The Business of Emotion: Two Lips' Farm
The sun burns brightly above as you travel up the River Trom, trudging up an uneven trail northwards out of town. As you round a bend in the river, you are momentarily dazzled by dozens of rainbow colored blocks of land, and almost choke on a sickly-sweet smell in the air.
A wide field of flowers surrounds a quaint farmstead in the distance. Outside, a crew of small figures loads a cart with colorful bundles of flowers.
Inside the farmhouse, Two-lips directs a crew of gnome workers around the farm. He blanches at the sight of the party, stammering, “You… you, you…? What are you doing here? Who are you?”
Two-lips does his best to hide the fact that he’s behind the recent outbreak of lovestruck villagers (shooing the party, trying to slip away to oversee the farm, insisting that he’s too busy), but his defenses are pretty thin. After a bit of pressing with a DC 12 Charisma (Intimidation or Persuasion) check, or any explicit threat of violence, he caves and begins to confess.
While Two-lips is superficially apologetic about the incident and explains how he’s attempting to “play it straight” or “make an honest living for once,” he also seems to delight in how successful the plan has been in saving his farm.
If pressed, he will insist that the plan with the love potion was all Hermia’s idea, and that all he did was purchase the ingredients she requested. He will also direct the party towards the cave where he and Hermia set up the potion to drip into the Trom, but will not accompany them.
Two-lips, an experienced merchant, will react negatively to any attempts of extortion by the party, but he is “always willing to make a deal” and will pay handsomely to avoid punishment: 75 gp and “a year’s supply of white roses.”
Wild creatures now prowl the lands between Lanidor and the cave; including a pack of five dire wolves . Should the party encounter these wolves, they are attacked along the riverbank, and the wolves attempt to knock them into the river using the Shove action, exposing them to the love potion (Odds and Ends).