D20 SYSTEM✦ Normal

The Fermenting Grudge: A Sporeborn Conspiracy

# Intrigue# Dark Fantasy# Investigation

The Lower City's bakeries are under siege. A living, bubbling yeast-ooze has begun consuming flour stores, fermenting dough into monstrous growths, and choking alleys with a sickly-sweet spore haze. The city watch blames a notorious black market alchemist, 'Old Vat,' for dumping failed experiments. Old Vat, however, claims the outbreak is a natural mutation from illegally dumped noble household waste—a sin for which the bakeries themselves are responsible. You are hired to end the plague, but truth is a luxury that gets people killed in the Lower City.

Chronicle Prelude

The Grand Flour Mill, a neutral safe zone at the edge of the Lower City. The air is thick with the scent of warm bread and anxiety. Millers, bakers, and desperate city watchmen crowd the main hall, arguing over maps and empty grain sacks.

Environmental Traits

The entire Lower City bakery district is under quarantine. The goal is to identify the true source of the Yeast Ooze, halt its spread, and survive the machinations of two desperate factions vying for control of the district's future.

Legendary Archetypes

Rayan

HP:45

STR:16

WIS: 12

CHA:11

Key Factions & Autonomous Nodes (8)

Guildmaster Elara
A stern woman in her late fifties with flour-dusted hands and eyes that dart nervously. She wears a heavy, guild-embroidered apron and clutches a ledger like a shield.
Old Vat
A hunched, elderly man with wild grey hair and spectacles perched on a soot-stained nose. His robes are stained with chemical burns and fungal spores. He gestures erratically when speaking.
Captain Holt
A grizzled, weary man in a dented watch helm and a stained leather jerkin. His eyes are bloodshot from stress, and his hand rests near his coin purse as much as his sword hilt.
Spore Scout
A gaunt child with tattered rags, their skin mottled with greyish fungal patches. Their eyes are wide and feverish, and they move with a skittering, unnatural gait through the spore-choked alleys.
Ooze Tendril
A writhing, pale-green appendage of semi-solid fungal ooze, roughly the thickness of a man's arm. It emerges from cracks in the cobblestones or drains, tipped with a dripping, corrosive pseudopod.
Ooze Mother
A massive, pulsating fungal growth the size of a small house, seated in the heart of the cistern chamber. Veins of pale mycelium connect it to the pipes above, and it throbs with a sickly, bioluminescent light. Smaller tendrils lash out from its base.
Ragpicker Kira
A wiry woman with sharp eyes, her clothes a patchwork of salvaged fabric. She moves silently and carries a collection of hooks, picks, and pouches on a wide belt.
Guild Alchemist Marius
A fastidious man in a relatively clean lab coat, surrounded by bubbling beakers and scales in a corner of the guild mill. He is eager and slightly manic, with ink-stained fingers.

Chronicle Prelude

Environmental Traits

Legendary Archetypes

✦ Related Cases ✦

The Gargoyle Awakening of Rumbling Crag

The Scorched Carapace