Tales From the Yawning Portal

This adventure concerns a once-proud fortress that fell into the earth in an age long past. Now known as the Sunless Citadel, its echoing, broken halls house malign creatures. Evil has taken root at the citadel’s core, which is deep within a subterranean garden of blighted foliage. Here a terrible tree and its dark shepherd plot in darkness.   The tree, called the Gulthias Tree, is shepherded by a twisted druid, Belak the Outcast. He was drawn to the buried citadel twelve years ago, following stories of oddly enchanted fruit to their source. The druid found an old fortress that had been swallowed up by the earth in some sort of magically invoked devastation. With the previous inhabitants long dispersed, vile and opportunistic creatures common to lightless dungeons infested the subterranean ruins. At the core of the old fortress, Belak stumbled upon the Twilight Grove. He discovered at the grove’s heart the Gulthias Tree, which sprouted from a wooden stake that was used to slay an ancient vampire.   A perfect, ruby-red apple ripens on the Gulthias Tree at the summer solstice, and the tree produces a single albino apple at the winter solstice. The midsummer fruit grants vigor, health, and life, while the midwinter fruit steals the same. In the years since Belak’s arrival, the enchanted fruit has been widely dispersed through the surrounding lands, promoting good and ill. The seeds of either fruit, if allowed to sprout, grow into small plant monsters known as twig blights.