Try to survive the Winter: A planquest in Fantasy Colonial America

Wholesome Fauna and Flora

Or the creatures that, will still wild and sometimes fearsome, respect the order of Earth under God and do not show special malicious intent against the Lord's servants or His Dominion.


Ordinaries Animals

The land near Union is filled with abundant wildlife, from game like deer and the chicken-like birds called turkeys, to fearsome beasts like wolves and bears. What unite those otherwise ordinary beasts is the Disappearance.


Common New World Turkey

During Winter, all the ordinary creatures of the Wilds simply disappear, leaving not even the smallest bird or squirrel behind. And when the Sun comes again to the land after Winter, they all come back, as if the last year and Winter never happened.
This was the cause of quite a bit of bewilderment, since it seems as, when Spring comes again, the game hunted last year has risen from the grave to be felled again.


Trees

The trees of the wilds near Union are of a great variety of species, with the most remarkable specimens being giant trees, that could tower over a church tower.


The giants of the woods

They are also known for their abilities to move, with trees able to shift places or move in the way of a party of hunters. They are also known to be able to react to attack, with more than a few unaware woodcutters getting violently struck by tree's branches.
In many ways, the trees of the New World are more like wooden sheep in behavior than passive flora.


Spirits

Unbound spirits are legions in the Wilds, most of them born from dead men and beasts. They most of the time hold some memories and instincts from their old life, but are bound, forced to repeat the same factions and patterns endlessly. They can be freed from their bounds by external influence, human or not.

Almost all spirits have an anchor, either their remnants or a place of power, and will fight to defend it. Ownership of a spirit anchor offers both a way to control and harm a spirit.


A weak spirit manifesting

Most spirits are too weak to do much more than watch or lift a leaf, but they can grow stronger, especially by absorbing other spirits, and grow in power around their anchors (which is why one needs to act with precautions when unearthing an old corpse). Spirits do not truly die most of the time, only fading away with time and overuse of their abilities.

Voices of the Sun-Loving Wood

The Voices are a community of spirits using various trees as hosts, regularly jumping from host to host and returning to their place of power, the true anchor of their community, the Heart of the Sun-Loving Wood, isolated in an unexplored part of the woods.
The Voices are individually weakest, but when gathered in one host, they can animate them into walking trees able to shatter walls with their blows, and shake the very earth with the strength of their combined songs.
The Voices are a strange mix of childishness and wisdom, for they are mostly untouched by time, singing with each other, living in their host and sheperding their forests for years uncounted without much changes. They are mostly friendly with humains, even allowing us to cut down some of their herded trees, but can be hard to understand or follow, for humans are not accustomed to "soon" being decades away and "later" centuries at least.

The Voices animating a Giant of the Woods

The Mindless

Few things stay dead in the New World, and most of the time this means facing swarms of hungry dead and corpses inhabited by fiendish intelligence. Most of the time.

The Mindless are remnants of human, animal and sometimes even plants that were raised into undead by their environment but are unbound to any will or power.

They are bereft of intelligence, and when alone are passive creatures, only reacting to their environment and slowly decaying away. When enough Mindless are near one another however, they can unite into herds, with animal intelligence and organization, and begin to seek places of spiritual power and carrions to ward off the decay of their physical forms and animating energy.


A pack of remarkably intact Mindless, seeking carions

Common Mindless could be a broken human skeleton acting like a pack of dogs and unearthing corpses from a graveyard, or the dead husks of bees building an undead beehive near a sacred garden.


Razorweeds

Razorweeds is a climbing vine, much like bramble, named for its razor-sharp thorn. Those thorns, beyond being sharp enough to gut a man from head to toes, also cut the spiritual. They will harm a spirit just as well as they harm a man, and a harmless cut on a finger can push a man to darkest despair.

Razorweeds can grow pretty much anywhere and tend to spread by spreading floating pods in the winds during spring. However, much of the wildlife of the New World show a particular hatred for Razorweed, and will try to destroy it, especially when the Razorweed is too young to have thorns.


Yong Razorweed, with underdeveloped thorns. One thorn can already cut off a finger.

Razorweed tends to grow faster in dark, humid places and with some flesh and blood as fertilizer. It does not produce fruits, but young leaves of Razorweeds can be used to make soup , and old leaves to make a stimulating tea (which is also poisonous in high dosage).


The Four Sister

A symbiotic crops system born of growing maze, wheat, squash and beans together.
In its classical form, this takes the form of maze growing on a mound, with the beans using the maize stalk as a tether, squash growing under the mound and providing shade with its leaves, and the wheat growing between the mounds.


Four sisters crop, with the wheat not visible. Notice how the various parts are intertwined.

It has been noted that the roots systems of the plants seem to grow intertwined, and the crops tend to have similar growth even if the conditions are better for one crop than the others.

Fireberries

Bushy tree growing in humid, well lit part of the wood, they have the distant particularity of absorbing sunlight during the Summer to produce small, hot to the touch berries in the Autumn. When eaten, the berries slowly liberate heat in one body, warming a man even in the dept of Winter.

Fireberries (I am sadly at the image limit per post)

Corrupted beasts of the Wilds

Or the beasts that show ill intent to man and nature, seeking to harm mankind without incentive and to pollute lands and crops.


Eyesvines

A parasitic vine growing mostly around tree, eyesvines has the ability to convert animals into servants by absorbing their eyes, creating an unsettling spectacle of silents, eyesless beast caring for an eyes covered red vines.


Example of an Eyesvine's servant

Eyesvines tend to spread aggressively, their servants capturing new animals to convert and carrying Eyesvines cut to new favorable places. The Eyesvines colonies sustain their servants by producing bloodfruits, fruit made of what seem like flesh and blood, with the ability to sustain both herbivores and carnivores.


Woodflesh Spiders

Giant spiders with wood like flesh and the ability to produce steel hard cable. They are ambush, solitary predators, and seem to prefer entrapping and killing their prey slowly and painfully.


Example of a big Woodflesh Spider. Most of them have a size between a big dog and a man.

They seem to be able to act on their hunting ground, the forests, turning them into dense, dark and overgrowth environments, perfect for ambush and traps.


Many-limbed Devourers

Voracious, extremely aggressive centipedes, able to spit a powerful acid that can devour anything living, but is ineffective on everything else. They tend to build vast networks of tunnels through the Earth and with their various kills (trees, felled giant beasts...) and attack by emerging from their tunnels in masses and rushing prey from multiple directions.


Many-limbed Devourer eating a prey.


The Lords

Gigantic creatures that stalk the deep Wilds. They seem totally uncaring of almost anything, needing neither food nor water. However, if one as the ill luck of trespass on their territory, they react with extreme violence.


A Lord walking the land

In particular, over-hunting seems to greatly anger them, and they will strike during the Winter the culprits.
They are strong enough to crush palisades like twigs, fast for their size and impervious to small arm fires.


Sickness

Beyond normal illness caused by miasma and humoral imbalances, the New World is filled with sickness spirits, parasites preying on the weak for sustenance spiritual and physical. They are a nearly invisible, ever present threat, and can be challenged through various wards, scented smokes and strengthening the bodies and souls of the sick.


Sickness spirits, seeking preys


Hungry Dead

The violent version of the Mindless, Hungry Dead are corpses inhabited by degraded spirits, desperately seeking to restore themselves through attacking and devouring livings beings. This is the end result of many spirits unable to escape their corpse and left to rot.


A group of Hungry Dead

Much like the Mindless, Hungry Dead tend to gather into herds and hordes, and increase in intelligence and organization with their numbers. However, unlike the Mindless, the Hungry Dead are relentlessly aggressive and seem interested only in living prey.


Amalgames

Amalgames (Amalgams in english) are what happen when corpses are left to rot together, especially in mass graves.
The bodies and souls of the dead slowly rots and fuse together, creating a massive undead abomination.


The Wall of Limbs, an Amalgame

Amalgame, due to the way their fuse, are a mess of souls in constant pain, and seem to be guided by a need to integrate more persons into themselves. As such, Amalgame will attack any living person. They are extremely hard to put down, due to their vast quantity of spare body parts, and can grow to almost absurd size, the largest specimen able to simply crush entire houses under their weight.

Voices of the Blood-Loving Woods

Twisted cousins of the Sun-Loving the Voices of the Blood-Loving Woods herd trees that need the lifeblood of living beings to growth and sustain themselves. They are creatures of hungers, seing beings of flesh as fodder for their herds.
Much like their cousins, they shift from tree to tree, and gather into an hidden Heart, but their power are far more bound to their host, more powerfull than the Sun-Loving when their host is gorged with blood, but almost helpless without gore to feed on.
Their powers are almost identical to their cousins, beyond tending to animate their black hosts with vast mounths on their backs, to better crush beings of flesh and suck out their blood.

Example of a Maw

The Maw take the Blood, the Blood feed the Tree, the Tree feed the Voices

Fiendish servants of Winter

Or the fiendish things that serve the Enemy, escaping their hellish haunts every Winter to seek the damnation of all under Heaven.


Servants of Cold

It is said that Hell is the absence of God, of Hope. An endless emptiness where everything good was. Cold, as an aspect of Winter, is this emptiness, and ever seek to expand by annihilating all lights in existence


The tunnel grow, and the light recede, until there nowhere to run.


The Husks
The Mindless and the Hungry Dead, even as degraded as they are, have still parts of once they once were. Not so the Husks, what has been hollowed out until it is but a formless vessel for the power of Cold. Husks are the swarms that come in the Winter, the formless, endless legions that come to overwhelm and destroy anything on their path.


Some of the Husks


The Empties

Beings hollowed out by Cold, but with their form kept. If the Husks are but vessels, the Empties are puppets.


But a servant

Imagine one of your loved ones killed and turned into a puppet. And that every year, the killer strings the puppets, and sends it, knife in hand, to your house. This is what the Empties are.


Pitiless Winds

Spirits of the winds turned into weapons. Blizzards made cruel and hungry for human suffering. Resist them, or chase them will fire.


The children come to play


Servant of Hunger

Hell is greed. A never ending greed. It is the need to take, and take, and take, until every once of humanity has been corrupted and a man is no more than a hungry beast. Hunger, as an aspect of Winter, is this greed. The ever open maw, the never filled stomach.


All will end there


The Red Beasts

The favored beasts of Hunger, animals turning into flesh-eating monstrosity, much like the Augean horses of old myths. They are extremely fast, agile and aggressive, but are just as vulnerable as a normal animal.


A deer seeking its next meal


Tribute Takers

Thoses that lost the rights to be called men. The Tribute Takers are a society of bargainers, selling and buying the goods of their dark masters, and ruling over countless slaves and tributes. Their domains are tamed, dark waterways they travel on dark canoes, masks on their faces and dark cloaks on their back. Every Winter, they choose a settlement as prey, as tribute, and devour it whole.

Once, we called them friends and allies. Now, they are monsters to eradicate.

Once-man

The Tribute Takers have no pity for their slaves, who are something to exchange and use in their eyes. So they make good use of the Once-men, twisted to serve their interests. In many ways, the Once-men allows the Tribute Takers to ignore the lack of horses and cattle on the New World, for they have found an alternative.



The simplest of the Once-Man, strong and able, without the burden of intellect.

Masked

Most of the Tribute-Takers are Masked, men who have sold much of themselves to the darkness, until their existence cannot simply be maintained by their body. Those wicked souls need to cover themselves in stolen or scavenged names and forms, shaped into masks, talismans and other garbs, or face dissolution, what is left of them devoured whole by their patrons.


Masked Merchants

The Tribute-Takers have learned a dark arts that allow them, after making any transactions or exchange with someone, to force them into accepting poisoned gifts (hunger, pain, illness, despair...) and take from their victims (take their life, their mind, their freedom...). Most frightening of all, this art allows them to take not only from their victims, but to those connected to them : their family, their friends, their community.
The masters of this art amongst the Masked are the Merchants, empty men using the stolen faces and appearance of their victims to infiltrate their "future partners" walls and homes, and making their cruel deals. They are even known to, much like the Devil, take the guise of snakes, birds and other beasts.
Thankfully, despite their mastery of illusions and trickery, the Masked Merchant are weak in body and spirit, and when found can be crushed like the parasite they are.


The Bestiarius will be updated with discoveries.
If you find a good image, propose it on threads (I am probably on enough watch lists after my search for this post)