D20 SYSTEM✦ Normal

The Blighted Hunt: Stag-Rage and the Attendants' Price

# Investigation# Beast# Intrigue# Dark Fantasy

The Royal Hunting Grounds, once a symbol of the crown's majesty, are now a bleeding wound. A legendary White Stag, its flesh warped by unnatural growths, leads frenzied caravans of mutated beasts in devastating rampages. The culprit: a high-potency 'Excitation Potion' secretly fed to the creatures by the Grounds' own Attendants. Veteran players are drawn into a conflict where the line between protector and poisoner is blurred. The crown demands the beast's head and the traitors' deaths, but the Attendants claim they act to prevent a greater, hidden cataclysm. Unraveling this web requires navigating a landscape where every choice has a bloody cost.

Chronicle Prelude

The Foresters' Hold, a fortified lodge on the edge of the Hunting Grounds. It's a tense bastion of weary hunters, displaced nobles, and crown investigators, all smelling of smoke, blood, and fear. The air is thick with the screams of the maimed and the distant, unnatural howls from the woods.

Environmental Traits

The Hunting Grounds are a sovereign crisis. The mutated Stag and its caravan are not merely beasts; they are a weaponized blight destroying trade routes, poisoning the land, and eroding the crown's authority. Victory requires ending the rampage, but the true challenge is deciding who—or what—is the real threat.

Legendary Archetypes

Rayan

HP:45

STR:16

WIS: 12

CHA:11

Key Factions & Autonomous Nodes (8)

Commander Varis
A tall, gaunt man in immaculate black plate armor etched with silver thorns. His face is scarred, and his eyes burn with fanatical certainty. He wears the crimson sash of the Inquisition's high command. His posture is rigid, radiating uncompromising authority.
Quartermaster Rogar
A stocky man in a worn, mud-stained Crown uniform. His shoulders are slumped, and his eyes are haunted. He mechanically sorts crates of supplies, but his gaze constantly flickers towards the dark treeline. He smells of cheap ale and despair.
Elara, High Priestess of the Grove
A woman of indeterminate age with long, silver-streaked hair woven with living vines. Her robes are the color of deep moss, and her eyes hold a profound, sorrowful wisdom. She moves with a serene grace that seems disconnected from the surrounding horror, as if she is listening to a song only she can hear.
Fenrik the Doubtful
A rugged man in his prime, dressed in practical leather and furs, stained with sap and earth. His face is lined with worry, and his hands are calloused from both blade and trowel. He carries a staff of living wood that seems to writhe slightly at its tips.
The Agonized Stag
A colossal, once-majestic white stag, now a horrifying abomination. Its hide is split in places, weeping greenish sap and revealing pulsating, mutated flesh beneath. One antler is broken and blackened (the source of item_corrupted_antler), while the other has grown into a twisted, root-like mass. Its eyes are milky white and weep tears of corruption. It moves with a terrible, limping grace, radiating waves of pain and madness.
The Whispering Blight
Not a creature of flesh, but a semi-sentient environmental presence. It is felt as a chilling pressure in the air, a distortion in the light, and a cacophony of maddening whispers that seem to emanate from the corrupted earth and trees themselves. It does not have a physical form to attack, only an influence to resist.
Marta, Keeper of the Stag's Rest
A stout, weary woman with sharp eyes and hands permanently dusted with flour. She wears a clean but patched apron and moves efficiently behind the bar of the only tavern in the Foresters' Hold. She watches everything and everyone with a quiet, calculating gaze.
Slain Crown Hunter
The body of a man in a Crown-standard leather jerkin, lying half-consumed by the corrupted undergrowth. His crossbow is shattered, and a look of pure terror is frozen on his face. His wounds are not from claws, but from something more brutal and organic, as if the forest itself turned against him.

Chronicle Prelude

Environmental Traits

Legendary Archetypes

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