D20x5 Elven Forest Retreats

You know I wasn’t too sold on the steam release of dwarf fortress when I first heard about it but it looks pretty good

Click the button below for your very own elven forest retreat:

Special thanks to Spwack for his table automator here: http://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D20	This forest retreat
1	has been grown from the living trees themselves, shaped from first sprout into buildings and furniture.
2	is suspended in sections from ropes. With the untangling of a single devilish knot, entire boroughs could be plunged to the ground.
3	lies just beneath a lake, supplied air and buoyancy by puckishly woven hollow reeds that dimple its surface.
4	is built in the huge, cave-like knotholes of equally huge trees.
5	occupies human ruins overgrown by wilderness.
6	is centred around a grove of hellroots, foreboding trees which descend into the underworld to tap the waters of the Lethe and Styx.
7	has had every animal and plant within it preserved within a thin encasement of amber.
8	is hewn into a flash-fossilized stump the size of a hill.
9	exists in a hallucinatory realm accessible only to those who imbibe the nectar of the forest’s otherworldly blossoms.
10	has grafted animal to plant, and plant to animal. Trees grow fruit composed of meat, and elk duel with antlers of twisting branches.
11	has homes hung like hammocks from weeping willows, swaying with their branches in the wind.
12	is a tower of translucent crystal that spirals up, around, and through a tremendous waterfall. While beautiful, the unwary can easily get caught in spots where the falling water blends into the crystal and get dragged into a fatal plummet.
13	is ensconced within an optical illusion, and so can only be entered and exited from the right angles, the proper perspectives.
14	is located in the eye of a perpetual storm.
15	is a grand ossuary of the bones of all the beasts and men its elves have ever hunted, secured together with living vines.
16	is built from yurts made from autumn leaves.
17	resembles a human village, except that everything from furniture to to layout is built from an alien perspective.
18	is woven together from elongated pine needles.
19	is a fractal mud-brick ziggurat built around the roots of a mangrove swamp.
20	is magically shrunken, so that a single lily-blossom can hold a household.

D20	The elves of this forest retreat
1	perform unseemly dances in the moonlight, when the blood they spill shines black.
2	take their name from the most impressive thing they’ve hunted and slain. Beware the one called The World Before’s Sun.
3	must perform one cruel deed for every kindness they do.
4	take panthers as concubines.
5	consider the whole, raw eggs of songbirds to be a delicacy.
6	can swap shadows with each other, and thus become aware of the actions of the elf whose shadow they possess by its silhouette.
7	are confused and fascinated by dreams because they have none of their own.
8	grow out the nails on their hands and feet to file them into talons.
9	allow wasps to nest within their ears and nostrils.
10	refuse to precisely quantify anything.
11	scorn archery, and practice a brutal style of wrestling. They believe that the closer you get to kill something, the more you honour the life you take.
12	have one silver iris, and another that’s golden. In their mythology the sun and moon exist in a series of complex and often contradictory relationships.
13	hang poachers and trespassers with nooses made from their own magically extended and woven hair.
14	can communicate with whistles that mimic the sounds of the wind.
15	will never lie, but can still get very creative about not telling the truth.
16	have trees sprout instantly from their dead bodies.
17	have a superstitious fear of hats.
18	reject any mechanism more complicated than the wheel.
19	consider anything that doesn't last forever to be worthless.
20	play ball games with the skulls of their ancestors encased in resin.

D20	Besides elves, this forest retreat is home to
1	badger-folk, who are to soil as dwarves are to stone, and can work roots and worms into subtle yet potent magics.
2	philosopher-blossoms, sapient flowers. They live but a few days, but in that scarce time they can intuit the laws of nature from first principles and authour works that shake the learned sorts of the world for another year. Their ruminations on mortality in the last minutes of their life are poignant enough to be lethal.
3	mad hermits who preach the virtue of natural living to anyone who’ll listen, and many who’d rather not.
4	burning ghosts of the forest itself, remnants of its many deaths and rebirths by fire.
5	a great sleeping serpent. The forest is slowly dying from the venom it drips while it dreams, but the elves are too afraid of the thing to face it themselves.
6	a colony of spiders that follow the commands they receive from their web, which has become so complex that it’s developed a burgeoning sentience.
7	blind ascetic moth-monks who hold light and truth to be illusions, and warmth to be a sinister temptation.
8	wisp-men, ethereal beings of living, glowing gas.
9	an oak treant whose head was split by lightning. It knows half of all that’s happened under the open sky, but its personality is as split as its head and neither side will help an ally of the other.
10	fungal pilgrims quarantined by the elves, who wish only to ascend to the top of the forest so that they might infest new hosts closer to their destination.
11	a clan of fauns who worship their horned god through debauchery.
12	a circle of druids attempting to radicalize the elves against civilization.
13	a cult that wishes to cultivate a new and improved universe with a seed of the world-tree.
14	a hunting lodge where less morally-inclined nobles come to mingle and cavort.
15	a bestial demon who admires the redness of nature’s teeth and claws, and wishes to mimic such horrors as parasitic oviposition in their hellish domain.
16	a coven of cannibalistic dryads seeking to usurp the woods from their less peckish sisters.
17	an exiled emperor who bribed the elves to enchant them so that they would believe they still ruled.
18	a community of humans who’ve fled the confines and extortions of civilization for the disorder of the forest.
19	a crew of ancient lumber-processing golems cutting a swathe through the forest, slowed by the depredations of time and the deceptions of the elves.
20	a lost city and its undead inhabitants, cursed to relive (redie?) the day of its destruction for all time.

D20	This forest retreat has annoyed its neighbours
1	by eating the bodies of their dead (given willingly, the elves claim, by being defeated in battle).
2	by kidnapping babies to one day deepen their shallow gene pool.
3	by blighting their truffle-sniffing pigs.
4	by spreading a plague of rust across their iron implements.
5	by letting its tamed wolf packs “graze” on their herds.
6	by leading their sleeping children off into the night with fey music.
7	by impersonating their nobility at masquerades to cultivate scandals.
8	by cursing interlopers with animal heads.
9	by correcting their pronunciation of their own languages, based on far older antecedents.
10	by dealing nasty forest drugs.
11	by introducing individualistic values to the peasantry.
12	by elongating the tax collectors that came to them into noodley abominations.
13	by providing fickle support in wars to weaken them all.
14	by stitching a bunch of people together into a living quilt.
15	by throwing raucous bacchanals that keep everyone up at night.
16	by playing human rivals off each other for their own benefit.
17	by contaminating their wells with deliriants.
18	by undermining the historical narratives that legitimize their states.
19	by releasing a pest that eats their crops.
20	by robbing merchants then leaving their luxury goods to rot.

D20	Despite the annoyance, you might come to this forest retreat
1	to barter for one of their cigar-golems, paper-wrapped effigies animated by the esoteric herbs smouldering within them.
2	to rob the elves’ mummies, worth as much for the amber they’re preserved in as the grave goods they’re entombed with.
3	to purchase sweet resins, spices, and incense.
4	to learn philosophy, history, and the natural sciences with those elves who studied at the feet of long-dead masters.
5	to get magic seeds that can grow into whole plants in moments.
6	to acquire a changeling to replace someone you can’t subvert by other means.
7	to be instructed in elven sword-arts that mimic the flickering of flames and the swipes of bears.
8	for the impossibly fine brushes they make from the fur of newborn squirrels, prized by painters beyond all others.
9	to purchase the birds that they’ve taught to spy and speak.
10	to be taught their spear-arts, which let you harry your opponents as an all-encompassing wreath of thorns.
11	because they know the art of twisting curses into blessings and blessings into curses.
12	because there’s been a heavy bounty put out on elf ears.
13	because they're the only ones who remember the very specific method to kill an otherwise-immortal creature.
14	because they're the only ones who might have the first-hand knowledge to settle a doctrinal dispute that threatens to split a church in half.
15	to win allies able to fight against an enemy that is equally infuriatingly fey.
16	to acquire maps of this land as it was when it was still young.
17	to identify a curse so subtle that shorter-lived beings might not even perceive it.
18	because only they know how to tame cool animals you might want for mounts, like giant lemurs or whatever.
19	because it's hidden from the eyes of the gods, even (especially) the evil ones that might want to smite you.
20	because they remember the names of demons unrecorded in any grimoire.