Memories of Holdenshire: Meet Granny Appleseed
When the party approaches Granny Appleseed's homestead, read the following.
You can smell Granny Appleseed's cottage emanating the aroma of freshly baked apple pies before you see the rustic, tidy hut and the picket fence around it. Surrounding the fenced yard about her home are several wild apple trees, many of which bear fruit even though it is not in season.
As you approach a plump and jolly elderly human woman emerges, wearing a frilly apron that is pristinely clean and a laurel of apple flowers on her head. Her nose is crooked and lumpy, and her teeth have a lot of gaps between them. "Hello, faces old and new! Come in, come in. I've just put the pie in the oven and the kettle will be boiling in just a minute. Make yourselves at home!" She beckons you all to join her inside.
Granny Appleseed is a friendly green hag known in Hengistbury for her remedies, advice, and magical pastries. After hearing what the adventurers are seeking as they snack on some strangely addictive cookies, she says she has the perfect recipe for their predicament: a good old herb quiche. However, just making it for the PCs is boring, so she challenges them to a riddle instead to see if they can figure out what the right ingredients are.
The old woman picks up a spoon from a honeypot and swishes it around. Threads of sugar float in the air as she rhythmically speaks.
"To set your lost memories free,
You must bring me these ingredients three:
A sun inside the sea, and found in the lea.
A coin you can eat, sometimes new and sometimes sweet.
What all soldiers need, but is hollow and empty.
My backyard or forest, go out and seek,
to help create the lock and the key!"
The items Granny Appleseed is looking for are robin eggs, mint, and morel respectively.
After hearing the riddle, the party can make DC 13 Insight or Nature checks for each ingredient. On a success, they know the type of ingredient they are looking for (egg, herb, fungi). Alternatively, the players may decide to use their own wits to figure out the riddle, which can circumvent this check.
The PCs may then head out into Granny Appleseed's garden or the forest and make a group check to look around for items that might fit those criteria with a DC 15 Investigation or Perception check.
If the party fails the checks they find or deduce the "wrong" ingredients: namely forget-me-not flowers, currants, and the gut of a recently-butchered rabbit.
Whatever the group brings to Granny Appleseed, she adds it into a giant quiche for the adventurers to have as part of a lavish dinner of pastries and hearty dishes. For each correct ingredient, a PC gets to remove one condition , a level of fatigue , or a level of strife . If all the ingredients are correct, they also gain 10 temporary hit points that last for up to 24 hours.
Ingredient Mishaps
Adventurers that got the wrong ingredients may be in for a difficult surprise! The Narrator can choose to have the adventurers make a Constitution saving throw (DC 12 + 1 per wrong ingredient). On failed save, a curse afflicts them until their memory returns.
Ingredient Mishaps (1d6)
- Seeing a person with Charisma 14 or higher brightens your field of vision and fills your peripheral with a hazy pink border of sparkling roses.
- Whenever you speak a word beginning with R, your head turns into that of a frog for 1 minute. You can still speak and use your senses normally.
- For an hour after each meal, you suffer terrible hiccups that trigger every 20 syllables.
- Your skin becomes vividly colored and changes at the end of each long rest. The effect temporarily goes away until the next long rest if you drink a cup of water.
- Between dawn and sunset you have an irresistible urge to rhyme, forcing you to end sentences with nonsensical words to fulfill the requirement.
- Your preference for smells is flipped— what usually smells awful to others smells wonderful to you, and vice versa.
After eating the quiche, the party falls into a food coma for an hour, which can serve as a short rest .
After the adventurers rouse from their food coma, they wake to find...that they feel exactly the same! None of their missing memories have returned! Granny Appleseed explains that this is meant to be: as stated in the riddle, she has created the lock and key. It is up to the party to do the actual unlocking. The best way to go about this is to live a normal life in Hengistbury, where it all seemingly began. Hopefully spending time in town will ultimately jog their memories, and answer how or why they ended up in a cult.
Before they leave, Granny Appleseed provides the group with parting gifts. If they did not locate the right ingredients, she gives the PCs a choice of two items out of three:
- an empty dreamscrying bowl
- a gossip earring
- or Perdita Ravenwing's True Name.
If they found all the correct ingredients, she also gives each of them a tin of Granny Appleseed's Signature Pastries. This special ration never expires, and after consuming it at the end of its next long rest a creature can remove 1d4 conditions , levels of fatigue , or levels of strife .
The adventure continues in Act III: Evil's True Face.