Funabashi

Naomhtha Valley has an unusual amount of natural aether; MP costs for spells are reduced by 1.

Funabashi Village is somewhat self-sufficient, farming sheep and chickens, hunting wild game, growing root vegetables and mushrooms, and foraging from the forest. They travel to pick up goods from Yamazawa on an irregular basis.

Its inhabitants speak Common in a strange, hard-to-place accent--it has aspects of Herwin or Minamigawan dialects, but sharper, like it's an older dialect that has developed here in isolation, separate from the villages around it.

People

Oyama and Inume Katsuhira

Oyama is an older man who lives and works with his wife Inume, an herbalist. They're quite old at this point and can't easily go traipsing off into the woods this time of year, but they can send the party out with a sketch and a description of the plant they're looking for. Inume in particular is well-versed in identifying plants; she makes a point to identify the type, surface, color, and arrangement of leaves and berries--variations the party wouldn't have ever thought to look for on their own.

Locations

Naomhtha Monastery

(nuwv-huh)

This ruined monastery is centuries old; however, it was still built by what's considered modern-day peoples--in this case, early settlers from Dougalough, Herwin, and Minamigawa--as opposed to the ancients who built Thyrelume.

You work your way up the ridgeline, working out a path along a series of switchbacks. In places, you might swear there was a trail here at one time, but if there was, it's lost to the cycle of erosion and deposition, over what surely had to be centuries of time.

The top of this stretch of ridgeline is too rocky for a forest to take root; scrub dots the landscape here and there, and you find a few copses of trees now and then, but it's wide open, giving you a breathtaking view of the forested valley around Funabashi--dense and deep, the dark green of evergreen covering every direction except for a little dirt road snaking its way through.

Above you rises a beige stone building. It appears to be about two stories. Its sharply pitched roof--made of now-faded, but once deep royal purple tile--is crumbling in places, leaving much of the building open to the weather. The outside is very plainly adorned, aside from some strangely lifelike statues scattered around.

About half a mile beyond it, you see more dense evergreen forest, and a stony tower rising out of the middle of it.

Funabashi Wizards Tower

You make your way to this tall, round stone tower that rises out of the woods on this ridge. There's a road, but much like the road up to the monastery, it's grown over. If it wasn't autumn, you might lose the trail in the underbrush.

As you get closer, you see narrow windows--more slits than anything--cut into what seem to be the first and second floors. They are dark. Anything above that is out of sight, above the forest canopy.

Large metal doors, rusty and discolored from what you are assume are centuries of disuse. A fairly standard modern lock is prominently set under one of the handles.