About This Adventure
In the shaded folds of what was once a sprawling pre-war botanical garden and adjacent medical campus, the Willowtrace people tend terraced clearings of potatoes and climbing tomato vines threaded through the skeletons of glasshouses and brick wards, their timber homes nestled against ivy-cloaked walls and ringed by drying racks of medicinal leaves and smokehouses heavy with salted game from the rewilded woods. The surrounding landscape has transformed into a dense second-growth forest laced with mossy paths that follow old service roads, the faint outlines of greenhouse frames rising like pale ribs amid thick understory, and distant ridges of overgrown freeways serving as high trails for game and travelers. Life here centers on the careful cultivation of healing plants—comfrey, willow, and rarer stock once tended by the old gardeners—alongside modest harvests of roots and smoked venison or fish, all preserved with hard-won salt and bartered outward for surplus grains, breeding stock, and metal tools from the more open valley clans. Healers and seed-keepers hold quiet prominence, their knowledge of poultices, midwifery, and the last sealed clinic stores forming the tribe’s strongest currency in a world where infection and injury still claim too many. As the late-summer drying of herbs and curing of meats reaches its fullest and the seasonal caravans begin assembling for the long walks to neighboring gatherings, the community rests in a moment of fragile plenty: stores are solid, alliances remain cordial, yet thinning stocks of certain vital plants, rumors of fever among downriver potato mounds, and the growing boldness of scavenger bands circling the deeper clinic basements cast a lengthening shadow over the coming exchanges that will decide whether the Willowtrace people remain the region’s valued healers or face leaner, more isolated seasons in this green and emptied land.
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