The Gates
The island's south-eastern spine: cold slate and basalt cliff scoured by gale-force wind, studded with cyclopean stone arches that open onto somewhere else. The Huli Jing hold the line here, alone, and the rest of Everdew is glad to let them.
The Land
A brutal topography of jagged shale and columnar basalt, punctuated by ancient weathered portals that hum with discordant spatial noise and flicker with planar static. Vegetation is sparse and ferocious: thorny iron-brier scrub, blood-red lichen feeding on planar radiation, weeping wind-pines grown flat against the rock.
The native fauna is hardened against otherworldly predators — razor-billed ravens, armoured mountain centipedes, stoic rock-badgers whose leathery hides shrug off Netherkin ichor.
Beyond the cliffs the sea runs east toward the far shore and the Corpselight Fens, whose jacks live nearer these arches than anyone in the Kingdom does and have opinions about them nobody at court has solicited.
The Huli Jing
A grim warrior-sorcerer lineage whose name is spoken with hushed dread across Everdew. Battle-hardened ascetics and master planar wardens, nine-tailed, armoured in lacquered lamellar and midnight silk behind carved wooden spirit-visors.
They are the sole and unyielding shield between the heart of the realm and the Netherkin spilling out of the arches, and they fight that border war with cold precision, curved non-ferrous talons and destructive spirit-flame. Revered and feared in equal measure, they have no patience whatever for the diplomatic games of the Queen's court, knowing that if the watch on the high Gates ever falters, the garden realm burns.
Encounters
Roll d100. A border war against things that are not from here. The native fauna is hardened; the rest came through an arch. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.
| d100 | Encounter | CR |
|---|---|---|
| 01–09 | 1d4 Huli Jing on watch rotation at an arch, who have no time for you | 12 |
| 10–16 | planar static rises; an arch begins to hum, and the watch-post signals for relief | — |
| 17–23 | gale off the cliffs strong enough to take a Faerie off the shale entirely | — |
| 24–30 | 2d6 blood-red lichen colonies feeding on planar radiation, and speaking oddly | ⅛ |
| 31–36 | 1d4 springtails, hardened strain, in an iron-brier root mat | 0 |
| 37–42 | 1d3 lesser Netherkin through a minor arch, disoriented and already hunting | 4 |
| 43–48 | 1d4 ground beetles in the basalt columns | 2 |
| 49–54 | 1d2 bark scorpions in a shale crack | 4 |
| 55–60 | 2d4 Netherkin swarm-forms spilling from an arch in numbers | 3 |
| 61–66 | 1d2 armoured mountain centipedes, lesser, in the scree | 4 |
| 67–72 | 1d3 razor-billed ravens' brood-scouts working the cliff face | 8 |
| 73–77 | 1 stoic rock-badger whose leathery hide shrugs off Netherkin ichor, and yours | 9 |
| 78–82 | 1 greater armoured mountain centipede on the spine road | 10 |
| 83–87 | 1d2 Netherkin warforms, ichor-armoured and coordinated | 11 |
| 88–91 | 1 Huli Jing gone through an arch and come back wrong | 14 |
| 92–94 | 1 razor-billed raven, full grown, on the cliff wind | 18 |
| 95–96 | 1 greater Netherkin, arch-born, that the watch cannot hold alone | 17 |
| 97–98 | 1 great horned owl off the basalt, native, and unafraid of any of it | 23 |
| 99 | an arch opens wide, and what comes through has a name in no Kingdom record | 22 |
| 00 | the watch on this arch has already fallen, and nobody downhill knows yet | — |