The Oak-Ward (A Stonetop Spirit)
On a clear day, sharp-eyed folk in Stonetop can spot the Golden Oak, gleaming at the horizon and dwarfing the trees around it. According to the tales of the Forest Folk, a hero buried at the roots of the Oak can find their way back from beyond the Last Door. But no one from Stonetop has ever made it there and back.1
The Golden Oak is something like a world tree, in my eyes. A colossal, towering, golden, glowing Oak that can be seen from leagues away in any direction. I imagine that its roots are what feed the Great Wood, imbuing it with eternal renewal as far as they spread. Maybe this is why the Forest Folk entombed their spirits in the trees, or what the Green Lords harnessed to craft their chimeric monstrosities. When I look over its related setting texts, many questions pop up in my mind. What does it imply that humans learned of the Oak from Forest Folk, yet the Fae Paths are the only known method for getting close? Why is the Oak said to be guarded by a servant of the setting's own Grim Reaper? What does it mean for a wellspring of primal, unchecked vitality to stand here in the living world?
Stonetop provokes my creativity, so I have answers to these. The Golden Oak is much older than Fae, Forest Folk, and Green Lords, and possibly about as old as the Lady of Crows. The Fae are also, more or less, magical fugitives who built their own worlds after freeing themselves from Green Lord oppression. Therefore, I think avenues of the Fae paths circumvent something put in place to protect the Golden Oak. The waystones are an infuriatingly (to Primordials) clever method for accessing a font, perhaps the font, of life itself. And what is life? Do we find it in the passage of time? The self rearranging dance of space?
Such a foundational pillar of World's End is too sacred to leave undefended, which brings me back to who could be the reason the Fae built their paths to the Oak--enter The Oak-Ward. The Forest Folk could tell you when it made it onto the scene, if they could tell anyone anything anymore. The Fae would call it an annoying hall monitor, if they knew what that was. Humans would tell you it was bright and terrible as the dawn... if they could remember seeing it.
The Oak-Ward is a Spirit incarnated for as-yet unknown reasons. It can't stray far from the Oak's trunk, and it has one goal--prevent discovery, thwart the curious. It might recognize you when you get close, but it knows you'll forget it as soon as you turn around. Its tools for extracting its presence from your mind are imprecise, and the emotionally tangled nature of memory means it may take more from you than you bargained for. Dallying with it is risky, but it's not malevolent. At best you can meet it once before it makes sure no one can repeat your methods.
It resembles something like what your brain processes as it tries to resolve a camouflaged animal or Magic Eye image, taking on as many forms as there are eyes to see it. Someone might realize they see a woman who shouldn't be quite so tall melting forward from the underbrush, while someone else swears the Oak-Ward was a flock of leaf-litter colored owls. Its voice is the most slippery of all, leaving only its words behind as the timbre evaporates in your memory nearly as soon as it drifted in. It is not lonely. It has seen much.
-> The Oak-Ward: Splendid, magical, unyielding.
HP: 18, Armor 5 (hardened, supernatural).
Damage: d12 with advantage, close range, blunt.
Special qualities: Reads minds, ageless, magical influence over space and memory. Tethered to the Golden Oak.
Instinct: To protect the Golden Oak. To look for knowledge of the Golden Oak among the minds of approaching travelers. To divert intruders away from the Oak's embrace and harvest their memories.
If a successful bargain is struck, or you can convince it that you mean no harm, being transposed across the forest by the Oak-Ward confers a special move:
WHAT WAS KEPT: When the Oak-Ward transports you a great distance, roll 2d6 +WIS and find you're missing all memories of how you got there as well as:
6-: one of your Moves. Mark the dazed debility, then tell us which Move you lost and which memory it was connected to. Replace your lost move with RETRACING YOUR STEPS (see GM).
7-9: a promise you made, now never to be fulfilled. Tell us to whom this oath was given.
10+: a burden, something that weighed you down. Tell us what it is as you suddenly become lighter.
The reason this is worded specifically around Wrinkle in Time-ing the PCs is that they're tasked with crossing hundreds of miles of forest in just a few days, but you'll notice that I don't talk about the Oak in that post. Why? Using the Golden Oak's "no-one can get close" lore and stretching it to mean "something warps you around the Wood if you try" was an idea put forward by one of my players, and I liked it so much that I decided to dig in and write a Spirit that supports this plan.
The book warns you that Spirits should be fraught rather than a convenient contrivance, so I think reaching this thing will have to have its own consequences. Encountering the guardian of a wellspring of life itself should feel big--like, eyes of ancient powers directly on you, big. Whatever they do with this will be noted by beings they can't fathom. And, unfortunately, there will be eyes looking back out of some of theirs that have been searching for the Oak for millennia... and their intentions are grim.
The Oak-Ward is an original spirit made with Stonetop's Spirit tables. If anyone uses it, I would like to know what it looked like and how it behaved in your campaign, so gimme a shout via usual methods.
Strandberg, Jeremy. Stonetop. Lampblack and Brimstone, 2026.↩