Sorrowloom
Beneath the Twilight Forest lies an eerie, brooding underworld where beauty and melancholy are the same thing. Its foundation is the calcified remains of a forgotten prehistoric kingdom of insects and arachnids, and the Sullen carve their art from it.
The Land
Towering arches cut from petrified mantis carapace, streets paved in iridescent beetle elytra, cavern vaults framed by fossilised arachnid ribs — an alien and genuinely breathtaking foundation for a thriving ecosystem. In the cold half-light, pale spectral lichens, weeping ghost-fungi and phosphorescent silk-moths cast violet and cerulean over the ancient ossuaries.
Silence hangs here like an unplucked harp string. Despite the desolate atmosphere life is vigorous in the decay, sustaining nocturnal creepfolk and shadowy fauna adapted to feed on the lingering psychic resonance of the dead.
The Sullen
Quiet, enigmatic and possessed of a sombre elegance, their complexions running from pale ash to deep charcoal-violet and painted with geometric motifs in crushed glowing mineral. They drape themselves in midnight gossamer and velvet moth-down.
Their magic blends the density of Earth with the shifting arts of Shadow, letting them sculpt darkness into substance or pass through stone as silently as an eclipse. They are peerless crafters, repurposing the bone, horn and chitin plate of Sorrowloom's ancient beasts into gossamer bone flutes, carapace jewellery and skeletal reliquaries that command awe and high prices across all of Everdew.
Encounters
Roll d100. Everything here feeds on decay, resonance, or both. The quiet is not empty; it is occupied. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.
| d100 | Encounter | CR |
|---|---|---|
| 01–08 | 1d4 Sullen carvers quarrying fossil chitin, who will not speak first | — |
| 09–15 | 2d6 phosphorescent silk-moths drifting the ossuary vaults in violet | 2 |
| 16–22 | a chitin fall: an arch of fossil carapace gives way, and it does so silently | — |
| 23–29 | 2d4 booklice grazing ghost-fungus off a reliquary they consider theirs | 0 |
| 30–35 | 1d6 silverfish nesting inside a petrified thorax | ½ |
| 36–41 | 1d3 rove beetles feeding in the decay, tails up | 1 |
| 42–47 | 1d4 house centipedes pouring down a fossil rib, far too fast | 3 |
| 48–53 | 1d2 black widows in a burial niche — shy, and disproportionate | 3 |
| 54–59 | 2d4 wolf spiders crossing the elytra pavements | 3 |
| 60–65 | 1d3 creepfolk feeding on the resonance of the dead, not yet hostile | 4 |
| 66–70 | the quiet: sound stops dead for a hundred feet, and something is using it | — |
| 71–76 | 1d2 tarantulas in the lower vaults — body Medium, reach Large | 7 |
| 77–81 | 1 praying mantis among the arches, which will finish the conversation | 8 |
| 82–86 | 1 huntsman spider running the ossuary walls | 9 |
| 87–91 | 1d2 bats hunting the vault ceilings by sound alone | 10 |
| 92–94 | 1d2 greater centipedes in the deepest ossuary | 10 |
| 95–96 | 1 lesser snake threading the fossil ribs | 14 |
| 97–98 | 1 gigantean centipede — twenty-three pairs of legs and no natural enemy | 16 |
| 99 | 1 great horned owl down through a collapsed vault from the forest above | 23 |
| 00 | something void-quiet feeding on the memory of the dead, and it knows your names | 25 |