This is a small, simple area/adventure you can plop into your campaign wherever. It works best in a northern swamp, boggy and cold. It is shown here in a hexmap format. It uses the silver piece standard, so if you're using D&D or something, just convert all cash to gold.
Brewer's wood isn't quite a town: more like a collection of campfires, tents, and other assorted vagabonds and bandits. They aren't all bad, but the whole place is quite unpleasant.
Random Encounters in Brewer's Wood
1d6:
- 1d6 hunters with fresh food, in good spirits.
- 1d6 hunters without food, desperate, will trade (they have next to nothing, and if they aren’t bartered with, 3-in-6 chance one will try to steal from you).
- A family of 1d6 huddled around a fire (1d4-1 children). They are neutral, but become friendly if you offer them food. They will not share their food with you (they don’t have enough to go around as it is).
- 1d6 bandits who want everything you own.
- 1d6 bandits enforcing a toll (1d12 sp/person)
- 1d4 small zombie children soaked in alcohol. They came from 34.21. 1-in-6 chance that it will instead be one living child, who will tell you about Ulva Von Stein.
The town itself (33.20) is mostly just hunters and families. They'll tell you their oh-so-sad stories, the bandits will try to recruit you/rob you, and so on.
33.21 has a wooden wall trying to protect the hunters squatting beside it from the cold winds from the snowlands. It doesn't work, and they are miserable and cold. They will trade you meat and gold for warmth.
The Hag of Brewer's Wood
The Hag of Brewer's wood resides in 34.21. Her name is Ulva Von Stein. The hex itself is shrouded in mist, which lets people in, but does not let them out without permission from Ulva, who lives in a giant barrel in the middle of the hex.
She’s been stealing children from the town and burying them in the swamp in barrels. She wants children of her own, but doesn't quite know how to go about it. Some of the children are still alive. Others are undead. If she is threatened, she will raise 2d4 barrels from the ground. 1d4-1 of them will burst open and coughing, half dead children will slide out. The rest will be smashed open from the inside, and ghoulish children will appear, hungry for flesh. Returning living children to their parents will net you 5 silver each.
Ulva wants to be left alone, but will trade you alcohol for necessities or more children. The alcohol allows you to walk through the mists surrounding the swamp. In her hut, there are 1d6 bottles of special mead, labeled with a walking corpse. She won't sell you these. They smell like death, but taste like oddly meaty honey. Drinking one will allow you command mindless undead for 24 hours by speaking to them.
There is a recipe in her hut, which allows a necromancer to make the undead-commanding alcohol (it takes a magically incribed barrel costing 20 silver, 40 silver worth of honey, and some magical energy, as well as 1 month to ferment in a barrel with a corpse in it, and produces 5 bottles). The bottles can be sold for 30 silver each, or the recipe for 100 silver.
Drawn by some medieval dude.
