Glåugust '26 entry 4: The Cordtree
The Cordtree
Its canopy balloons overhead, green even in dry season. Its trunk, hulking, twists like hempen rope cut too short at both ends. It sprawls from atop a mound of its own making; roots form a little island in the pool of clear water within the crater glade.
This is a location to find at any point in a campaign, but is tuned for lower levels.
sprite from Caves of Qud
List of NPCs
- Essel, apprentice Ur-Mold emissary and tender of the Cordtree. She can be found working or delegating in the canopy loggia, or weaving on the stone porch in the evenings. Masked worry. Disappears for hours at a time below the loggia.
- Luboron, hired help from a nearby village. Cleans and gardens, and learns what they can of mote-wises from Essel (not much). They can be found tending the crater glade in the mornings, or otherwise cleaning the abode.
- Stone-eyes, half-dead seedbed for petrifying motes, among others. Ex-adventurer, now retired to weaving wicker in his little shaded nook.
- Five patient disciples, who arrived here together six months ago from far away to learn the art of mote cultivation. Curious, nosy, and with some incompatibly foreign manners. They can be found practicing in the canopy loggia, lounging in the crater glade at noon, or sometimes shopping at the nearby village in groups of one or two.
The crater glade
Loam gently rises, then falls to form a ringed basin of grass that holds a pleasant glade of trees. Its center is dominated by the Cordtree, around which the crater is waist-deep with pure water from an unknown spring. Despite its stagnation, the water bears almost no pondlife: a few minnows, clumps of rushes, a content toad, nothing more. The cordtree's canopy extends almost to above the ring of the crater, so the middle-est hours are bathed in its filtered green sunlight. Its shade is never all that dark.
Smallish trees are spaced pleasantly and crowded only by patchy ferns. Someone has taken the time to tend the plants here to keep the glade sun-dappled and gardenesque. Woodland animals visit often, but none stay. No dens or nests here.
The stone porch
Smoothed stones stand in the water and arc a quarter-circle around the rooty island. The shortest extend to the grassy banks as a stepping-stone bridge, while the tallest complete the rise to meet a wide, squared-off rock protruding from the roots. This is the porch, rising ten feet above the water and providing a comfortable 15x30ft surface worn smooth by weather. In the evenings, Essel will be here weaving baskets by twilight, and will welcome visitors up to dine.
Narrow but steady steps have been carved into the cordtree's spiral trunk, winding up from the porch to continue the ascent that the stepping stones started. This stair leads to the first landing.
The first landing
A small wooden platform built out from a recess in the tree where two 'ropes' of its twisted trunk briefly separate. Faces into a canvas door-flap (into the canopy loggia), flanked on the right by a shallow recess containing a stone bowl of water, and on the left by the shaded nook.
The shaded nook
A cloven gap in the thick trunk wide enough to lay down in. Here sits Stone-eyes, a middle-aged man weaving wicker and reed baskets and furniture. The top half of his head is covered with a flaky mica-like growth of dead motes (a colony still festers beneath), and patches along his body are succumbing to a different breed of mote entirely: rusty reds arresting his muscles and ligaments. He is hard of hearing and doesn't initiate, but will answer questions about the place if bothered. He says visitors are welcome, just don't be nosy. Stone-eyes has been here for ten years, having retired from an adventuring life and seeking a cure from his afflictions. Essel's (and the emissary before her) care slow the motes' progress so he can live a simple life without too much pain. He weaves for them in return.
Stone-eyes is highly attentive and will report everything he sees to Essel in private, each night at the latest.
The canopy loggia
Shaped wood steps lead up from the first landing and into a wide platform clutched within the trunk-fingers of the cordtree. It's a rough lopsided circle 25ft across, with at least a waist-high wall of natural trunk with its bark smoothed away. Above, boughs twist and knit into a massive support network holding a volume of green so great it becomes a sky. A fresh, leafy breeze washes through this place. The loggia contains a large open hearth with kettles, wicker chairs at a rough-built table, and many wooden planters growing all manner of distant species in soil and sand.
This is where Essel spends much of her time, breeding mote colonies in strange materials and environments and conversing with or teaching the patient disciples. Unless it's urgent, she won't stop to talk to visitors, but she might speak while doing simpler tasks. Randomly throughout the day, she will excuse herself to the trunk chambers where she disappears for a few hours at least. Come dinnertime, she will dine with everyone present at the table, speaking openly about her work as emissary and of mote-breeding, but nothing about the Ur-Molds.
Besides the entrance stair at one end, the loggia connects to two higher places via a pair of nailed-in stairs (short stair to Essel's chamber; long stair to the censer), as well as a narrow spiral stair down to the trunk chambers.
The censer
A tiny bough-cradled platform provides lookout to beyond the glade and access to a massive metal-grate censer hanging above. This brass bauble breathes a thermophilic mote-mist into the environ, warding many breeds of small-life from the glade.
Essel's chamber
A small shelter is fashioned from planks and daubed wicker brushing the canopy. Here, a straw mat and simple furnishings make a home swaddled in tapestries. Essel sleeps here and stores her valuables in a small locked chest (30sp, bismuth screw, iconographic traveling poncho).
The trunk chambers
A low-ceilinged hallway extends from the entrance steps into a snailshell curve in inverted symmetry of the cordtree's twisted trunk. The wood here has been hollowed and civilized by adze and plane, but the cordtree flourishes somehow. The hall's steps slope down with doorways leading to small rooms on either side: a lopsided storeroom/pantry, two narrow bedrooms (for the patient disciples), a locked door to the former emissary's room, and a tiny latrine. The hall ends in a locked door, never seen opened.
Beneath the Cordtree...
Essel's predecessor passed some eight years ago and left her apprentice with the burden of a great project, drafted by an Ur-Mold to be carried out by mortal hands far from the salt desert. Here, where abnormal quantities of vita pool, a great tree has grown atop an ancient temple dedicated to old-life gods. It's the perfect place to incubate a godling.
This location will be expanded on at a later date. Until it becomes a proper dungeon (a tree dungeon, perhaps), it'll serve as the local region's go-to spot for mote research the way a classic wizard's tower is for arcane matters.
This is my fourth entry for Glåugust 2026, this time with the prompt Tree Dungeon. I didn't get to the actual dungeon stuff in this post, so you'll have to forgive me. In the meantime, this is a location I plan on making fairly recurring in my own game. I was inspired by the evocative and incident-rich OSR module He Who Claimed the Sun to make a recurring location that becomes familiar to the players, then (when it's level-appropriate), changes catastrophically into a proper dungeon.