Iām planning to run a shadowfell arc with my long running campaign, and Iām planning to play with the theme of memories, memory loss, items and books absorbing memories and the like. Thereās this mansion with an evil shadowy figure collecting/stealing peoples memories etc etc, and I would be super intrigued to see what your take on an adventure/arc like this would be?
At the end of it all, we are all just stories
On the edge of the tidelands there is a grand and forgotten estate. Not forgotten in that it is abandoned, but forgotten in that a lapse of memory hangs about it like a fog. Even most who live in the nearby village can recall its existence while looking right at it, and only then a few paltry details about how it has affected their lives or the history of their home.
The source of this amnesia is the work of a shadowcaster by the name of āāāāāā āāāāāā, who has taken the estate as his own while perfecting the art of stealing stories. Like other shadowcasters, āāāāāā wields the powers of remnant and entropy inherent to the shadowfell and has a particular fascination with how the memory and narrative surrounding a thing can survive independently of that thing's destruction. Originally presenting himself a medium and exorcist, āāāāāā was hired by the estate's original owners to deal with a lingering ghost problem, only to discover that there was a rift to the shadowfell in a root filled room in a corner of the greathouse's basements.... a room that no one seemed able to remember.
Taking advantage of such close proximity to the upside down, āāāāāā began experimenting, eventually creating an umbral ink that would steal away facts and moments of time when placed on the page, allowing him to make ghosts of people and places without even needing them to die. For now āāāāāā is content to tinker, but it's only so long until stumble upon the conspicuous absence he's shrouded his activities under, or the lives he's disrupted in the process.
Within the party's bag of holding or the pack of their most rougish member the heroes discover a bound together stack of pages, which detail their encounter with a man named āāāāāā while out on the road earlier in the campaign, described as an innocuous scholar with inkstains on his cuffs, always seeming to be writing in his travel journal. He offered insight on their adventures then seemed to disappear. Should the party destroy or damage the pages, they'll suddenly remember this encounter, them managing to steal these pages, and the fact that the man's shadow more often resembled a tree than that of a human
The party visits a seaside village, and while most things seem normal, there's a woman clearly in distress that the locals are keeping well away from. She claims she's lived in the village all her life but most seem to think she's a stranger, those few who do remember her thought she ran away when she was just a lass (about the age that she started working at the manor). Like many of the servants, āāāāāā worked some magic to keep her on thinking he was the master of the estate, forgotten by her neighbours, but forgot to fully edit her story to prevent her from visiting her parents grave on the anniversary of their deaths some decades past.
āāāāāā's ink comes from a great unnatural tree that grows up through the foundations of the manor from the shadowfell below. Adapted to eat away at the memories of ghosts, the shadowcaster gorges this tree on the stories of the living, creating an ever deepening wellspring of power and a never ending supply of umbral ink. Drunk on power and the possibilities of playing blackout poetry with people's lives, āāāāāā does not realize that the tree is literally undermining him, threatening to drag the whole estate down into the land of the dead, erasing whole swaths of the countryside as the manor's library is drowned in amnesiac gloom.
