The Briar Patch
The western arm of the ring: brambles, thorns and succulents compounded by ground that does not want to be walked on. Crossing by air is advised, and even that is not safe, because the Shah Gaz hunt the canopy as readily as the floor.
The Land
The densest and darkest of the four crossings. A hawthorn spike at this scale is a fixed lance eight feet long, and the standard injury here is a fall onto one; every settlement keeps a thorn-surgeon and none of them want for work. Bramble grows a full stride a week in spring, so a road left uncut for one season simply stops existing.
Light reaches the floor in coins. Everything that lives here has learned to move without shaking the thicket, because shaking the thicket is how you announce yourself.
The Shah Gaz
Ambush predators with sleek black fur, green eyes and a genuinely unsettling reputation, because they do not hunt for food and they do not hunt for territory. They hunt because they like it. Anything short of a Faerie that enters the Briar Patch is fair game, and the qualifier is doing a great deal of work that the Shah Gaz decline to clarify.
They are not lawless — the Kingdom's writ runs here, nominally — but no bailiff has ever served a summons in the Briar Patch and returned with it signed.
Encounters
Roll d100. The densest crossing, and the only one where the landlords hunt you for entertainment. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.
| d100 | Encounter | CR |
|---|---|---|
| 01–09 | 1d3 Shah Gaz who have been following the party since the thicket edge | 6 |
| 10–16 | 1 cutting-gang reopening a road that closed itself over the winter | — |
| 17–23 | a thorn fall: an eight-foot hawthorn lance comes down through the canopy route | — |
| 24–30 | 2d6 thrips on a dog-rose bloom in a coin of light | ¼ |
| 31–36 | 1d4 ladybird beetles on a bramble aphid colony | 1 |
| 37–42 | 1d3 jumping spiders in the thorn lattice, already ahead of you | 1 |
| 43–48 | 2d4 earwigs in a bramble hollow, deserving the reputation | 1 |
| 49–54 | 1d3 ground beetles in the litter, night and jaws | 2 |
| 55–60 | 1d2 paper wasps with a nest in the thicket, orders, and reinforcements | 2 |
| 61–66 | 2d4 wolf spiders on the floor, moving without shaking the thicket | 3 |
| 67–71 | 1d2 black widows in a thorn hollow, shy and disproportionate | 3 |
| 72–76 | 1d3 hornets on a burst hedgefruit | 4 |
| 77–81 | 1 mantis nymph in the bramble, already lethal | 4 |
| 82–86 | 1 greater robber fly in a canopy gap, waiting for exactly this | 6 |
| 87–90 | 1 praying mantis on the thorn road, which opens with a courteous greeting | 8 |
| 91–93 | 1 huntsman spider running the thicket walls | 9 |
| 94–95 | 1 songbird in the thorn canopy, and there is nowhere to go but down | 11 |
| 96–97 | 1 jay calling you into the open with a voice you love | 13 |
| 98 | 1 hedgehog in the understory, a walking siege engine that eats people your size | 13 |
| 99 | 1 hawk threading the Hedges at full speed without touching a twig | 20 |
| 00 | 1 fox in the briar, which the Shah Gaz will not contest | 24 |