Mama Shrog’s Solutions

For the past several decades, the old Vezneri House has been whispered about by children as the “most haunted house” in Eastgate, but with its recent purchase by a strange old lady named Shrog, the building’s reputation has shifted dramatically—although not for the better. Once owned by an eccentric artist named Vezneri who famously murdered his family and servants in the pursuit of “the perfect shade of blood red” to paint his masterpieces (landscapes of a grisly realm called the “Flayed Lands”), Vezneri House’s ownership reverted to the city for many years until it was purchased by a woman who, over the course of the past few years, has rebuilt the crumbling manor into something akin to a curio shop. The pale, waifish Mama Shrog herself has no apparent children, yet claims all who visit her shop are “children in search of answers.” She claims to keep among the wide range of devices and curiosities and books and elixirs and contraptions and sculptures solutions to any problem a visitor might need a solution for, and is quite talented at talking customers into buying objects that may or may not serve in the role she promises.
Many view Mama Shrog with suspicion, but her charismatic nature and lack of any hard evidence of wrongdoing have, to date, kept her on the right side of the law, but what isn’t contested is the fact that she openly worships the goddess Lamashtu. A bust of the three-eyed goddess looms over the front door to the shop—the only addition she made to the old manor’s facade—and the northern wing of the building is the only one not open to the public. Here, Mama Shrog maintains the city’s only obvious shrine to Lamashtu, and her work to keep the worship here just this side of the law often eclipses the toil she undertakes to keep her curiosity shop stocked. Dozens of paladins, crusaders, and adventurers have met no end of frustration in various attempts to shut the shop down and have Mama Shrog thrown from the city. Less legal attempts to oust her have, so far, resulted in quite public displays of violence involving bound demons or monsters that appear from nowhere to defend Mama Shrog and her shop—visitations that she always just manages to justify as “self-defense” in the face of overly-zealous Firebrands or covetous thieves. Mama Shrog’s operation is but the latest in a long string of Lamashtu shrines that have popped up over the years in the city to take advantage of Absalom’s religious tolerance, and cynics point out that even if she were to be proven to be acting against a law, it’d just be a matter of time before another “legal demon worship loophole” popped up elsewhere in the city.

Type

Shop, Curio

Alternative Names

Vezneri House

Parent Location

Eastgate

Owner

Mama Shrog

Ruling/Owning Rank

High Priest

Owning Organization

Cult of Lamashtu