Project Dragonwatch: The Greenshae's Lair

The Greenshae: Origins

About the time Ilsundal’s migration began, a series of quakes ripped through the Hyborean Reaches, damaging the the outflow piping beneath Dragonwatch Keep. Wastewater from the facility’s dragonstone reactor crystal cooling pools began to seep into some of the tributaries feeding the fledgling Ietzirah woodlands.

Trees along the major streams began to sicken after the first decade. Within a century, the northern rim of the woods had succumbed to the befouled waters. The waters also claimed the home tree of the dryad Ashe.

Rather than kill the tree, though, the demon-tainted waters infected it, in turn poisoning the dryad. Over the course of the next century, she became more and more twisted, giving in to the whispered powers gathering in her tree. Those fey who did not flee were driven out by the dryad. What wildlife was left, the dryad either ate, or sacrificed in an attempt to silence the insistent jabberings and whisperings of the demonic infection. Her last desperate act, her last as a dryad, was to sacrifice her own home tree. Far from freeing her from the demonic clutches, it sealed her doom, completing her transformation into a hag.

The Heart of Corruption

The Greenshae lairs in the middle of the swamp, in a squat stone tower that was once an oak, long ago corrupted and petrified by the demonic taint suffusing the waters of the bog. The hag has cultivated several vine blights to lurk near the tower entrance, as well as the bottom of the main stairwell, and the top of the stairs leading down to her current lab and living quarters in the basement levels. 

The walls of the open main floor are lined with crude shelving, upon which she displays all manner of gruesome trophies: faun hooves, actaeon antlers, bottled sprites and pixies, a tarnished silver platter heaped with blackened, desiccated nixie tongues. More recent additions to her collection include fingers and ears from the elven clans intruding upon “her” domain.

The tower’s upper floors have been abandoned as the stone decayed, leaving once-fine furniture and laboratory equipment to molder and rust. Bats and stirges vie for roosts.

The tower's lower levels consist of  stone-lined hollows beneath the petrified tree's roots. Slimes, oozes and jellies puddle in the deeper shadows, and at least one shambling mound nests amidst the remains of past and current victims of the hag's obsessions. The Greenshae's workshop and audience chamber are guarded by two flesh golems stitched together from parts of fauns, goblins, and lizard men.