Guilford

The head of Laewendas's local outpost stationed at the Keep Grow Inn beyond the Palisade — a brute roughly 7 feet tall and 6 feet wide, "big as a bear and strong as one too," built "like a shed." He hangs women with wheat-colored hair who spurn him, or whom he merely imagines have spurned him for his ugliness, stringing them from the trees. The party first meets him asleep and snoring in the tavern corner; when he wakes he begins clumsily "working his charm" on a married fair-haired woman.

His lynchings make him a direct threat to two missing/dead mothers: the orphan Barry's hanged mother, and (the party fears) Magra's wheat-haired elf-healer mother, somewhere in this country. Session 23 lays bare the origin (a mind-read by Silithane): as a child he watched his own wheat-haired mother hang herself from the rafters, and has spent his life re-creating that death on women who resemble her, none of which fills "the hole" she left. His soft, disowned son is the gentle Potato Peeler at the Keep Grow Inn.

(Name rendered "Guilford" / "Guilford" / "Guilford"; spelling unconfirmed.)

Session 22

• Identified by the inn's trapper as the man "stringing people up willy-nilly" — "mostly women he don't like… they string up by the tree."
• Magra learns from the rumor mill that a dozen elves, many with wheat-colored hair, have been hanged, and dreads the connection to her mother.
• The orphan Barry keeps mud in her hair on her late mother's instruction, "because Guilford's a bad man."
• Woke during the Herald's hourly toll and went prowling for a fair-haired woman — left alive and un-confronted as the party kept its heads down.

Session 23

• His mind read open. Silithane's Detect Thoughts reveals the hanged-mother origin of his lynchings, and that he was actively hunting a wheat-haired traveling wife at the inn that night ("one of them will not survive tonight"). His face is half-melted by an old burn; his strength reads at twice Silithane's.
• Poisoned and bewitched. Thalia (disguised as a waitress) slips Lash's iron rot bile into his drink, and Silithane casts Suggestion to send him off to the Grey Vale Cave to "prove himself" against the monster.
• The son revealed. Guilford disowns the inn's gentle Potato Peeler as "my waste of a son… a shame upon me bloodline," and describes his pattern of seeking out a different village's sensitive "peeler boy" to hang.
• Spared. At the cave the charm wears off; the party (on Valmora's plea) talk him into seeking help and atoning, and let him walk away alive — against the trapper Averick's warning that whatever replaces him will be worse.