Lodge au bord des bois
Lodge Overview
Name Woodsedge Lodge
Lodge Location Woodsedge, Galt
Venture-Captain Armeline Jirneau
Key Members masked servants
Allies Firebrands, the Red Raven, River Kingdoms nations that shelter Galtan refugees (such as Gralton and Liberthane)
Enemies Galtan revolutionaries, Grey Gardeners
Assets and Services alchemical items, identity protection, martial training, transportation (via Maze of the Open Road)
With some portions of this two-story stone manor being more than 400 years old, Woodsedge Lodge reflects the fashions of the Chelaxian nobility from the time of its construction, including the pair of low, rounded turrets at the front of the building. Located in its namesake city, the second largest in Galt, the lodge has undergone several renovations to distance the building from its ties to the nobility by replacing all traces of the original noble owners on the doorways and tiles with stylized wayfinders. After sustaining heavy damage during two different attacks in the span of 5 years, the lodge also received a series of upgrades to its durability, from improvements to its structural reinforcements to fire-retardant alchemical coatings along its wooden surfaces.
Woodsedge Lodge’s greatest treasure is the vast hedge maze on its grounds, the Maze of the Open Road—originally a gift from Forest King Narven Feathereyes, druidic ruler of a short-lived kingdom in the nearby Arthfell Forest. Narven constructed the maze and filled it with portals that connected to locations of interest to members of the Decemvirate, as well as dangerous creatures to guard its winding hedge passages from unwelcome travelers. With Narven’s death, modifying the maze and handling its dangers became increasingly difficult, and the Decemvirate gradually used the maze for transportation less often. Still, some of its portals lead to locations so difficult to access through other means, most notably the planet Aucturn, that the maze remained a valuable asset. In 4720 ar, an influx of primal magic revitalized the maze and connected it to an extradimensional realm with ties to the First World—this extradimensional realm later became known as the Open Road Lodge (page 98).
A flight of large stone steps decorated with potted red roses leads up to the manor’s double doors. These roses, a rare breed called Narven’s Tears, went extinct in the wild 200 years ago but live on through the Maze of the Open Road. The lodge displays them prominently to suggest an affiliation with the goddess Milani, a particularly popular champion of revolutionaries in Galt. The doors open into the lodge’s great room, a two-story chamber overlooked by balconies and adorned with a massive crystal chandelier. The roaring fireplace and comfortable chairs, tables, and couches make the great room a pleasant place to relax, socialize, and plan missions. Along the walls, shelves hold an eclectic array of trophies and curios, surrounded by the mounted heads of several animals. The oddest item in this collection is the stuffed body of Beaky III, the former owlbear pet of Taldor’s Grand Prince Stavian I.
Meals and formal meetings, such as mission briefings, take place in the conference room around a 25-foot-long table marked with the lodge’s insignia. The lodge’s kitchen and pantry stay well-stocked with exquisite ingredients from across the Inner Sea region and beyond. Its masked chef can skillfully create cuisine from numerous nations. Initially, the kitchen received such resources to satisfy the refined palate of the lodge’s former venture-captain, Eliza Petulengro, but no one at the lodge has the inclination to break the tradition of good food.
Pathfinders looking to hone their combat skills can practice in the battleground, an indoor training facility with armored dummies and numerous nonlethal versions of common weapons. The lodge also features a well-stocked armory, where agents can purchase weapons and armor suited for real combat or borrow them when necessary. Due to the sensitive nature of operations in Galt, Woodsedge Lodge sends its greatest treasures to the Grand Lodge for storage. One of the lanterns along the battleground’s wall serves as a secret switch that, when turned, opens a hidden hatch in the floor. The hatch connects to a branch of the Low Highway, an underground thoroughfare nearly inaccessible from the surface. As a part of the Darklands, the Low Highway is far from safe, but it does provide a place for agents to retreat if necessary.
The battleground and armory both lead to a walled-off courtyard decorated with fountains, cobblestone paths, and meticulously tended topiaries. The last feature of the ground floor accessible to rank and file Pathfinders is a library. Its shelves contain numerous maps and historical documents as well as books on local flora and fauna. The library also holds a large collection of romance novels. Though these novels may seem out of place at first glance, they serve a critical function—Venture-Captain Armeline Jirneau (CG female half-elf detective) uses them to encode hidden messages with a method nearly impossible to decipher without a copy of the same book used to conceal the message. A locked door hidden behind a sliding bookshelf in the library leads to a second, smaller library. This secret archive holds Woodsedge Lodge’s most valuable relics along with documents that could compromise the lodge if they fell into the wrong hands, such as dossiers on Galt’s most prominent politicians.
The second floor contains Armeline’s bedroom and private study as well as seven other bedrooms. The largest of these rooms is reserved for visiting Pathfinders, but it’s rarely occupied for long. Instead, Pathfinders on extended missions in Galt typically stay in nearby inns and receive subsidies from Woodsedge Lodge for their costs. This arrangement allows the agents to conceal their affiliation with the Pathfinder Society. The Society remains on tenuous ground with the local populace, who quickly lash at outsiders or those suspected of being disloyal to the revolution. The other six rooms belong to the lodge’s staff.
Those who work at Woodsedge Lodge wear white porcelain masks over their faces and red ribbons around their necks. The ribbons represent the harsh cut of Galt’s guillotines, the final blades—everyone employed at the lodge has lost people dear to them to the guillotine, and many of them risk execution themselves if they walk the streets openly. The ribbons serve as more than symbols, however, as each functions as a talisman that allows its wearer to assume a disguise at a moment’s notice in the event of a raid on the lodge (see the emergency disguise talisman below). Few besides Armeline herself know the true names and identities of the lodge’s servants.
Venture-Captain
One of the Society’s newest venture-captains, Armeline Jirneau has worked as an active member of the Pathfinder Society in Galt for over a decade. After many Pathfinders lost their lives in an assault by Galtan citizens, the Decemvirate gave the order to leave any remaining agents to their own devices—Armeline numbered among those abandoned. She subsequently got arrested and sentenced to death as an enemy of the Galtan revolution, but through quick thinking and improvised alchemical recipes, she managed to engineer her escape.
Instead of leaving Galt, Armeline moved to the village of Rosehaven and dedicated her life to helping other people elude the wrath of the mobs, fabricating new identities for them or helping them flee Galt altogether. She had no plans to return to the Pathfinder Society, convinced by her experiences that the organization was opportunistic and untrustworthy. However, after a group of up-and-coming Pathfinder agents saved Rosehaven from evil and murderous spirits, she decided to give the Society another chance. The venture-captain at the time, Eliza Petulengro, impressed Armeline with her accounts of the work that Woodsedge Lodge had done in recent years to help persecuted Galtans, most notably its habit of sheltering and employing fugitives. Thereafter, Armeline worked closely with Eliza over the following years. In 4719 ar, Eliza revealed herself as a member of the Decemvirate. Due to significant political events in the Pathfinder Society, Eliza returned to Absalom, leaving Woodsedge Lodge in Armeline’s care.
Armeline has a sharp, analytical mind and a knack for finding unconventional solutions to the challenges that face her. She guards secrets carefully, both her own and those that others have entrusted to her, and she’s slow to trust others. While Armeline prefers to gather meticulous information before acting (particularly if a plan would put others in danger), she recognizes that some situations require quick and decisive action. Still, she never asks another person to take a risk she wouldn’t take herself, and she carefully informs agents about any dangers she knows of in regards to their missions. In addition to her work as a venture-captain, Armeline continues to run operations to shelter and assist Galtans in distress. For this work, she operates under a masked identity she calls Bladethief—a reference to her practice of “stealing” people sentenced to death at Galt’s infamous guillotines, the final blades. Armeline refers to these excursions as “hunting trips,” and she maintains a sizable collection of hunting trophies to help preserve her cover.
Emergency Disguise
Given the constant scrutiny in Galt, a good disguise is a must, and one that can be donned speedily is invaluable. Pathfinders operating out of Woodsedge Lodge have access to the following item.
EMERGENCY DISGUISE ITEM 1
UNCOMMON; CONJURATION; CONSUMABLE; MAGICAL; TALISMAN
Price 3 gp
Usage affixed to armor; Bulk –
Activate [one-action] envision; Requirements You’re trained in Deception.
In Woodsedge Lodge, this thin red ribbon, typically worn around the neck, symbolizes the reach of Galt’s soul-trapping guillotines, the infamous final blades. Each of these talismans stores a specific disguise, chosen at the time of its creation. When activated, the talisman applies a disguise to its wearer, allowing them to Impersonate without taking the time to assemble a convincing disguise first. The components the disguise creates can appear to be worth up to 3 gp total. The instant nature of the disguise leaves a few traces of its haphazard nature, imposing a –2 circumstance penalty on checks to Impersonate using the disguise. Wearers with the Quick Disguise feat don’t take this penalty. Any objects created as a part of the disguise disappear after 24 hours or after you remove them.
Pathfinder Operations
Even in the revolutionary nation of Galt, Woodsedge Lodge provides a haven for free thinkers, rebels, and iconoclasts, serving as a hotbed for the seeds of Galt’s newest waves of thought. From here, numerous groups of rebels have formed and risen to overthrow the government, only to become the target of the next group convinced that it holds the answers to Galtan prosperity. Nobles, criminals, and outcasts of all descriptions hide among these rabble-rousers. Though a dangerous place to keep a lodge, Woodsedge is also a city full of potential. Countless old maps, texts, and other documents have disappeared due to censorship and propaganda in the last century. While some have been deliberately buried or burned, others remain tucked away in libraries or hidden in ruined buildings. Woodsedge Lodge’s library has one of the most comprehensive collections of such documents in all of Galt, and the lodge always looks to expand its resources.
Few in Galt show much interest in preserving or documenting the pre-revolutionary history of their land. Those with the knowledge and skill to track down unexcavated sites find little local support but also a notable lack of oversight. For locations near rivers or along the open plains, finding the sites and dealing with bandits or wilderness predators may well serve as the greatest challenge. However, Galt’s ruins aren’t always in such hospitable locations. Caverns under the dense and haunted Boarwood hold fragments of ancient elven ruins. The Verduran Forest is the domain of powerful druids and fey. The druids possess extensive knowledge, and they don’t easily trust outsiders. Even the friendliest of the Verduran’s fey have limited experience dealing with outsiders, and they hold a set of priorities that rarely matches up with the outsiders’ best interests. The Fog Peaks might be the most dangerous location of them all, with frost giants, white dragons, and even an ancient cyclops lich among its greatest threats.
While hidden sites draw few competitors, sites that advertise treasures within (such as old manor houses) become frequent targets for looters. These scavengers take only what they expect to fetch a hefty price on the market, leaving behind plenty of documents of historical interest. A cultural disregard for the value of the past makes Galt’s marketplaces an excellent place for a savvy scholar to find artifacts with a rich history. Such objects can become pieces of a larger archaeological puzzle, perhaps leading to other sites or helping to answer open questions.
Pathfinder agents adventuring in Galt should take care in their missions, however, as those who seem too interested in the pre-revolutionary past could find themselves branded as traitors to the revolution. Protecting agents from the mob’s ire may involve proving the agent’s innocence, redirecting the mob’s interest to a greater threat, or even breaking the agent out of prison. Such delicate jobs require stealth and subterfuge, lest Woodsedge Lodge find itself the target of another murderous raid. Pathfinders who demonstrate bravery, compassion, and discretion in their missions for the Society may receive an invitation from Armeline, in the form of her alter ego Bladethief, to join her underground operations.
LOCAL ALLIES
Alois Lofton (LG male human barrister): A former venture-captain and lawyer in Woodsedge, Alois suddenly abandoned his post several years into his efforts to repair the Society’s situation in Galt, and his upstanding practice turned to shady deals and sloppy legal work. In 4718 ar, Pathfinder agents discovered the reason for his strange behavior: fey magic had swapped his mind with that of a criminal he was pursuing. These Pathfinders reversed the effect and helped Lofton redeem his name. He has since resumed his work defending innocents from mob justice.
Nadise Dupal (CN female halfling inventor): A talisman specialist, Nadise mass-produces popular talismans while working to innovate new models. She pays lip service to the Galtan government and its Grey Gardener executioners, though she finds their violent methods distasteful. Nadise keeps her shop open to any customer but offers many more wares to those she trusts not to use them against innocent Galtans. One item of her own invention she makes available only to trusted customers: the emergency disguise talisman (page 108).
LODGE HISTORY
4428 ar Woodsedge Lodge is founded. The lodge is trusted to recover, maintain, and display priceless magical artifacts and historical relics, receiving patronage from numerous members of the Chelaxian nobility.
4640 ar House Thrune rises to power in Cheliax. Woodsedge Lodge severs its connections to its noble patrons in an attempt to avoid being swept up in Galt’s waves of revolutionary zeal. Despite this precaution, the lodge loses most of its treasures, as disaffected locals still subject it to frequent raids.
4704 ar Anti-Pathfinder sentiment surges, and a mob assaults Woodsedge Lodge, murdering its venture-captain and most other Pathfinder agents operating in Galt at the time. The Decemvirate judges a rescue of survivors too risky. A few months later, the Pathfinder Society sends in a trio of skilled agents—Alois Lofton, Senri Stenn, and Thurv—to assess the situation, recover what relics they can, and avenge their fallen allies.
4709 ar Eliza Petulengro makes an active effort to reestablish Woodsedge Lodge, serving as venture-captain for over a decade.
4710 ar An attack from a Galtan hero of the people, the Red Raven, nearly destroys Woodsedge Lodge; Venture-Captain Adril Hestram is killed.
4719 ar After revealing herself as a member of the Decemvirate, Eliza Petulengro cedes control of the lodge to Armeline Jirneau.