Dreadweaver Corpsefortune
A teenage necromancer (~17½, human) who infiltrated and destroyed the Druid's Grove, posing as a weedy, malnourished commoner boy in dirty green-brown robes. Self-styled with the edgelord title "Dreadweaver Corpsefortune"; his real birth name was never given, and when first cornered he panic-lied that he was "Tim Bimson." Attuned to a powerful necromantic ritual-book, he is the strongly-implied source of the woods' undead blight — Golgain's "necromancer in the woods."
(His true name is unknown — "Dreadweaver Corpsefortune" is a title he coined; "Tim Bimson" a lie. See Canon Questions.)
(Spelling conflict, unresolved. In his own writing he signs himself "Dreadweaver Corpseforger" — forger of corpses, which is what he did. The vault has carried "Corpsefortune" since Session 47, read from the transcript. The note keeps its existing title pending a ruling; see the discrepancy log.)
Session 47 — killed
- Found hiding in the grove's cabin. Discovered cowering in a cupboard (beside a mimic), patting needle blights, and pleading trespass. Fenric's magic-sense flagged him as a spellcaster carrying a powerful magic item.
- Sunbeamed to dust. When he refused to do any druid magic, Stunghelm Elkheart elbowed him unconscious and Sunbeamed him to ash — having first cast Detect Evil and a spell that only harms evil undead, confirming the "boy" was an evil undead.
- His work. His diary, the Annals of Dreadweaver Corpsefortune, and his ritual-book (a body-fusion spell-tome) revealed he used the corpses beneath the grove for necromancy: he killed its pacifist druids one by one, fused all ~42 of them into a single monstrosity (slain by the party), and his book held the concentration on a horde of ~1,000 zombies — so Fenric destroying it dropped the horde page by page.
His own account — The Anals of Dreadweaver Corpseforger
The diary itself, transcribed from the GM's own journal handouts (player-facing) rather than from a session recording. The vault knew this document existed — the party read it in the cabin in Session 47 — but not what it said. It is riddled with misspellings, including its own title (Anals, for Annals): he is functionally illiterate. Quotations below preserve his spelling exactly; the vault's own prose does not.
It is a short, boastful, entirely unrepentant record, and it explains the Druid Amalgam from the inside.
The infiltration
He did not storm the grove. He lived in it for four months, disguised as a wandering scholar — "Four for months I lived among them under the goose of a wandering schoolar" — and the druids simply took him in. His own contemptuous account is the strongest evidence the vault has of what these people were like: "They welkomed me without suspision and preached endlessly of harmny, mercny, and peacny. Their convitions were genoine." And then the line that turns the whole massacre: "Even when the killign bargain, several attempted to raisin with me rather than fight." They tried to reason with him while he was killing them.
The discovery
The grove's ground was the opportunity. "There grove possessed an unusual qualty. The rooots beneath it formed a living networck though which droodic magic flouwed." Examining the bodies he found the crucial thing: the connection remained even after death. The druids were still joined to the root network as corpses. His note on this is four words — "An obvious opportunity."
So he dismantled them and incorporated them into the root system surrounding the central pond, binding "Flesh, bone, rooot, and lingring sprit" together with necromantic and druidic energies at once. That is the mechanism the vault never had: the amalgam was not assembled out of nothing, it was grown into a magical network the grove had spent generations building, and the druids' own magic was the medium.
The revelation — the amalgam was conscious
This is the line the vault should carry, and it retroactively changes what happened in Session 47:
The crature is not merely aminated. It is collective. Every drood of the cyrcle persists within it as fragmants of a grater hole. I frequently here there voices emerging from differant parts of the mass. Most plead for death.
All forty-two druids were still in there, aware, and in pain. The vault's bestiary entry reads the amalgam as a mindless construct with no will of its own; by its maker's own account it was forty-two conscious people fused into a body they could not leave, begging to be killed — for however long it stood in that pond before the party breached the dome. Its Hymn of the Ancient Ones was sung by them. Its immunity to psychic damage was, in his arithmetic, forty-one brains. When Lash's Fire Shield immolated it, the party did not merely win a boss fight; they granted what the voices had been asking for. And Magra's grim work afterward — cutting the mass back into forty-two buryable bodies "to give them their identities back" — was more exactly right than she could have known.
The rest of the grove
He confirms the outer works were his too: "The perameter has been seeded with lesser experiments and defencive growths" — the needle blights and blighted interior the party fought through — laid so that "Should intruders reach the centre, they will witnessing the true suces of my work." The amalgam was staged. He wanted it seen.
The signature
He closes with his thesis and a challenge, and signs the name the vault does not currently use:
The age of raising onedividual copses is over. A single cadiver is a servent. A hundred cadivers is a mansterpiece. If you rade this, you was worthy to facing me.
— Dreadweaver Corpseforger
What it changes
- He is worse than the vault recorded, and more deliberate. A teenager who spent four months accepting the hospitality of pacifists in order to study their magic, then killed them while they tried to talk him down.
- A hundred cadavers is a masterpiece. He states an ambition of scale — the grove was a proof of concept, not an end. He is dead, but his ritual-book taught the method and he was not necessarily the only reader; the woods' wider undead blight (Golgain's "necromancer in the woods") sits under this sentence.
- The persona was tailored. To the druids he was a wandering scholar; to the party, cornered in a cupboard, he was a weedy malnourished commoner boy pleading trespass. Both were costumes.
- The grove's root network is a real, named phenomenon — druidic magic conducted through living roots, persisting through death — and the Druid's Grove is not the only grove. The party is currently carrying Vedanis the Evergreen's two orated tomes to the groves of Kerri and Maelor.