The Tidal Wilds
The eastern arm, where the Meadowlands' gentle alluvium runs down into the salt of the Singing Sea: a drowned maze of blackwater creeks, shifting mudflats and half-submerged mangrove forest under permanent warm mist. Every traveller bound for the sea comes through here, and the Shah Balam watch all of them.
The Land
The region breathes with the tide. At low water vast tracts of glistening silt are picked over by fiddler crabs and mudskippers; at high water the root-canopies flood into glassy saltwater lagoons and the paths of six hours ago are gone. Colossal red and black mangroves anchor into river clay on sprawling stilt-roots, hung with weeping moss, carnivorous pitcher-reeds and pale salt orchids.
It is a stratified and thoroughly hostile wetland — long-jawed gar, ambush morays, territorial monitor lizards — and it swallows anyone who tries to reach open water on foot. The sensible route is by boat, with a Shah Balam pilot, at a price.
The Shah Balam
Stout, heavily muscled and broad-jawed where their briar-dwelling and city cousins are lithe, with water-slick rosettes in their coats and ornaments of river-clam shell, shed snake hide and woven sedge. Where most fey balk at wet ground, the Shah Balam revere the tides and the flooded caves beneath them.
They carry an air of unhurried menace, spend the day's heat lounging on branches over blackwater pools, and hunt by dropping into the flood like otters. They use almost no weapons and need none: their bite is the strongest in the Hedges, and they guard the threshold between the Kingdom's pastures and the deep sea with proprietary seriousness.
Encounters
Roll d100. The region breathes with the tide. Roll the encounter, then roll for whether the ground is still there. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.
| d100 | Encounter | CR |
|---|---|---|
| 01–09 | 1 Shah Balam pilot quoting a price for the crossing, which is not negotiable | — |
| 10–16 | 2d6 fiddler crabs and mudskippers picking over a low-water flat, and talking | ¼ |
| 17–23 | high water: the paths of six hours ago are gone, and so is the party's camp | — |
| 24–30 | 2d6 mosquitoes out of the mangrove at dusk | ½ |
| 31–36 | 1d4 water striders across a blackwater lagoon | 2 |
| 37–42 | 1d3 backswimmers under the film at a root crossing | 2 |
| 43–48 | 1d4 pitcher-reeds and salt orchids at a channel edge, carnivorous and patient | 3 |
| 49–54 | 2d4 wolf spiders on the stilt-roots at low water | 3 |
| 55–60 | 1d4 diving beetles in a flooded root-canopy | 4 |
| 61–66 | 1d3 newts on a mangrove knee, poisonous to touch | 5 |
| 67–72 | 1 giant water bug ambushing from beneath the tideline | 7 |
| 73–77 | 1d2 fishing spiders running the flooded lagoon | 9 |
| 78–82 | 1d2 crayfish in a creek mouth, asserting rights and prepared to litigate | 10 |
| 83–87 | 1 frog on a mud bank; the tongue arrives first | 9 |
| 88–91 | 1 long-jawed gar in a blackwater channel, and the boat is the only cover | 13 |
| 92–94 | 1 ambush moray in a flooded root cavity | 14 |
| 95–96 | 1 bullfrog at a landing, looking around for the second one | 13 |
| 97–98 | 1 territorial monitor lizard on the flats, which owns them | 20 |
| 99 | 1 garter snake hunting the tideline at speed | 18 |
| 00 | 1 heron on the mudflat, and it has been there since before the tide turned | 24 |