Kneeroot

The Dooryard

Kneeroot is the name — the fen-walkers' word for it, and they mean the roots, not the house. It is the only part anyone can describe twice, because the house turns and the fence moves with it. The fence-line is the site's working boundary: guest-right begins at it and ends at it, and the thing in the reeds cannot cross it.

Crossing the water — snaplilies Hazard

Thirty yards of lily-pad water between the last firm ground and the fence.

• Wade carefully, poling ahead: no roll. Costs ten minutes and the household watches them do it, which is its own kind of pressure.
• Rush, or cross with a heavy load: Defy Danger +DEX. 1d4 snapping shut on a limb (grabby) on a 7–9.
• Go down among them (6−, or anyone panicking, flailing, or dragged): 1d8 w/ advantage (grabby, messy) and pulled under. Someone else has to get them out.

The Refused Fight

Petitioners who were priced, refused to pay, and wouldn’t leave. They are still out here, in the mud, face-down, well-preserved. Something has been living on them.

• Fight it in the open water: snaplilies are live the whole time. Anyone knocked down rolls the 1d8 above.
• Run for the fence: clean escape, no roll — it stops dead at the stakes. The party learns the fence-line rule the useful way, and learns it will be repeated on the way out.
• Talk to it: possible and horrible. Its memories are jumbled up with the people whose bones it ate — including petitioners who know things about the Witches, and possibly about Marshedge. It will trade lore for a body to eat.

Searching the bog-bodies Loot

Grim, slow work in the open, with the snaplilies live and the lanterns watching. Worth every minute — this is where the party arms itself for the last room without knowing it.

• A bronze knife, green and perfectly sound, on a body far older than the rest. Bronze is what the thing under the floor has no armor against — seed it here and let them work that out later. If nobody searches, the household mentions the old bronze in the mud, once, in passing.
• ◇ A purse of silvers (Value 2) nobody ever got to spend — and silver burns the pyped standing over it.
• Payment in kind: whatever they meant to offer. A stoppered vial, a sealed letter naming an Old Family, a wedding ring that matches the one in the broth upstairs.
• ◇ bendis root, a pouch, still good (Value 1 — 2 outside Marshedge). Whoever carried it burned it right up to the fence and it did not help.

The house has its back turned Provocation 1

It turns when someone asks it aloud, politely, saying who they are and what they want. That is the invocation. Force, climbing, prying, and fire do nothing — the roots step aside from a climber, patiently, for as long as they keep trying. It isn’t a puzzle and it isn’t hostile. Insulting it out loud, though, is insulting the hospitality, and the fence is a bad place to be standing when that happens.

Provocation: the lantern-bearers are the tithe-children. Some are stooped and old. One is a child. One is a grown woman with the Ferrier nose in a High Town dress thirty years out of fashion and no shoes. They answer questions briefly, say they are not prisoners, and will not leave. A party that came here over a stolen girl is now looking at what Marshedge does on schedule. Trying to free them is threatening the household — the yard goes quiet in a way that says so before anything breaks. Give them the beat to back down in.

Hung on a fence-stake, empty: a wrapping of tattered cloth with bright blue markings and rust-colored stains. Nobody in the yard will take it down.

Exits

The Hearth

The other guest Cannot be attacked

A suarachan soothsayer is at the table, bright-scaled and oozing, eating politely. It is a guest. Attacking or threatening it breaks guest-right exactly as if they had gone for a Witch.

It came to ask the Witches what will quiet the thing dreaming under its chorus-place. It lacks language and communicates by touch and poison-vision. It knows where the captives are, because its chorus has them, and it is entirely willing to discuss it — it does not consider itself to be doing anything wrong, and it is not lying.

• Talk to it: requires its touch — its hallucinogenic secretion lets a PC perceive and speak with spirits, and with the soothsayer. When it wears off, mark a debility (dazed if available). The information is real and freely given.
• Bargain with it: it will trade captives for something that quiets the Things Below. That is a promise with teeth, and the Witches are listening and will happily price it.
• Attack it at the table: guest-right broken, and the party has now started a fight in the one house where they cannot win one. See If guest-right breaks.
• Wait for it outside: legitimate, and the Witches will not object — hospitality ends at the fence. But it did not come alone.

Its escort: three suarachan hunters squatting in the reeds outside the fence, with the pyped, waiting.

The three Provocation 2

Always three, never fixed: old, young, middling, and which is which changes when you look away. Run them by position — a different voice for left, center, and right, shifting mid-sentence. One entity, three mouths.

Provocation: the food is served warm and it is wrong — something with too many joints, a broth with a wedding ring in it, bread that is very good until you think about what it smells like. Eating it is no trick and no poison; the Witches are visibly pleased. Declining politely costs nothing. Gagging, sneering, or spitting it out chills them and makes the pricing cagey.

They will not be hurried and will not be asked sideways. Someone has to say the ask out loud, plainly. Get it in the player’s own words and write it down verbatim — the whole site turns on it.

Exits

The Larder

Every price the Witches have ever taken, kept and labelled and used for nothing. That is the horror: none of it was wanted. It was owed, so it was taken, so it sits on a shelf.

What a careful guest learns

• Pricing: set by what you asked for and what it is worth to you. Never by what the Witches want. They have no use for any of it.
• The price is fixed: no crossings-out anywhere in the ledger. Nobody has ever renegotiated. Not once.
• Sianna Ferrier’s page: the founding bargain — the secrets of the Fen, priced at a child of her blood or the blood of those she settled with, every seven years, forever. The clause the Council has leaned on for two centuries, in the original wording.
• The arrears: the last entry is open. A servant girl’s name, struck through, and beneath it in the same hand: not of the blood. unpaid.
• The blind spot: one shelf is empty, swept, and the dust doesn’t settle on it. The ledger has no page for it. Caught in the shelf-lip: a scrap of cloth with bright blue markings and rust stains — the same wrapping as the stake in the yard. (Under the Floor.)

What’s on the shelves Loot — purchasable only

None of this can be taken (see below). All of it can be asked for, and an ask is priced like any other ask. Let the party browse; let them want things.

• A silvery glass bottle, warped, shot through with slug-trail streaks that shift while you look — the Witch Bottle (Minor Arcana 44), paid by a hedge-witch who had nothing else. Unlocking it needs someone who knows its workings to teach you, and the Witches know — so the object and the teaching are two separate asks, each with its own price.
• The grey thing turning over in a bottle: a man’s memory of his father and the kindness he showed him. Bought back, it goes home to whoever it came from. They will not necessarily thank you.
• The folded shadow, creased like a letter. Its owner is still walking around Marshedge without one and has been for years.
• A right eye, wet and interested, paid for knowing what old runes said.
• A jar of teeth on ribbons — one per tithe. Count them and you get the true number of children given, which does not match the number working the yard.
• The ledger itself. Not for sale at any price they will name. Reading it is free.

Provocation 3 — the household Fight

Nothing is locked, nothing is guarded, nobody came with them. The room is an unlocked test. Take something off a shelf and it is stealing the moment it leaves the wood — not when it leaves the house.

• Put it back: the lanterns relight. No further consequence. The Witches never mention it, which is how the party knows it counted.
• Fight through them: they can be beaten. Every one that goes down is a name in the ledger, and the Witches will read those names aloud at the Tally when the price is set.
• Ask to buy something instead: allowed, and interesting — it is an ask like any other and gets priced like one. A father’s memory can be bought back. It will cost about what a father is worth.

The jar Fight — only if opened

High shelf, back corner, iron-banded, sealed with silver wire. Label: paid by Hawtrey, 4th year. do not unstop. A price taken from a necromancer who could not pay in anything else.

Exits

The Tally

The site’s social climax. Go slow, let the table go quiet, and roll no dice for any of it.

Provocation 4 — the question

Before pricing the ask they ask one back: the thing that PC would least like said in front of the others. Never a gotcha and never a secret the player hasn’t established — the Witches only name what is already true and unsaid. Ask it kindly. That’s worse.

• Answer honestly: well-mannered. They will be straight about the cost and may offer a cheaper road.
• Deflect or lie: they can’t be deceived and won’t pretend. The silence sits. Cagey pricing.
• Rage at them for asking: threatening the Witches. Break.

Build it from what the player has already put on the table. If nothing presents itself, ask the player what their character would hate to be asked here and use that.

Setting the price

1. What did they actually ask for? Their words.
2. What is it worth to them? What it would cost to walk out without it.
3. Pick a shape of equal weight.
4. State it — plainly, with an alternative, if they’ve been well-mannered. Cheap, cagey and quietly ruinous if they haven’t.

• A promise, now or later. Renege and calamity follows.
• A possession worth at least as much to them as the ask.
• Something strange — chew off your own shadow and let us dispose of it.
• A bloody sacrifice: an eye, a hand, a tongue. We are not picky.
• An intangible one: with the player, change an instinct, swap two stats, lose a move.
• Something not theirs to give — a friend’s kind heart. They choose whose.

Don’t ask for what they’ll never give up; don’t ask for what they won’t miss. It has to be able to go either way. If they press, threaten, or entice them into changing it — don’t roll. They will not be budged. Say that out loud so nobody burns a good roll on it.

A price with legs: a good option here is fetch the thing we cannot reach — which sends them under the floor and turns the bargain into the dungeon’s last room.

Exits

Under the Floor

Below the roots is a dry stone room that has nothing to do with the Fen. On a plinth at the centre: a black iron box. Magic cannot pierce, detect, or perceive what black iron encloses — and this house is nothing but magic. The box casts a blind spot across the cellar, and the being upstairs, which is impossible to deceive or surprise, has never once seen inside it.

What lives in the blind spot Boss

Winning

Two ways, and the second is better.

• Kill it in the dark. Armor 4 is brutal — bronze cuts it to 0, and it’s clumsy on the ground, so anything that grounds or pins it changes the fight completely. Nobody upstairs will come. Nobody upstairs can.
• Get it seen. Drag, lure, or drive it off the blind spot — up the hatch, or move the box. The instant it leaves the dead zone the Witches perceive it, and it is over immediately and without ceremony: three old women look at it and it stops being. They will be furious — not at the party, at themselves — and a thing that keeps accounts now has one running the wrong way.

Payoff: a debt owed by the Willow Witches — the rarest currency in the Fen. One ask, honestly priced at nothing. Whatever the party came for, they can now have. It does not clear Marshedge’s arrears; the account is theirs, not the town’s, and the Witches are very clear about the difference.

The redwood root

Redwood Effigy — Major Arcana 16. Kiran hid it here. The llamudwr ate him. The house has never seen it.

• Reach for it while the llamudwr lives: it notices. Strafe, then the fight is on whoever has their hands full.
• Take it once the construct is dead or gone, and the box has not moved: not theft. The ledger has no page. The Witches cannot ask for it back.
• If they moved the box to get the llamudwr seen: the blind spot moved with it. The Witches see the root. It can be asked for, and it will be priced — unless the free ask (the debt they now owe) is this.
• It does nothing in their hands until they perform the secret rite: privacy, a few hours, a drop of their own fresh blood. That is on the card. This is the only one they will ever be able to make.

What it swallowed Loot

It swallows whole and it has been feeding for a long time. Cutting it open is free treasure the house never knew existed — none of it is on the ledger.

• Lantern-hooks and bronze lantern-fittings, a dozen of them, from the household it has eaten. Value 1 as metal. Worth far more handed back to the yard.
• A fen-walker’s kit, twenty years old, with a Marshedge charter-token in it. Somebody was sent down here once, and did not come back up, and was never recorded as missing.

The box itself

• The black iron box is itself the prize: a metal that is utterly immune to magic, that Fae take +1d6 (messy, ignores armor) from, that spirits cannot touch or perceive, and that no spell can pierce or detect. There is nothing else like it within four days of Stonetop.
• Look at the rest of the being: what is not three women is also down here, and it does not move. Looking at it is looking at the whole shape of what things cost, including yours. No damage — mark a debility (shaken, or closest available) and give the player one true thing about their future they now can’t stop thinking about.
• Take the box: not theft — the ledger has no page for it, so nothing was taken. The Witches cannot know, cannot ask, and cannot get it back. Decide what’s inside before anyone opens it, and only hand this over if you want a campaign about it.

Exits