they will have to find Rowan the Centaur Witch and convince them to help.
- An un-thrown Catapult Walnut. Lina knows that best place to get this in Stopoverton is in the overgrown yard behind a rundown mansion in Gray Valley that has been divided into apartments. This yard has a whole grove of Catapult Walnuts in it. Because it was too expensive for anyone to deal with these plants, it has just been fenced off. A sturdy wicker fence was build around it years ago. The fence is now old, rotting in places, and there are some suspicious holes in it.
- When anyone approaches the Catapult Walnut grove, the trees rattle their branches threateningly. Those who can talk to plants will hear the trees growling things like, “You will not eat or trample our children!” “We shall protect our grove!” “Fear us and flee!”
- When they attack, the nearest tree shouts, “Sisters, attack!” and all of the others start shouting, “Attack! Attack!”
- Their goals are to protect their grove and to be feared.
Making a Deal with Bristle
Bristle: Bristle is a full-fae pixie druid that does not have the students’ best interests at heart. She is one of the druid teachers at the Academy and stays exclusively in her swamp, which is full of rare and dangerous magic plants. All students have been taught to be extremely cautious when interacting with her.
Bristle’s Gift: From their experiences as students, the player characters know that they need to give Bristle a modest gift just to have a conversation with her. The most common gifts are fruit, flowers, cuttings, or seeds from magical plants.
Outside the Swamp Description: “The swamp is surrounded by a ten-foot-tall hedge wall made from Fast Healing Wall Bush with a single arched gateway going through it. The edges of this gateway are made from a solid mass of bare branches and roots that have been braided into a smooth surface. The path into the swamp leads through this gateway and onto a living boardwalk made of elevated tree roots.”
Whispering Aspen: The swamp has multiple stands of Whispering Aspen in it. One is positioned along the path into the swamp, requiring mental defense rolls from the player characters.
- “As soon as you pass through the gateway, the whispers start. They come from above you and all sides. Some are near and some are far.”
- The characters roll their mental defense as described in the Whispering Aspen description.
Going Into the Swamp Description: “As your characters follow the boardwalk into the swamp, they pass by small bushes with enormous thorns and sharply-pointed leaves that vibrate and rustle anytime someone gets near them.
Farther in, patches of Eyestalk Bush grow near the boardwalk, turning their white berry eyes to stare unblinkingly at anyone who passes by.”
In among the enormous trees, you see flashes of migriaries shaped like monkeys, cougars, alligators, and birds, small patches of thick fog, and the rainbow leaves of wild jelly vines. Spore bubbles from Floating Puffball Fungus rise in the air, dancing on the breeze to the eerie song of flute grass.
The boardwalk leads to a circular platform on a small island located near the center of the swamp. Bristle is nowhere to be seen.”
Bristle Description: Bristle climbs down a tree behind them. “Bristle looks like a two-foot long and one-foot-tall, green-brown preying mantis covered in dark, waxy bristles. She is the green of swamp slime mottled with murky-brown spots. Two broad, brown antennae rise from the top of her head, branching out from her head like antlers, and her large, round, compound eyes are black as a void. Falling from her head, like waist-length hair, she has writhing, snake-like vines that are ornamented with bits and pieces of other plants.
While she looks entirely insectoid at first, Bristle is flexible in ways that insects can’t be. Instead of a chitinous exoskeleton, she has a skin of smooth, pliant scales. Her long, spiked forelegs reveal themselves to be bony arms with large, skeletal, clawed hands. All four of her legs end in webbed, bird-like feet that are tipped with powerful claws. And when her mouth opens, it gapes wide to reveal row upon row of shark-like fangs.”
Bristle Accepts the Gift: If the gift is an ordinary plant or a magical plant she already has, the snake-like vines of Bristle’s vine-hair will open up small mouths filled with serrated teeth. They strike the gift like snakes, using their razor-sharp teeth to tear off little pieces. They do this to sustain themselves and all of the stored spells Bristle keeps in them (that is what the “bits and pieces of other plants” ornamenting them actually are).
Bristle’s Initial Offer: If the group agrees to do one favor for her at the time of her choosing, they can have one Floating Puffball Fungus spore bubble or one recently opened fog flower. Getting both requires two favors.
- Negotiation: Bristle collects secrets and magic plants. As a pixie, she also loves to cause trouble, especially social chaos. Offers of any of these three things will make the player characters prepared on dice rolls to negotiate with her. Negotiation can also include putting conditions on the favor.
- Hidden details: Bristle intends to make them collect the spore bubble or fog flower as she watches and laughs at their struggles. It will cost an additional favor if they want her to collect the plants herself (it is easy for her, but she wants the entertainment of watching them). If Bristle agrees to collect them, she will send one of her monkey-shaped migriaries off to do it for her.
Bristle’s Favor: If the player characters agree to give Bristle at least one favor, she will immediately ask them for a cutting from a rare magical plant that grows in the Wild Wood. Specifically, she wants a Ghostleaf cutting (see Stage 5).
- Negotiation: Taking any part from a plant in the Wild Wood is illegal. If the player characters do so and are discovered, it could seriously damage their future careers as adventurers. Realizing this is a Culture roll, if the player characters don’t catch on. If they object strongly enough, Bristle will give them a Plant Magic spell that will duplicate part of the plant so that they can create a cutting without cutting off part of the plant. This means that the plant will not be harmed and there will be no evidence that anything happened to it.
- Other Plants Bristle Wants: Bristle also wants Razor Briar and Ghost Eater Vampire Vine cuttings, which can be found in the same area as the Ghostleaf. Depending on how the negotiation goes, Bristle may demand additional cuttings.
- Duplication Spell Description: Decide which character is going to carry the spell. “After a short pause, a squirrel migriary arrives. It is hopping from branch to branch, carrying a small Fast Healing Wall Bush cutting in its mouth. Bristle takes the cutting in one long-fingered hand as her other hand anchors the green-gold glow of a spell within it. She then wraps the cutting around one lock of [chosen character]’s hair. Roots sprout from the stem of the cutting, wrapping around that lock of hair so completely that it is impossible to remove.”
Find the rest of the Owlbear Reintroduction Program Adventure here.
