Purple Amber

Purple Amber comes to Wermspittle from the camps set up in the Purple Forest by various Refugees, foreigners, outcasts and others with nowhere else to go. These camps are poorly regulated, rarely monitored and barely managed. Usually someone sets up a lean-to or a tent, starts a fire and then either welcomes others to bed-down nearby or drives them off. It's very informal. Until someone starts a fight. Or a hungry beast prowls a bit too close...

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Gathering It Up
Amber-Gatherers tend to travel light, carrying everything they own on their backs. A few have acquired pack-animals but most make-do with what they can manage on their own. They rarely form groups larger than 5-6 individuals and they either learn to make their way through the woods quietly and carefully, or else they don't tend to last very long. They are also more likely to be carrying shovels, scrapers and brush-cutters than swords or axes. The Lumberjacks tend to take an exception to someone else wielding an axe near them and doing so often leads to taunts, jibes and challenges. Sometimes it's in good spirits or for fun, or at least it can start out that way, but these sorts of things tend to spin out of control very quickly. There may be some truth to the Midwives' mutterings about long-term exposure to this place having some sort of effect on people that goes deeper than just the Restless Slumbers.

Sophisticated Competition
Foragers sometimes duck out on their crews to go roaming through the Purple Forest, hoping to score a few decent-sized chunks of Purple Amber. More than a few disgruntled drop-outs and failed apprentices who've been relegated to the Forager-crews by their former mentors and masters have succeeded in either detecting Weak Points or erecting temporary portals to the Purple Forest. For some, it is a better life than working in the Corruption Trade...

Getting It Out...
Everybody knows that it is best to pack Purple Amber in wool or soft cloth, but in a pinch burlap or canvas will do. The stuff that gets really scratched-up can be sold for incense or oil-making. Most Foragers try to pack everything with a layer of smaller chunks and fragments, both to lock the larger chunks into place, and to maximize the pay-off for each load.

Smell That Entrepreneurial Spirit
Lumberjacks and brush-cutters sleep behind stout pallisades, a few have built motte-and-bailey style fortified depots to protect their point of access back into Wermspittle. The Lumber Forts are well-built and better patrolled. The Barons who run things are in rigorous competition with their rivals and sometimes raids take place unfortunate work-place accidents happen. The Lumber Companies pay well, but they expect a good return on their money. They don't let just anyone in through their well-guarded gates. Guarding these sites, keeping things reasonably safe and maintaining things has been a substantial investment and the accountants insist that fees, tolls and charges are attached to everything. They take an especially dim view of free-loaders or vagrants. Of course, there's always the opportunity to engage in a bit of discrete barter, especially when it can be done without having to report the transaction to their superiors and paying the requisite surcharges.

The Lumber Forts are notorious for the high cost of their hospitality. A handful of Purple Amber can make a lot of newfound friends in the Lumber Camps, but only for a short while. It is best not to over-stay one's welcome. It is also a good idea not to lose any sleep over what the same amount of Purple Amber might have fetched from a Buyer in King Clovine's Court. Better a safe place to sleep for a few hours than getting eaten by some hodag or grue.

Unlike the more settled and well-defended folk in the Lumber-Forts, amber-gatherers tend to stay more mobile, following the game trails and lake shores, going wherever they can find deposits of Purple Amber. They also tend to avoid the few roads hacked through the Deep Woods. The lumber companies charge a steep toll to use their roads and the mercenaries hired to patrol them are little better than bandits with a health plan. If you're desperate enough to go looking for Purple Amber, then using the roads is a good way to lose all your amber and possibly your life. A pound of Purple Amber is worth more than a pound of flesh, even in Winter. The buyers back in Wermspittle rarely ask how it was obtained; all they care about is the purity and quality of the stuff. After all, Like they say along the Low Streets; business is business and blood can be washed off.

You Get Used To It...
The Purple Forest and especially the Deep Woods are dangerous, but not much more than the back-alleys and Low Streets of Wermspittle. Anyone who's picked their way through the Burned Over Districts or been forced to take shelter inside one of the Abandoned Properties during a Spring Rain might actually prefer the woods over conditions back home. Of course there are no perytons or man-eating blue-striped bats in Wermspittle. Though there are grues.

At least seven Junctures have been discovered, all but two by Amber-Gatherers. Junctures are unstable cross-over points where the Purple Forest bleeds through into somewhere else. The two Junctures controlled by the Lumber Companies open onto vast tracts of wilderness that may or may not be located on other worlds. Neither Company has been particularly forthcoming in regards to the results of any exploration efforts they may have conducted. Trade Secrets and all that.

Purple Forest (Paraversal Planes)

The Purple Forest is mentioned in numerous sources available to the majority of scholars, students or sorcerers. Indeed it is one of the most well-documented and often visited Planar Realms known to nearly all reputable modern practitioners of those transgressive arts that delve into the mysteries of the Paraversal Planes and all such strange spaces.

Getting There
One could attempt to warp a free-floating Weak Point into temporary alignment with other spaces, including the Purple Forest, but the abuse of Violet Polyhedrae in such a manner is frowned upon by the authorities as it can lead to spill-overs, leaks and energetic bleeds that can often prove quite problematic. Attempting such a stunt is an offense leading to almost certain expulsion from the Academy. So, of course, those inclined to dabble in such proscribed things tend to go out into one of the Abandoned Properties and do it in secret. Black Trapezoids are also rumored to be useful in this context, but useful details are scant.

There is also Jakub's Door, a static portal anchored within a lop-sided door-frame on the third floor of a half-collapsed tenement deep within the Burned Over District. The location of Jakub's Door is only shared via word of mouth among those who have worked their way up the ranks as a Forager. It is a secret only revealed to those who have proven themselves to one who already knows the secret.

The most common way to get to the Purple Forest is to make use of the Triple Circle spell. It is not at all uncommon for mentors, patrons or employers to cast this spell and send parties of expendable cheap gullible  dedicated explorers through to collect purple amber, various exotic herbs, peculiar pollen, and other such things that have numerous uses and applications, especially to Fantomists, Oneirists, Somnambulists and some of the more obscure Teratosophists.

What's It Like?
Purple. Very, very purple. As far as anyone has ever explored or claimed to have gone, this whole realm is one vast, multi-continental lushly overgrown old-growth forest that seemingly extends onward and outward forever. There are few roads, and what trails there are tend to get overgrown by thorns and other brush fairly quick. The skies are perpetually overcast, gloomy and drizzle cold rain far too often. There are parts of the Purple Forest that do experience a type of winter, but overall the place seems to remain fairly even and stable when it comes to temperature.

A Dozen Fairly Common Encounters

1. (2d4) Deer or (1) really big porcupine with an attitude (30% chance of distemper or rabies).
2. (1d4) Koponu (Non-Union, and with a 40% chance of being drunk on fermented sap).
3. (1d4) Horned Bear (anything over the first one is a cub), they have 1d6 horns & the horns are worth a fair bit to a carver or horn-worker.
4. (1d2) Two-headed Boar or (1d4) Harpies scouting-out a potential new nest-site for their Tormenter Mistress.
5. (3d6) Woodsfolk or (1d4) dwarf-Molg.
6. (1d4) Hunters (Either Bows or spears; not many carry gonnes over here--the noise tends to rile-up and attract Big Nasty Things, like Huge Unseen Beasts or worse.)
7. (1d2) Gloomswallow
8. (1d4) Arborial Centipedes; these things have a distressing tendency to drop down from overhanging limbs and then curl tightly around their victim's heads/necks like living nooses. Maybe there is something to the old wives' tales about some renegade Midwives who ran off to the Purple Forest to avoid getting tossed into the asylum camps back during the Rebellion...
9. (1d4) Amber-Gatherers.
10. (2d6) Brigands who've managed to get themselves lost or (1) Midwife gathering herbs.
11. (1d20) Blue Zoogs or (1d4) Grikflits.
12. (1d4) Crudiv lurking in the thickets, scanning for opportunities.

There are rumors of peryton, man-sized bats, giant owls, and tribes of barbaric blue jay theriocephs out past the perimeter of the established enclaves.

Why Go There?
Foragers, foreigners and mercenaries are hired to go scrounge-up various things from the Purple Forest, as noted above, but the main attraction of this place is as a source of game during the harsh winters in Wermspittle; this is one of the ways that the Academy manages to feed its people during the worst of times. There are also several camps of lumberjacks and woodsfolk who have set themselves up to harvest, process and deliver a wide selection of choice woods especially useful in the creation of cabinets, ritual furniture, and other such applications, wood that is unique to this place. The huge bees that buzz across the scattered glades and hidden meadows are famous for the honey they produce, and that honey is greedily gathered for use in making mead that can go for three times the going rate of Dim Ichor or any of the mid-range brands of Black Liquors, especially in the Winter, when this mead is said to unlock even the deepest dreams. Then there is the trade in purple amber, which is used in the crafting of potent magical incenses, inks, oils and unguents and is an essential component in the concoction of the salves and fumigants used in the prosecution of the Four Great Seasonal Mysteries. The sap of certain trees in the Purple Forest is also used in the preparation of the Autumnal Carnifex in particular.

What Are People Saying About This Place?

1. Gloomswallows seem to drift across to the Purple Forest at-will, leading some oneirically-inclined scholars to assert that this might well be the birth-place of these things.
2. A shipment of (2d6) 'Sleeping Cabinets' were recently lost when the cart transporting them disappeared during a recent drizzle.
3. Solemn Nils of Paldramont has apparently found a way to bring over several dozen of his brigands and they have begun raiding some of the farther-out lumber camps and woodsfolk enclaves. Nils is notorious for his brutal methods and the enclaves closer to the more common points of entry are starting to hire-on ruffians, louts and mercenaries in order to protect them from further raids.
4. The Dalgaztri Camp hired-on some Urglun mercenaries only to have the things take over the place and enslave their employers. They seem to be building a fortress. The only reason anyone knows about this turn of events is that a small group of hunters escaped and are trying to raise a group of volunteers to go back and liberate their people.
5. A cache of high-grade purple amber is said to be stashed within the upper stories of the mostly burned-out Black Tambourine Inn.
6. A small group of Refugees is trying to hire someone to cast the Triple Circle spell for them. They have a goodly amount of coinage to offer, but something just doesn't sound right about the arrangement.
7. Midwives tell of any number of beautiful pools out past the queen-hives. These pools have special properties and effects. Sometimes the water retains this quality, other time not. One might be able to restore a fractured mind, or mend a tattered soul at the right pool, were one to know which one to seek out...
8. A small clique of brewers have decided to break free of the Corruption Trade, stop producing Black Liquors, and focus on making several varieties of mead and blended metheglins from the honey gathered from the Purple Forest. They'll need some protection, and a few good Foragers who'll work for them as they try to get set-up and running...

Why Doesn't Everyone Just Go There?

• Anyone with a CON lower than 15 must make a Save every 4 hours or else come down with the Restless Slumbers. This is an illness that makes it increasingly difficult for those affected to recover hit points or spells while in the Purple Forest. Those who contract this condition also receive a permanent -2 on all Saves versus Oneiric and Somnambulistic spell effects. Leaving the Purple Forest will allow those affected to shrug off the effect over 1d4 months (Make a Save at -4 first month, -3 the next, -2 next, -1 after that).
• Anyone who dies (or whose body is dumped) out in the Deep Woods has a tendency to get colonized by weird fungi. Some of these shambling things come back, others just decompose into the soil, and some allow the fungi to develop strange new hybrid forms.
• Dreamers who spend overlong in the Purple Forest tend to attract Gloomswallows, especially when they are asleep or in trance.