Bone Bramble

Description

The bone bramble is a maze of warped trees and bonelike vines. Calcified corpses merge with the trees, covered in fungal pods that feed on the blood oozing through the undergrowth. Here and there, narrow paths wend deeper into the wood.  

B1. Entrances

Characters who circle the tangled stretch of woodland uncover five separate paths leading into its interior. Impassable brambles choke the woodland outside these trails and even grow overhead to blot out the sky.   To avoid getting lost in the wood, the characters must succeed on a DC 15 group Wisdom (Survival) check. On a success, the characters locate Red Ruth’s lair at the heart of the woodland (area B3). If they fail, they blunder into one of the dead ends listed below (area B2) and must make the check again when they move on. Once all four dead ends have been explored, the group automatically locates Red Ruth’s lair.  

B2. Dead Ends

If the characters get lost in the brambles, roll on the Dead Ends table to determine where they end up, or choose a result that they haven’t encountered yet.  

d4	Dead End
1	Dead traveler
2	Dryad spirits
3	Shambling mounds
4	Thorn trap

  Dead Traveler. The corpse of a drow rests at the end of the path, her flesh impaled by hungry vines and her face twisted in an expression of horror. The traveler wears a bag of devouring on a strap.   Dryad Spirits. Three cursed dryad spirits (use the banshee stat block to represent them) approach the characters and demand to be reminded of the “wonders of life.” At your discretion, a character can mollify the spirits with a sweet story, a kiss, a song, or anything else that reminds the dryads of home. If the characters fail to satisfy them, the three spirits attack.   Shambling Mounds. Three shambling mounds arise from the brambles and attack the characters.   Thorn Trap. The characters spot a hawthorn staff entangled at the end of the path, buried behind a 15-foot-deep thicket of thorns. Each 5-foot-square section of thorns counts as difficult terrain and has AC 11, 15 hit points, immunity to psychic damage, and vulnerability to fire damage. If damaged but not destroyed, the thorns magically regrow to full health after 24 hours. The thorns restrain any creature that ends its turn within 5 feet of them. Any creature that starts its turn restrained by the thorns takes 22 (4d10) slashing damage from the writhing barbs. Once a creature is entangled, it can break free only if all the thorn bushes within 5 feet of it are destroyed.   The staff at the center of the maze is a decoy and crumbles to ashes in the hands of whoever claims it.  

B3. Red Ruth’s Lair

  Red Ruth, a night hag, makes her lair inside this gory den. She wears a dress made from stitched-together bones. Strings of infants’ skulls hang around her neck and chatter nursery rhymes incessantly (and in different languages) as she talks.   Evil visitors from all over the multiverse travel to hear Red Ruth’s divinations and sample her mystical brews.   Red Ruth sells potions brewed from blood, which she gladly trades for soul coins as listed on the Red Ruth’s Bargains table. Each potion imparts an unpleasant but harmless side effect when imbibed: flatulence, boils, hair loss, or any other ghastliness you can conceive. Her divinations replicate the effects of a commune spell, although Red Ruth provides the answers to the questions without needing to appeal to a divine being.  

Red Ruth’s Bargains

Goods	Price
Potion, common or uncommon	1 soul coin
Potion, rare	2 soul coins
Commune spell	3 soul coins

 

Map

 

History

In a bygone age, the night hag Red Ruth corrupted a community of dryads by fouling the roots of their trees with mind-bending poison. As the dryads fell to evil, their forest was wrenched from the Feywild into Gula. Those dryads who resisted the poison died trying to merge back into their trees. The rest crumbled to ash and became restless, tortured spirits akin to banshees. Contented, Red Ruth made her home at the heart of the twisted wood.