Parrow
A gnarled grey root — properly Parrowroot — that grows only from salted ground which has seen death: the sands of shipwrecks, the soil of old battlefields. Inhaled, it produces a euphoric rush and acts as a hallucinogen. It is aggressively addictive, and a treatise on the subject warns that it is dangerous in any hands but those of responsible alchemists and healers. It is the drug the party spent three weeks helping cook aboard The Expedition Ship.
What it does to people
The source's own summary of the addict is the line worth keeping: "Parrow addicts are often chasing 'the next adventure' as the substance provides both pleasure and escape." The substance supplies the high and the exit — which is why it takes hold of exactly the population the Reclamation is shipping across the sea by the thousand. A drug that grows on battlefields and shipwrecks, sold to soldiers sailing to a war, is not an accident of supply; it is a business model.
Where it grows
Its habitat is a map of every bad thing that has already happened. Salted ground that has seen death describes the whole southern coast of Rivalon — a shore with a Shipwreck Coast on it, forty years of war behind it, and a settlement on the map named Porthparrow (Rivalon, Session 8). No source yet states that Porthparrow is named for the root; the coincidence is noted, not claimed.
In play
- Jugs's still, The Expedition Ship — Parrow was cooked in iron pots and jugs under the lower-deck stairs for the whole crossing, screened by sight-blocking crates, the Potato Man, and Sir Conolith's repellent corner. Most of the party worked the operation: Kain on cauldrons, Ashlyn on the door, Magra peeling, Silithane mending vials, Lash repairing the pots, Thalia running deliveries (Sessions 6–7).
- The rebrand. When Thalia refused to courier Parrow, Jugs renamed the product on the spot: "It's not Parrow anymore… It is Rat. Every post is Rat." Deliveries thereafter went out as "Rat."
- How it is taken — snorted or inhaled, matching the "parrot-snorting rat" who offered Kain a hit by the middle-deck cannon (Session 6).
- Jugs's line closing production: "I've brewed enough parrow for one day."
(Transcripts across Sessions 6–7 render the word as "parrot" throughout — the GM's written handout settles it: the drug is Parrow / Parrowroot. The in-fiction cover name is "Rat," which is why deliveries, parrots and rats all tangle together in the Session 6–7 notes.)