“ You pass through a woodland with a floor that seems remarkably clean of debris. Suddenly your attention is drawn to a twisted bit of wood by the trail side, a short broken twig with several stubs of branches along its length and most of the bark missing. When you reach it, the twig blurs and turns into a small brown lizard, caught in the middle of its body-twisting run. The little reptile darts away down the trail with impossible speed, no doubt magically enhanced, and is lost to sight in a moment. Now someone knows you are coming...”
“ Along the sluggish Vanne River, the banks are lined with thick stands of tall bulrushes. These areas of wetland are considered ill-omened by the locals, for they hide the skeletal remains of thousands of grazing animals, washed downriver in a terrible flood decades before.
Adding to the uncanny reputation of the place is the occasional undead cow or goat that lurks there. The product of a necromancer's experiments some years before, these relatively harmless undead wander the area at night, startling livestock as they attempt to graze with them.”
“ As population increases, animal souls are promoted to human before they are spiritually advanced enough in terms of impulse control, etc.: this shouldn't have happened, but karmic progression is automatic, after all--it's a force of nature. But the 'animalization' of humankind bodes ill for civilization.
No doubt the same goes for elves, dwarves, and so on.”
