Quote from: AsenRG;883583Serious question, you mean people aren't doing that already? I just call them ripples on the water. Or sand ripples would do, I guess, since it's a sandbox:D!

Oh people do that already, just I'd be in favor of really exaggerating that past the point of realism.

Interlude: How'd You Become King Then?

This is bringing together, expanding, and polishing up my previous ideas on fairy tale royalty.

Each hex of the world has a Keystone that is the wellspring of life and magic for that portion of land. If a hex has a royal palace, a dragon's lair or a witch's hut they'll all be located right on top of the Keystone every time.

In Germanic fairy tales these Keystones are generally going to be springs or groves (perhaps domesticated as wells, fountains, and wooden buildings) while in Korea you'll going to get mountains, mountains and more mountains.

In order to become a king or queen you have to lay claim to one of these Keystones. How to do this various from hex to hex (and would be a good subject for a random table)  but generally involves marrying some avatar of the hex's Keystone, defeating some beast that lairs there, building a palace, or by gaining knowledge of that keystone (for example by hanging by your neck from one of the tree's branches for a while or chucking your eyeball into a certain well).

Once a person has claimed a Keystone they establish a kingdom and become linked to the land in a powerful covenant that makes the land of the kingdom Lawful. This grants Amber-style general knowledge, weather control, etc. over of the land of the hex and a small bonus (perhaps +1 AC or the ability to see like a cat) or perhaps a larger one that's only applicable within the hex. What this bonus is would be symbolically representative of the land of the hex and would be another good subject for a random table.

However becoming king or queen has its dangers as well. The forces of Neutrality and Chaos constantly war against the powers of Law. The fae powers of Neutrality can be bargained with, threatened and bought off but the infernal powers of Chaos are more insidious. These attacks often come in the form of dominating or corrupting the Keystone and a damaged or corrupted Keystone brings a curse upon the king or queen that holds it. Another good random table would be the threats that are spawned by hostile neighboring hexes.

Once a kingdom is established it can be expanded by laying claim to the Keystones of surrounding hexes. This again generally involves sex, blood, knowledge or engineering. After these Keystones are claimed they are still potent magical sites and are the obvious places to have health-restoring water, magical fruit, princes in the space of frogs, etc.

When a king or queen dies the kingdom is passed on to their heir and their heir's spouse. Simply slaughtering a royal family and grabbing the crown for yourself isn't enough to make yourself royal, you need a blood connection FIRST. Simple usurpation will make a hex stop being Lawful so that it has no king or queen. This explains why so many kings are so unwilling to let people marry their daughters, after all the only would-be usurpers you have to worry about are your son in-laws.

Also commoners who try to marry into royal families are generally greeted with suspicion, slander, rules-twisting and outright murder attempts so it is often important to bring a bunch of gold and soldiers to your wedding.

A kingdom can also be split among multiple heirs and often half of a kingdom is given to the royal son in-law to rule before inheriting the other half. This can be useful for placating people and a cluster of allied kingdoms is often easier to defend than one large kingdom, far fewer hostile hexes over the border per royal that way.

This still doesn't explain why the king with 12 sons threatened to kill all of them if a daughter was born. These mechanics should explain all the kings of seeming madness that fairy tale royals go in for.

Been mulling over the nature of chaos and the devil in fairy tales and it got me thinking. Now if you take the fairy tale devil, add in Cthulhu (who works with everything: monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2014/01/cthulhu-works-with-everything.html), The War Hound and the World's Pain by Moorcock and The Ceremonies by T. E. D. Klein (the last of two I've only read summaries of, which I'll have to remedy) and I may have hit on something.

Hell is a Cancer

After Lucifer's rebellion the defeated rebels were cast into Hell while those who remained neutral were exiled to the Earth to become Grigori/Fae. While the Neutral lands of Faerie are without God's Law and unpredictable at best the Chaos of Hell is far worse.

Without even the mad dream logic that faerie possesses, hell has become the world's cancer and ever day it bloats greater from the damned souls that it feasts upon. As Hell fattened itself it has become conscious, a blind idiot consciousness that knows little but hunger but a dangerous one nonetheless.

This worries the devils of Hell so they endeavor to keep it fed on the souls of the damned while lulling it with the monotonous pipings of demon flutes. But with every passing year Hell grows more ravenous and the devils of Hell have become divided about what is to be done.

One are in denial and just want to keep Hell asleep and well fed, others want to wake it and bring on the end times with the great beast arising from the depths to shake off lands of men and assault Heaven itself while others are searching for the Holy Grain in a desperate attempt to use its waters to wash away their sin and allow them to escape into Heaven.

The Angels and the Fae are equally divided. With the Host of the Lord exhausted with the attempt to hold the line against hell some wonder if it is better to just get things over with and destroy the world in order to save it and the peace feelers sent out by the devil have aroused massive suspicion.

This would set up an apocalyptic campaign in which the machinations of the various factions of Devils being the main driver of actions. The main attraction of this for me is that it is gets some nuance without the tired old trope of making Angels a bunch of assholes.

Quote from: Daztur;885040Been mulling over the nature of chaos and the devil in fairy tales and it got me thinking. Now if you take the fairy tale devil, add in Cthulhu (who works with everything: monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2014/01/cthulhu-works-with-everything.html), The War Hound and the World's Pain by Moorcock and The Ceremonies by T. E. D. Klein (the last of two I've only read summaries of, which I'll have to remedy) and I may have hit on something.

Hell is a Cancer

After Lucifer's rebellion the defeated rebels were cast into Hell while those who remained neutral were exiled to the Earth to become Grigori/Fae. While the Neutral lands of Faerie are without God's Law and unpredictable at best the Chaos of Hell is far worse.

Without even the mad dream logic that faerie possesses, hell has become the world's cancer and ever day it bloats greater from the damned souls that it feasts upon. As Hell fattened itself it has become conscious, a blind idiot consciousness that knows little but hunger but a dangerous one nonetheless.

This worries the devils of Hell so they endeavor to keep it fed on the souls of the damned while lulling it with the monotonous pipings of demon flutes. But with every passing year Hell grows more ravenous and the devils of Hell have become divided about what is to be done.

One are in denial and just want to keep Hell asleep and well fed, others want to wake it and bring on the end times with the great beast arising from the depths to shake off lands of men and assault Heaven itself while others are searching for the Holy Grain in a desperate attempt to use its waters to wash away their sin and allow them to escape into Heaven.

The Angels and the Fae are equally divided. With the Host of the Lord exhausted with the attempt to hold the line against hell some wonder if it is better to just get things over with and destroy the world in order to save it and the peace feelers sent out by the devil have aroused massive suspicion.

This would set up an apocalyptic campaign in which the machinations of the various factions of Devils being the main driver of actions. The main attraction of this for me is that it is gets some nuance without the tired old trope of making Angels a bunch of assholes.

There's a lot of potential to use devils as quest-givers.

I could actually see the old man in the dark corner of the tavern being an imp in disguise seeking mortal heroes to aid his grotto* in their fight against a rival grotto*.

*I do not know the proper term for a social grouping of devils. A court of devils? A revelry of devils? I'm not sure if Anton LaVey went into that in his Satanic Bible, I haven't read that since high school. I'm going to go with 'grotto'. As in the The Supernal Grotto of the Serpent, The Pale Grotto of the Cacoethe, The Gilded Grotto of the Diptera, etc. But that's just my head canon.

*edit*
Ah.
http://electricliterature.com/supernatural-collective-nouns/
A legion of demons
A bombast of devils
A party of incubi
An opulence of succubi

Quote from: Cave Bear;885041There's a lot of potential to use devils as quest-givers.

I could actually see the old man in the dark corner of the tavern being an imp in disguise seeking mortal heroes to aid his grotto* in their fight against a rival grotto*.

*I do not know the proper term for a social grouping of devils. A court of devils? A revelry of devils? I'm not sure if Anton LaVey went into that in his Satanic Bible, I haven't read that since high school. I'm going to go with 'grotto'. As in the The Supernal Grotto of the Serpent, The Pale Grotto of the Cacoethe, The Gilded Grotto of the Diptera, etc. But that's just my head canon.

*edit*
Ah.
http://electricliterature.com/supernatural-collective-nouns/
A legion of demons
A bombast of devils
A party of incubi
An opulence of succubi

Actually there's a story that's just like that later on in the Grimm collection. The Devil hires some guys to (indirectly) make sure some evil merchant dies and pays them well. He doesn't even try to screw them over he just wants that evil merchant's soul.

Which means that if the PCs want to kill some evil people then (looking at the extreme short term) the Devil is on their side (dead evil people means souls for him) while Heaven is against them (killing evil people precludes any chance they have for redemption). Giving supernatural powers comprehensible motives that just don't fit with mortal ones does a good job of allowing you to include angels and devils without going in for a simple white hat vs. black hat narrative or the tiresome "the angels are the real bad guys maaaaaaan" dime store Gnosticism that I'm so sick of.

Basically if you look at things from Hell's point of view there's plenty of reasons from infernal ideological splits, for example:
-Got to save the world, it's where I keep all my stuff!
-Kill evil people, more souls NOW.
-Foster evil people and let their evil spread, more souls LATER.
-Charge the gates of heaven! Sound the last trumpet!

Plenty of reasons for them to work cross purposes and sponsor PCs (possibly without even trying to screw them over) while still basically being dicks.

Same with heaven, if you want to avoid asshole angels you still have a bunch of disagreements in heaven. If the world has a cancer that is hell there's a lot of ways for well-intentioned and non-asshole angels to want to go about treating the patient:
-Cut it out. Yeah the patient might die but it's out best chance. It's only going to get worse later.
-Chemo. Yeah their hair's going to fall out and they're going to puke a lot and a few kingdoms will burn but what are you going to do?
-Try to keep the patient comfy for as long as possible.
-Well-intentioned but misguided denial and ignorance.

Also you can have the answer to "why don't the angels do more to help us?" be "they're really really busy keeping hell from bursting through the surface and tearing the world to pieces" if they take their finger out of the dike to come help you then you won't like the results.

Same with fae you get plenty of options for opportunistic alliances with factions from Hell or Heaven or "get off my lawn" xenophobia. With fae being neutral you actually have a reason for the old stupid D&D trope of neutrality wanting to balance good and evil, the fae have a reason to avoid too much Law and Heaven because that results in humans bulldozing them and making the whole world subject to Lawful human kings.

The way I'd approach this is by having Lucifer (the leader of the "Got to save the world, it's where I keep all my stuff!" faction) kick things off by trying to get his hands on the Holy Grail and have the supernatural faction warfare get more and more important as the game progresses with Lucifer offering them a job at one point and taking things from there. Put together a "what happens if the PCs do nothing" timeline and then make it very very easy for the PCs to derail that in unexpected ways.

I've just read through the whole thread and it's absolutely excellent. I particularly like your insights and commentary on social combat/interaction. Many thanks, Daztur (incidentally, I'm fairly sure that I once read an essay that you wrote on 'Combat as Sport vs. Combat as War', which was also excellent. Thanks for that one too! If you're ever in Hong Kong, I owe you a beer.)

Quote from: Daztur;884942Interlude: How'd You Become King Then?

This is bringing together, expanding, and polishing up my previous ideas on fairy tale royalty.

Each hex of the world has a Keystone that is the wellspring of life and magic for that portion of land. If a hex has a royal palace, a dragon's lair or a witch's hut they'll all be located right on top of the Keystone every time.

In Germanic fairy tales these Keystones are generally going to be springs or groves (perhaps domesticated as wells, fountains, and wooden buildings) while in Korea you'll going to get mountains, mountains and more mountains.

In order to become a king or queen you have to lay claim to one of these Keystones. How to do this various from hex to hex (and would be a good subject for a random table)  but generally involves marrying some avatar of the hex's Keystone, defeating some beast that lairs there, building a palace, or by gaining knowledge of that keystone (for example by hanging by your neck from one of the tree's branches for a while or chucking your eyeball into a certain well).

Once a person has claimed a Keystone they establish a kingdom and become linked to the land in a powerful covenant that makes the land of the kingdom Lawful. This grants Amber-style general knowledge, weather control, etc. over of the land of the hex and a small bonus (perhaps +1 AC or the ability to see like a cat) or perhaps a larger one that's only applicable within the hex. What this bonus is would be symbolically representative of the land of the hex and would be another good subject for a random table.

However becoming king or queen has its dangers as well. The forces of Neutrality and Chaos constantly war against the powers of Law. The fae powers of Neutrality can be bargained with, threatened and bought off but the infernal powers of Chaos are more insidious. These attacks often come in the form of dominating or corrupting the Keystone and a damaged or corrupted Keystone brings a curse upon the king or queen that holds it. Another good random table would be the threats that are spawned by hostile neighboring hexes.

Once a kingdom is established it can be expanded by laying claim to the Keystones of surrounding hexes. This again generally involves sex, blood, knowledge or engineering. After these Keystones are claimed they are still potent magical sites and are the obvious places to have health-restoring water, magical fruit, princes in the space of frogs, etc.

When a king or queen dies the kingdom is passed on to their heir and their heir's spouse. Simply slaughtering a royal family and grabbing the crown for yourself isn't enough to make yourself royal, you need a blood connection FIRST. Simple usurpation will make a hex stop being Lawful so that it has no king or queen. This explains why so many kings are so unwilling to let people marry their daughters, after all the only would-be usurpers you have to worry about are your son in-laws.

Also commoners who try to marry into royal families are generally greeted with suspicion, slander, rules-twisting and outright murder attempts so it is often important to bring a bunch of gold and soldiers to your wedding.

A kingdom can also be split among multiple heirs and often half of a kingdom is given to the royal son in-law to rule before inheriting the other half. This can be useful for placating people and a cluster of allied kingdoms is often easier to defend than one large kingdom, far fewer hostile hexes over the border per royal that way.

This still doesn't explain why the king with 12 sons threatened to kill all of them if a daughter was born. These mechanics should explain all the kings of seeming madness that fairy tale royals go in for.

How would you handle this in a party-based game, where rewards need to be split among the players?

(I guess if you split up a kingship, that could explain oligarchies, and the subsequent tendency for one oligarch to try to become a lone tyrant.)

The king killing all his sons sounds like Heracles. Maybe Hera is out there waiting in the wings, eager to screw up kings' lives for no particular reason. She is associated with women and childbirth, too, so the birth of a daughter could be an omen.

Quote from: Majus;885259I've just read through the whole thread and it's absolutely excellent. I particularly like your insights and commentary on social combat/interaction. Many thanks, Daztur (incidentally, I'm fairly sure that I once read an essay that you wrote on 'Combat as Sport vs. Combat as War', which was also excellent. Thanks for that one too! If you're ever in Hong Kong, I owe you a beer.)

Yup that's me. The only thing I've ever written that anyone's read. Usually I ramble too much and get people going TL: DR.

My current thinking on CaS vs. CaW is to divide up GMing styles like so:
-Environment focused: sandbox in which the players paying attention to and manipulating the environment is vital to success.
-Tactics focused: choosing between the options the game gives you is the focus of the game.
-Plot focused: adventure paths, 90's-style, etc.
-Character focused: story games and other play styles that really drill down to what's going on in the character's head, but in which the world often feels  like a sound stage.

Am in Korea so will probably end up in Hong Kong one of these days since now that the kids are older I'm able to travel more and will no longer be the only lifer in Korea who has never set foot in Thailand etc.

Quote from: Dumpire;885273How would you handle this in a party-based game, where rewards need to be split among the players?

(I guess if you split up a kingship, that could explain oligarchies, and the subsequent tendency for one oligarch to try to become a lone tyrant.)

The king killing all his sons sounds like Heracles. Maybe Hera is out there waiting in the wings, eager to screw up kings' lives for no particular reason. She is associated with women and childbirth, too, so the birth of a daughter could be an omen.

For a party-based game I'm assuming that not all characters WANT to be kings, a lot would want to be a prime minister, the court wizard, the local bishop or just the king's drinking buddy. However I'm setting the game up to intentionally support/reward clusters of allied kingdoms as having a kingdom that borders a lot of neutral/chaotic hexes is a big pain so having some smaller lawful kingdoms on your borders makes maintaining your kingdom a lot easier. A lot of NPC kingdoms would also be tiny and clustered together.

For the second point, I love it. That reminds me of my previous discussion about my can't-believe-they're-not-gods fae trinity (the Lady in Green, the Man in the Moon and the Queen in Splendour).

Making kings do crazy shit would right up the Hera-inspired Queen in Splendour's alley. She's be in charge of madness, arbitrary rule, the hearth, sunshine and kittens.

Just have to figure out some pattern behind her actions as I don't want to go the jealous wife Hera route. Why would a fae power drive some kings insane but not others and drive them insane in different ways? The Man in the Moon likes testing people and making bargains, the Lady in Green likes prophesies and curses/blessings that reek with poetic justice, what is the Queen in Splendour's schtick?

Going to actually run this thing September of next year with my son's friends and adults as well, gotta stop navel gazing and start hacking some stuff together.

Perhaps the Queen bestows her favor on an honestly worthy mortal, they become king, and then she variably becomes disappointed with them. They never measure up to her impossibly high, if not outright ideal, standards.

Then she throws that one away, and looks for another mortal. It's not that she is capricious or cruel, mortals just can't never fail or always succeed in some task that is trivial to fae demigods.

Sorry, only just noticed your reply.

Quote from: Daztur;885495Yup that's me. The only thing I've ever written that anyone's read. Usually I ramble too much and get people going TL: DR.

I don't know, mate, I've read two articles that you've written and found both of them interesting and insightful. That's a pretty good average.

Quote from: Daztur;885495Am in Korea so will probably end up in Hong Kong one of these days since now that the kids are older I'm able to travel more and will no longer be the only lifer in Korea who has never set foot in Thailand etc.

You definitely should. That said, I've been in Hong Kong for a couple of years now and have seen precious little of Asia either, so I'm a fine one to talk!

Was just listening to an audiobook of Russian fairy tales. There seems to be constant theme of people marrying bits of nature which at times seems to dance on the line of human sacrifice.

Quote from: Baron Opal;885667Perhaps the Queen bestows her favor on an honestly worthy mortal, they become king, and then she variably becomes disappointed with them. They never measure up to her impossibly high, if not outright ideal, standards.

Then she throws that one away, and looks for another mortal. It's not that she is capricious or cruel, mortals just can't never fail or always succeed in some task that is trivial to fae demigods.

This I like. This I like a lot. Humans being given gifts and then screwing up (either from ingratitude, simple greed or having a gift with strings attached) is a constant theme in fairy tales and having a character to help push that works perfectly. Seems like a perfect thing to hit PCs with.

Quote from: Majus;886270Sorry, only just noticed your reply.



I don't know, mate, I've read two articles that you've written and found both of them interesting and insightful. That's a pretty good average.



You definitely should. That said, I've been in Hong Kong for a couple of years now and have seen precious little of Asia either, so I'm a fine one to talk!

Well here's a third. Hope you like it: http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=28659

Here's the stuff we've come across in the first 30 stories.

Fairy Tale Inventory

Magical Acts
-Turning people into frogs.
-Turning frogs into people by keeping your promises to said frogs.
-Taking living people to heaven.
-Spending 12 years not talking in order to break a curse.
-Making a cursed stream come out of the ground that causes people who drink it to turn into deer.
-Illusions that make someone look like someone else.
-Hugging a ghost to return it to life. Waving a sword over a ghost also seems to work.
-Crying healing blindness.
-Stoking people's temptations/making lettuce addictive?
-Getting strawberries in winter.
-Spitting gold coins whenever you talk.
-Making someone more beautiful/ugly.
-Blessing someone with marriage to a king.
-Cursing someone by making it so clothes don't warm them in winter.
-Cursing someone with a miserable death.
-Human ghosts possessing ducks.
-Preserving food etc. from the elements.
-Cause fear.
-Summoning birds, fish, etc. to help you and forming pacts with various species.
-Boot-based divination.
-Possessing a clothes-producing tree upon your death.
-Cursing your children so they turn into ravens.
-Using a person's ring to return them to their true shape.
-Eating someone's food to gain power over them.
-Using your finger bone to open doors.
-Establishing a threshold keeps out uninvited guests such as wolves.

Magical Creatures
-Many, many kinds of talking animals.
-Subterranean elf.
-Gardening elf in tower.
-Three little elves in a house in a forest who have winter strawberries.
-The Virgin Mary.
-God.
-Spectral(?) black cats and dogs.
-Guilty ghost.
-Cannibalistic witches.
-Animals possessed by human ghosts (usually birds).
-Wish-granting flounder.
-Unicorns that "damage fish."
-Stupid giant brothers.
-Giants that challenge people to contests of strength.
-Scary giant boars.
-Mother Holle, the avatar of frost and winter whose feather bed creatures snow when shaken out.
-Cannibalistic sun and moon.
-Glass mountain that is home to a dwarf and "lord ravens."
-Death the boatman to heaven and/or hell.
-Monstrous pigs.
-Little men of the forest.
-The Devil and his mom.

Magical Items
-Vorpal knife.
-Key to the doors of heaven.
-Chimney that constantly drops skulls and other body parts.
-Annoying bed that runs around.
-Magical(?) scissors that let you cut things open without waking them up.
-Lilies that are actually your brothers so if you pick them your brothers turn to birds and stay that way unless you stop talking for 12 years.
-A white snake that if you eat it grants you the temporary ability to talk with animals.
-A singing bone that tells of its owner's murder when played.

Magical Locations
-Heaven and its many rooms.
-Harmless hats and dogs.
-Fairy's lettuce garden.
-Cookie house.
-The Tree of Life (which has apples).
-A well that takes you to a microcosm of the world were even tiny acts can have a big impact on the moral realm.
-Roads through the forest that protect you from wolves.
-River that divides the mortal realm from heaven/hell.

Trained Skills
-Iron heart-band installation and removal (necessary to prevent hearts from bursting with grief).
-Making your voice softer by eating chalk.
-Animal languages.
-Being nimble.

Misc Nifty Stuff
-Children being kidnapped at birth by the Virgin Mary and raised in Heaven.
-Kings constantly marrying mute girls they find in the forest.
-Serial disappearance of royal children at birth leading to accusations of cannibalism.
-Crazy kind saying that he'll kill his 12 sons if he has a daughter instead of a thirteenth son.
-Polymorphed creatures do not age.
-To break a spell you don't need to just kill someone, you need to kill them in a way that destroys their spirit.
-The palace-industrial complex.
-Lots of inhuman monsters want to eat people, perhaps to help give them the semblance of humanity.
-The threat of starvation as a way to kick off a sandbox campaign.
-Taking three (the third time you try something you get advantage if you failed the first two times and disadvantage if you succeeded the first two times). Also applies to stuff like three brothers trying the same thing.
-Ravens really really love horse meat.
-Saving throws vs. anguish.
-Failed suitors get executed.
-Lots of rings getting thrown into the ocean for some reason.
-Incredibly ornate crowns/thrones. For example a three-yard diamond crown or a two mile high throne.
-If you hide your humble origins from your wife she's try to get your in-laws to murder you in your sleep.
-Terrifyingly impressionable children.
-Judges using clever tests.
-Butchers being scary dudes.

Fairy Tale 31: Maiden without Hands

A miller meets the devil who offers the miller riches in exchange for whatever it behind his mill. The miller thinks its his apple tree but it's actually his daughter.

When the devil comes to collect the maiden draws a circle of protection vs. evil (really!) on the ground and purifies herself with water so the devil can't grab her. The devil demands that the miller take the water away the next day but she purifies herself with tears. On the third day the devil threatens to take the miller to hell instead if he doesn't hack the girl's hands off so she can't wash herself at all. Of course the girl then cries so much that even the stumps of the arms are clean.

By resisting the devil for three days the maiden breaks his claim on her and instead of staying with her dad who was really sorry about the whole dismemberment thing she sets off into the world with her hands slung across her back. And comes to an apple tree. She feeds herself by slamming into the tree so that apples fall down.

But it's the king's apple tree so some guards come to haul her away but the prince intercedes and gets her to care for the castle's chickens instead and later marries here.

Later he's off to war when their son is born and the devil switches the letters that they send to each other so that the king appears to command that his wife be exiled. She sets off into a forest with her baby and her hands (STILL!) slung across her back she meets an old man and asks him to hold her baby to her breast. Instead he tells her to hug a random tree, which gives her her hands back.

Later her husband searches the woods and finds her.

IIRC in later editions the maiden gets dragged down into hell to serve the devil but this is how this one goes in this first edition.

What can we get from this one:

If You Deny the Devil for Three Days He'll Go Away

Very important thing to keep in mind, especially if the devil is your Mr. Johnson.

Written Words are Lies

In fairy tales spoken lies never seem to work and but written lies always succeed. Will have it be stupidly easy to detect spoken lies (as in a NWP that you can take at first level that lets you unerringly detect lies) but there will be no character ability to discerning written lies.

She Kept her Hands Around for HOW Long

Seriously, she kept the damn things around for at least a few years it seems and carried them on her back right next to her baby! Having the PCs meet random people carrying around random body parts because reasons would be a good thing to seed random encounter tables with, much like I really want to make a PC one day who's carrying around one finger bone of their dead beloved so that they can get resurrection cast on it once they have enough money saved up.

Everywhere With the Trees

Trees appear three times in this story, always having pivotal roles. If mountains were the real lynch pin of Korean shamanism, trees (and springs a bit as well) seem to be massively important in Germanic paganism and it survives into fairy tales. The importance of holy and magical trees really can't be overstated and they'd be the real key stones of the land that represent the whole surrounding hex, like a Yggdrasil writ small.

Divine Magic

Here we have a straight-up bit of D&D clerical magic: circle of protection vs. evil. Note that it only works if the girl is pure physically and spiritually. As having to track a certain PC's state of grace seems annoying a simpler way is to just have divine magic work if the intentions behind that specific bit of magic are pure and sacramental magic always works (because otherwise is Donatism and BURN HERETIC!).

Up next: Clever Hans

East of the Sun and West of the Moon, by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, is a collection of Norwegian fairy tales you might be interested in.

I've noticed that too; trees are significant in the North, even to the point that the gods made the first people from trees. I've heard that clay or earth is the desirable raw materials for people from Egypt to India. I vaguely remember a story somewhere that people are made from the clotted blood of the gods; Navaho, maybe?