Spire Sessions 1: The Wilted Man
Hiram The-World-Rises-With-the-Sun can't remember what it was like to have eyes anymore.
His have long been replaced with dry, wilted flowers; they itch at times, yes, but what can you do? The fusion of aelfir and plant is something that must be done in order to truly become all that the world wants him to be.
That said, though, he is... Different. For the flowers, bark, and stems that make up most of his body now have long since begun their slow descent into entropy, decaying slowly. It is as if they do not want his body. As if his flesh is not fit for reclamation.
Which is what a fool might say, he thinks. The truly enlightened such as himself know the truth: the once-fertile land of Spire is long dead.
It is long dead, and we who chose to occupy it are responsible. And the only way to resurrect Mother Spire is by killing us all.
Hiram The-World-Rises-With-the-Sun can't remember what it was like to have eyes anymore. But here, in the Garden District, he has found a new way to see. A way to make everyone see... Sweet death.
The Wilted Man, formerly Hiram The-World-Rises-With-the Sun, is an aelfir druid. Formerly a Warrior-Poet of some renown, he had a spiritual awakening of sorts upon his arrival in the mile-high city and retired to the Garden District. There, he became a farmer who moonlit as a druid, slowly trading his flesh for plant matter in a quest for oneness.
Several months ago, he was approached by Lady Grendelmyn Stars-Softly-Shine of the Spire Council. The Lady had heard of his prowess and assigned him the all-important task of finding a way to reawaken the ancient soul of Spire through a restoration of nature.
What she did not account for, though, was Hiram's recent brush with death. Hiram had already tried to restore Spire...By journeying into the Heart. What exactly happened in that nightmare labyrinth of skittering dark, only he can say, but the results were apparent. The brilliant colors that had adorned his body became drooped and dead, and he was overcome with a deep cosmic nihilism. All of his dreams were replaced with one simple truth: Spire is dead. It is a corpse, and we are squatting in it.
And so, deep in the Garden District, the newly-christened Wilted Man set to work. What his efforts wrought will be one of the greatest nightmares in Spire's history.
The Wilted Man has, via a whole lot of occult magic, engineered one of the greatest man-made famines in world history. The plentiful crops in the Garden District, which is essentially Spire's breadbasket save for imported food, is now a place of death. All of the plantlife there has died, and what little there is that has survived has become incredibly poisonous or, in some cases, carnivorous.
The farmers of the district have been completely cut off from the rest of the city. Inside the Wilted Man's new kingdom, they are slowly going mad with hunger. Roving bands of starving farmers wander the darkened wood, armed with torches and whatever implements they have, searching for leftover animals... Or, if they're desperate enough, their fellow man. Some farmers have tried to turn to druidism to save the Garden, but their paths are dark and twisted, for nature itself has been corrupted. The Hunger-Wracked Farmer and Druid Ecoterroist stat blocks, found in the Strata sourcebook, should be fine for these NPCs, though I recommend lowering their Resistance and maybe damage output to really sell the idea of a desperate mob.
Deep in the district lies the inner sanctum of the Wilted Man, from which he waits patiently for the city outside to finally go quiet. Roaming around the premises are the Wilted Man's Thralls (every big bad needs some thralls), fungi and algae that use the various corpses kept in the Garden District to grow mushrooms as shells off of which to build their forms.
Wilted Thrall
Names: N/A
Descriptors: Has an uneven number of legs; host body's head is visible and looks strangely peaceful; slowly wilting but doesn't seem to care; shape of its host body is barely distinguishable through what it has become
Resistance: Honestly, I recommend rolling D8 for each one. Adds variety.
Equipment: None, but its plant outer shell provides (Armor 1, Camouflaged) and it can attack with the profile (D6, Scarring) or (D3, Spread).
Without food from the Garden District, the entirety of Spire has begun to run low on food. Sure, they can import stuff through the North Docks and New Heaven, but drow and human dietary restrictions prevent them from eating most of it. The aelfir in Amaranth are fine--they've got enough food stored to last them a good while--but the people down-spire are suffering. It's only a matter of time before the people turn on one another in the name of a decent meal...
It is for this reason that, using the category system elaborated on in my previous post, the Wilted Man is Category 3 at best. The party could find a way to stop him and restore the Garden District before the famine gets too severe, but Derelictus at the very least will still suffer the effects. More than likely, he'll be spending most of the story at Category 4, as the famine will slowly spread up-spire as more and more wealthy folks run out of food. If things get really bad, even the aelfir could experience shortages, making him a Category 5. Big deal guy.
I've gone ahead and thought up several ways that the players could end up working to bring down the Wilted Man. Given that this is a tabletop campaign, they'll likely find other avenues for success that I absolutely did not plan for, but brainstorming is still fun.
His have long been replaced with dry, wilted flowers; they itch at times, yes, but what can you do? The fusion of aelfir and plant is something that must be done in order to truly become all that the world wants him to be.
That said, though, he is... Different. For the flowers, bark, and stems that make up most of his body now have long since begun their slow descent into entropy, decaying slowly. It is as if they do not want his body. As if his flesh is not fit for reclamation.
Which is what a fool might say, he thinks. The truly enlightened such as himself know the truth: the once-fertile land of Spire is long dead.
It is long dead, and we who chose to occupy it are responsible. And the only way to resurrect Mother Spire is by killing us all.
Hiram The-World-Rises-With-the-Sun can't remember what it was like to have eyes anymore. But here, in the Garden District, he has found a new way to see. A way to make everyone see... Sweet death.
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| From Justice League Dark Annual #1; art by Guillem March and Arif Prianto |
The Wilted Man, formerly Hiram The-World-Rises-With-the Sun, is an aelfir druid. Formerly a Warrior-Poet of some renown, he had a spiritual awakening of sorts upon his arrival in the mile-high city and retired to the Garden District. There, he became a farmer who moonlit as a druid, slowly trading his flesh for plant matter in a quest for oneness.
Several months ago, he was approached by Lady Grendelmyn Stars-Softly-Shine of the Spire Council. The Lady had heard of his prowess and assigned him the all-important task of finding a way to reawaken the ancient soul of Spire through a restoration of nature.
What she did not account for, though, was Hiram's recent brush with death. Hiram had already tried to restore Spire...By journeying into the Heart. What exactly happened in that nightmare labyrinth of skittering dark, only he can say, but the results were apparent. The brilliant colors that had adorned his body became drooped and dead, and he was overcome with a deep cosmic nihilism. All of his dreams were replaced with one simple truth: Spire is dead. It is a corpse, and we are squatting in it.
And so, deep in the Garden District, the newly-christened Wilted Man set to work. What his efforts wrought will be one of the greatest nightmares in Spire's history.
The Verdant Necropolis
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| Hollow Knight |
The Wilted Man has, via a whole lot of occult magic, engineered one of the greatest man-made famines in world history. The plentiful crops in the Garden District, which is essentially Spire's breadbasket save for imported food, is now a place of death. All of the plantlife there has died, and what little there is that has survived has become incredibly poisonous or, in some cases, carnivorous.
The farmers of the district have been completely cut off from the rest of the city. Inside the Wilted Man's new kingdom, they are slowly going mad with hunger. Roving bands of starving farmers wander the darkened wood, armed with torches and whatever implements they have, searching for leftover animals... Or, if they're desperate enough, their fellow man. Some farmers have tried to turn to druidism to save the Garden, but their paths are dark and twisted, for nature itself has been corrupted. The Hunger-Wracked Farmer and Druid Ecoterroist stat blocks, found in the Strata sourcebook, should be fine for these NPCs, though I recommend lowering their Resistance and maybe damage output to really sell the idea of a desperate mob.
 |
| Marvin Seo |
Deep in the district lies the inner sanctum of the Wilted Man, from which he waits patiently for the city outside to finally go quiet. Roaming around the premises are the Wilted Man's Thralls (every big bad needs some thralls), fungi and algae that use the various corpses kept in the Garden District to grow mushrooms as shells off of which to build their forms.
Wilted Thrall
Names: N/A
Descriptors: Has an uneven number of legs; host body's head is visible and looks strangely peaceful; slowly wilting but doesn't seem to care; shape of its host body is barely distinguishable through what it has become
Resistance: Honestly, I recommend rolling D8 for each one. Adds variety.
Equipment: None, but its plant outer shell provides (Armor 1, Camouflaged) and it can attack with the profile (D6, Scarring) or (D3, Spread).
Outside the Garden
Without food from the Garden District, the entirety of Spire has begun to run low on food. Sure, they can import stuff through the North Docks and New Heaven, but drow and human dietary restrictions prevent them from eating most of it. The aelfir in Amaranth are fine--they've got enough food stored to last them a good while--but the people down-spire are suffering. It's only a matter of time before the people turn on one another in the name of a decent meal...
It is for this reason that, using the category system elaborated on in my previous post, the Wilted Man is Category 3 at best. The party could find a way to stop him and restore the Garden District before the famine gets too severe, but Derelictus at the very least will still suffer the effects. More than likely, he'll be spending most of the story at Category 4, as the famine will slowly spread up-spire as more and more wealthy folks run out of food. If things get really bad, even the aelfir could experience shortages, making him a Category 5. Big deal guy.
Player Approaches
I've gone ahead and thought up several ways that the players could end up working to bring down the Wilted Man. Given that this is a tabletop campaign, they'll likely find other avenues for success that I absolutely did not plan for, but brainstorming is still fun.
- The players could ally themselves with Spire's various druids and stage an attack on the Garden District. A bunch of plant people might have some problems dealing with a guy that can decay them on command, though.
- With a lot of digging in Spire's upper echelons, the party could discover concrete proof that Lady Grendelmyn put Hiram up to this plan and, in so doing, generate a whole fuckton of public unrest and hate for the aelfir. The result could, at the very least, increase public faith in the Ministry and, if the powder keg is really ticking down, lead to the full-scale revolution the party's superiors have dreamed of. That still leaves the question of how to beat the Wilted Man, but that's still a huge W.
- If the party is feeling particularly vindictive, they could locate and raid/destroy the aelfir food vaults, leaving them just as famished as everyone else. Not only would this increase the chances of survival for people down-spire, it would also put the pressure on the Council to actually send strike teams into the Garden District to put down the Wilted Man. Granted, most of them will probably die quite quickly, but it'd still be a fantastic distraction.
- Hey, isn't the Vyskant trying to assimilate people by giving them infected food grown in the Garden District? They certainly won't like what the Wilted Man is doing! The players could agree to an uneasy alliance with the Herald Corporation, which might just be insane enough to work. Having the backing of a hivemind of alien mantis parasites is the most pure rule of cool, out-of-the-box approach I can think up.
GM Notes
I only want the mission to enter and reclaim the Garden District to be half of the equation in this story--for the other half, I want to show the real, tangible impact of the Wilted Man's mad scheme. It's not often that media explores what a man-made famine would look like firsthand, and I can see why--it's hard not to be exploitative when depicting people slowly dying of hunger, that most benign thing we all take for granted. But I think that with some research and sensitivity, opportunities exist to present a truly nuanced tale of desperation, loss, and, at the end of the day, perseverance. Personally, I'm doing research on the Soviet Union's infamous Holodomor for my take on this story.
I plan to take lots of time to show the fights for survival happening across the city and, most importantly, give my party the chance to intervene and save as many people as they can. With the win condition met, the story can ultimately become one of hope: when faced with catastrophe, an oppressed group can come out stronger and defeat those that have brought them down.
To that end, I think I'm going to be playing the long game with the Wilted Man storyline. I'm going to start it by having food shortages slowly begin to happen in the background of other events in the campaign before kicking off the storyline proper, which I want to take place over a year in in-game time. In real-world terms, that'll likely translate to 6-8 sessions; I'm keeping things rather compressed, by design.
The other half of the story, however, will be spent exploring the transformed Garden District. I want to emphasize the atmosphere of the place, the beauty that is inherent to its grotesqueness. I'm gonna rely a lot on natural descriptions of the rot and decay taking place: bodies subsumed into poisonous moss growths, piles of dead crustaceans taken from the vats, and buildings being reclaimed by nature that is, itself, in the process of dying. I'm also gonna go all-in on the body horror of the Wilted Thralls--as you saw from the sample image earlier, they aren't gonna look pretty.
With combat against humans, particularly the starving farmers, I want to maintain tension and desperation. These people are desperate, so I really want to show them ripping into the party.
As for the Wilted Man himself, well, he's also gonna be icky and body horror-y, but in a different way. The Wilted Man has transformed into a mockery of the humanoid form: flowers for eyes, a cloak made of petals, hands covered in brambles, the works. His customary aelfir mask was made of wood, and it has fused with the bark that now comprises some of his skin, so it's impossible to tell where his mask ends and his true face begins. I also quite like the idea that he has thorns growing on his tongue and inside his throat, making it physically painful to talk; as a result, he speaks in quick, raspy fragments and lets his raw physical presence communicate everything else.
Additional notes:
- The cannibals of Grist are probably having a fucking field day with the famine. After all, a lack of food will eventually make consuming your asshole neighbor seem much more attractive.
- To go with the story arc taking place over a year, I think I'm also gonna emphasize each of the four seasons to correspond to the four acts of the story. The campaign starts in the summer; act 3, in which the Wilted Man is at the height of his power, will be in winter; and the party will finally reclaim the Garden District in the spring. It might be cool to have the appearance of the district and its inhabitants to change each season, too.
- The Deep Apiarists could prove particularly effective against ol' Hiram, given that his affliction was caused by the Heart. Hrm.
- I imagine the Grangou will be more relied-upon than ever during the famine. Hopefully, I end up having one or two in my party.
- The Wilted Man's favorite flower is the black dahlia.
I think that about covers it. Probably won't be doing the Wilted Man saga for a while in my campaign, but when I do get to it, expect at least a brief report on how it went. Up next: a visit to an all-new location which I felt the base lore of Spire was sorely lacking in.
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