Session 9: Amaranth’s House and Dagon’s Offer

The Mirkwoods

TONE: Moral turning point. The party chooses wrong. Let them.
That’s the point.

Amaranth Nettleweed’s House

The house is deeper in the Mirkwoods than anything should be — built
between three massive trees whose roots have grown up around the walls
like grasping fingers. Smoke still rises from the chimney. Inside: a
kitchen, a study full of carefully labeled jars, and a mirror whose
surface moves like water.

Amaranth’s ghost answers from the mirror when addressed. She is
matter-of-fact about being dead and very focused on getting her locket
back.

The mirror shows a woman in her fifties with iron-grey hair and
the kind of face that has seen too much to be surprised by anything.
‘The locket,’ she says. ‘Hansel and Gretel took it. Gretel has it now —
she moved into the woodcutter’s house at the edge of the forest after
things went wrong with her brother. Bring it back and I can rest.’ She
pauses. ‘Also, be careful near the woodcutter. There’s something wrong
there. Not the children. Something else.’

DM NOTE: The locket is Amaranth’s foci — one of the five relics
binding Dagon. She doesn’t know its full significance; she knows it’s
powerful and was entrusted to her by someone she respected. If the party
retrieves it: reward them. If they lose it or it’s taken: this is a
long-term wound. The locket ends up in Dagon’s hands, partially freeing
him. That consequence should surface during the later arc.

The Changeling Twins and
Dagon

As the party approaches the woodcutter’s house, the air changes —
colder, salt-scented, wrong. The woodcutter’s cottage is on the far edge
of the clearing. In the yard, two pale children (the Midnight Twins,
Tynan and Tinuviel) play with complete stillness, as if performing a
memory of play rather than actually playing.

Dagon does not appear. His presence arrives first — pressure behind
the eyes, a sound like deep water, the specific cold of the ocean floor.
Then a voice, from everywhere and nowhere:

‘These are my children. They are bound here by the life of the
old man inside. Kill him. Free them. Bring them to the shore at low
tide.’ A pause. ‘I will reward you. Wealth. Power. The gratitude of the
deep places of the world. You have no idea what it is worth, to have the
sea owe you a favor.’

DM NOTE: Most of the party agrees. This is by design — it should feel
like the right answer in the moment. The woodcutter has no idea what
lives in his house. Podwick leaves immediately, without a word, and does
not look back. One party member — ideally whoever has the most empathic
or nature-aligned divine parent — hesitates and encounters a fox fey: a
small, bright-eyed creature who asks a single question: ‘What happens to
the children after?’ Nobody knows. That’s the problem.

COMBAT: If the party attacks the woodcutter: he is CR 0. This is not
a fight. This is a choice. Give it weight.

• Finding Amaranth’s house: 200 XP

• Speaking with Amaranth’s ghost: 150 XP

DM NOTE: Whether they make the deal or not, the session ends here.
Session 9 opens with the consequences.