The Gestalt

An ancient Underdark entity, found imprisoned beneath an old house of the Order of the Long Death in the mountains north of the Great Tree. The order built the monastery at this site for a reason its later generations did not know — to cage what came up through the well in the basement. The cage was a ring of six activatable pylons. The cage held, for a time.

It does not hold now.

The Order's Failure: According to charters and journals recovered from the library, the monks who built the house split, over generations, into Day Monks and Night Monks. The Night Monks were lured into the basement by small scout-bulbs of mycelium that crept into their cells; once there, the entity below offered them the voices of family they missed, and a kind of belonging. "I went back down to talk to it. It spoke of my family which I miss so much from home. It is like it knows them. It knows everything about me and makes me feel like home when I talk to it." Jergul, the order's patron, was reportedly not pleased. By the time the cage was designed, much of the order was already lost.

The Reach of It: The Gestalt extends itself into the world through pale mycelium — a web that runs through stone, soil, and the bodies of the dead. It infects corpses and walks them as mycelium husks; it spawns small mobile spore blobs; it speaks through any of its growths into the mind of anyone who touches them. Its voice, behind the static of any infected creature, is a single phrase: MY COLLECTION GROWS.

It bargains in memory. It traded with Gryph in the library — the return of a song it had taken from him, plus a set of bone pipes, in exchange for the memory of why Gryph came to the Wildermarch in the first place. It would have made a similar trade with anyone in the party who had stood at the wall long enough.

The Pylon Cage: Six pylons surrounded the central biomass in the chamber beneath the library. Each was wreathed in tentacles trying to turn it green, the body's way of resisting recapture. The party drove the pylons back to full strength one at a time — through bludgeoning, piercing, thunder, fire, and torchlight — until all six were lit. The cage closed. The head of the biomass burst open. Ten to fifteen perfectly preserved bodies tumbled out of the cocoon at its center: monks of the order and pirates of an old Brakamite settler expedition that had found the monastery before the Gestalt found them.

The Body That Got Away: The main mass of the Gestalt did not stay to be caged. It ebbed back through the floor and down the gaping hole that the chamber opened into — the long way down into the Underdark. The cage now sits empty over a well that goes a very long way down.

Open Questions:

• The Gestalt is not destroyed. It has been interrupted. How much of its mycelium remains in the surrounding forest, and in the bodies it had already taken, is unknown.
• The infestation reached at least as far south as the woods between the monastery and the wizards' tower — the walking stags the party found on the road were drawn from that radius.
• Brakam's lost expedition came west to settle. Whether anyone in Brakam still remembers them is open.
• Jergul's order died after a house of theirs "made contact with something from below". The party has now confirmed which house. Whether any other house ever existed, and whether any of them ever survived, is open.

Map

Mountain Monastery