D20 SYSTEM✦ Normal

The Animated Scissors Garden: Lacerations of Red-Leaf Manor

# Dark Fantasy# Fey

A crumbling estate where the legendary Gardener's final, obsessive automation—a garden of self-pruning, sentient scissors—has gone lethally haywire. The estate is a warzone between two desperate factions: the eco-theurgists who believe the garden is a new, albeit painful, form of natural life, and the family's descendants who see only a profane desecration of their ancestral grounds. Players are hired to salvage an heirloom, only to find themselves choosing between two visions of survival in a landscape that actively resists their presence.

Chronicle Prelude

The party arrives at the rusted, wrought-iron gates of Red-Leaf Manor. The air hums with a low, metallic drone. Before them lies the Overgrown Courtyard, a relative safe zone where the once-manicured paths are now choked with thorny vines and the occasional, dormant pair of ornate scissors embedded in the soil. A flickering lantern marks the path to the small, fortified shed used by the Verdant Accord faction as their forward base.

Environmental Traits

The entire estate is caught in a catastrophic feedback loop. The Gardener's 'Pruning Protocols'—an ancient system of golems and animated tools meant to maintain the grounds—now interpret all life, including visitors, as 'invasive overgrowth' to be surgically removed. The soil itself is laced with a strange, red sap that seems to both nourish and control the bladed flora. The ultimate goal is to reach the Heartwood Chamber in the manor's sub-basement, the system's core, and decide whether to destroy it, hijack it, or let it complete its 'pruning' of the region.

Legendary Archetypes

Rayan

HP:45

STR:16

WIS: 12

CHA:11

Key Factions & Autonomous Nodes (8)

Elder Thorn
An elderly druid with bark-like skin and hair like dangling moss. Their robes are woven from living vines that sprout tiny, red-tinged flowers. They carry a staff of gnarled wood that drips with clear sap.
Quire Redleaf
A grim, weathered woman in her 40s wearing practical, scarred leather armor over a faded red tunic. Her hair is tied back in a severe knot. She carries a ceremonial, jagged-edged family blade and a determined look in her eyes.
Scrivener Motes
A nervous, ink-stained scholar in a worn wool coat, peering out from behind cracked spectacles. They are constantly jotting notes in a small book, flinching at distant sounds from the garden.
Sentry Vine
A massive, ambulatory Blademoth that patrols the Laceration Fields on six scythe-like legs. Its body is a pulsating sac of red sap, with two large, reflective compound eyes and a cluster of snapping, shear-like mandibles at the front.
The Gardener's Echo
A translucent, shimmering specter in the tattered remains of a once-fine gardener's outfit. It flickers between moments of serene pride and sudden, anguished guilt. Red sap drips endlessly from its incorporeal hands.
Gardener's Last Golem
A towering, 12-foot construct of petrified wood, rusted iron girders, and pulsating, red-veined roots. Its torso is a hollow cage containing a glowing, sap-filled clockwork heart. Its arms end in massive, interconnected sets of garden shears that snap and grind.
Lyra Mossheart
An elderly woman of the Verdant Accord, her skin textured like lichen. She wears robes adorned with pressed, red-veined leaves and carries a gnarled staff wrapped in glowing fungi. Her eyes hold a scholar's intense curiosity.
Grizz
A burly, scarred man with a mechanical left arm grafted from scavenged garden machinery. He wears a heavy leather apron and is surrounded by tools and weapon parts. The smell of hot metal and alchemical solvents hangs around him.

Chronicle Prelude

Environmental Traits

Legendary Archetypes

✦ Related Cases ✦

The Shambling Mound Rampage of Shadowthorn Wood

The Squirrel Swarm Frenzy of Pinecone Wood and the Archdruid's Lost Memory Crystal