“ The PCs come across a town with a strange curse: Every morning, those who have grown up here wake up with the memories of someone else. They do not find this strange and have no idea it is happening. They calmly wake up and start these new lives as though they have always been that way.
The cause: A wizard who lived there was spurned by a maiden he was infatuated with. His attempt to manipulate her memories into believing they were already together and that she loved him went horribly awry.”
“ A good camping-place with something extra: a gallows with a hangman, reduced mostly to bones and a few rags. It marrily hovers in the wind. Any manipulation will make it fall apart. An excellent camping place, except for the midnight hours, when ghosts of those executed haunt here. Some wail for their crimes, some re-live their execution over and over, some want to have a talk, and still some others want to scare the Living for fun.”
“ These rare, fist-sized spiders do not make webs, but rather excrete secretions which harden upon contact with air. These 'droppings' resemble barley-sized spider eggs, or even lustrous pearls, once the slime coating them, dries up. In fact, dried Pearl Spider 'drops' are indistinguishable from the marine varieties produced by mollusks, and hence of identical value on the open market!
Several centuries ago, they were studied by naturalists, and several observations were made. Firstly, was that these spiders 'lay' these pearls for no apparent or discernible 'natural' reason, and secondly, the naturalists had discovered that the more these spiders ate or were fed--and they were true omnivores--the larger the spider pearls came out.
A cottage industry began. Enterprising merchants hunted and collected these creatures across the lands, erecting spider-farms for the manufacture of Spider Pearls. It wasn't long before someone got the idea to force-feed the spiders, ala foie gras geese, and soon, the fattened spiders began pooping out pearls of great size! (relatively speaking). The regular pearl market came to disarray, and prices and value fluctuated wildly.
[b]Plothook[/b] The Mermen Mercantile Alliance hires the party to eradicate all terrestrial Pearl Spider Farms!”
