Old Macridi E.4
The Salty Bark Tannery
Heavy Leather, River Gear, and What the Hides Remember
You smell the Salty Bark before you see it.
Sharp tannin, woodsmoke, wet leather, lime, and something considerably less pleasant hang over a sprawling timber workshop at the western edge of town. Hides stretch across wooden frames beneath broad awnings while workers in stained aprons stir dark vats with poles longer than spears. Finished boots, harnesses, and heavy leather coats hang from overhead beams.
A broad-shouldered dwarf woman holds a strip of hide toward the light, frowns at it, then tears it neatly in half with both hands.
Black, oily threads run through the flesh beneath the fur.
"Third one this week."
The Salty Bark Tannery supplies much of Old Macridi's working leather: logging gloves, harnesses, protective aprons, leather armor, river boots, and waxed equipment intended to survive the constant rain and mud of the Palakar frontier.
The tannery is operated by Brena Holt (N female dwarf leatherworker), a blunt, immensely experienced craftswoman who can often identify an animal's age, health, habitat, and manner of death from a half-cured hide. Brena has little interest in magical theories. She knows only that healthy animals have recently begun arriving with things beneath their skin that should not be there.
Brena does not understand the larger blight, but she has noticed its physical progression before most of Macridi.
Several animals taken near Profit's Flow show blackened tissue around the paws, mouths, and bellies. Whatever affected them appears to have entered through water, soil, or food, rather than spreading from animal to animal.
That makes Brena's tannery an unexpectedly useful source of evidence.
Frontier Leatherwork
- Waterproof River Boots — 8 sp
- Waxed Leather Cloak — 1 gp
- Heavy Logging Gloves — 5 sp
- Leather Armor & Repairs — Standard price
- Waterproof Pack Treatment — 3 sp
- Custom Harness or Tool Belt — 1–3 gp
Tannery Challenges
Challenge 1: What Ruined the Hides?
Brena lays three rejected hides across a worktable: a river deer, a boar, and a large forest cat. All were killed in different places and brought in by different hunters, but each contains the same branching streaks of blackened tissue.
A character examining the hides chooses what they are trying to learn. Other characters can Aid or investigate a genuinely different aspect of the evidence.
Examine the Animals
The character studies the animals' wounds, organs, fur, and pattern of contamination.
Examine the Leather
Rather than diagnosing the animals, the character studies how the damaged tissue reacts to salt, tannin, scraping, and curing.
Challenge 2: Boots for Reiver's Right
When Brena learns where the party is headed, she strongly recommends proper river boots and waxed gear. Unfortunately, nearly her entire finished stock has already been reserved by a Blackjacket procurement contract.
The party can try to convince her to release some of the reserved stock or help her finish another batch before they leave.
Ask Brena to Bend the Contract
Help Finish the Batch
A character can spend several hours helping Brena cut, wax, fit, and finish enough equipment for the expedition.
The tannery gear should make the expedition feel better prepared without becoming required equipment. Appropriate waterproof gear can justify a +1 circumstance bonus to a single check where soaked equipment, deep mud, or poor footing is directly relevant, at the GM's discretion.
The White Stag's Hide
Brena has one hide she refuses to put into a vat.
It belonged to an enormous white stag with silver-gray antlers, sold to her yesterday by a trapper named Colm Vey. The hide is flawless except for a small spiral of living green bark still attached behind one shoulder.
Brena has worked the Palakar long enough to recognize a warning when she sees one.
- Objective: Find Colm Vey and determine where—and under what circumstances—the white stag was killed.
- Finding Colm: He has not fled town, but he is deliberately avoiding Brena. Characters might question hunters with Diplomacy, follow his recent movements with Survival, or devise another approach appropriate to their investigation.
- The Truth: Colm found the stag already mortally wounded near the western timber line. He did not kill it—but he removed the hide despite recognizing markings associated with the fey courts because he knew it would be valuable.
- Further Clue: The stag's actual wounds contain the same black residue found in Brena's damaged hides.
- Reward: If the party establishes the truth and arranges for the hide to be returned to the forest or its rightful fey custodians, Brena provides each character with one free piece of mundane leather equipment or armor she can reasonably produce and becomes a reliable contact for future repairs.
Checks here are normally made by the character performing the described action. Other characters can Aid when they meaningfully support that attempt, or make a separate check when they investigate a genuinely different question. Avoid having the entire party make identical rolls simply because everyone is present.