The Once-Buried Trowel

by Frazer 👁 44 views

This small trowel has a polished ashwood handle banded in tarnished silver and a narrow blade of dark green copper. Tiny engraved roots wind around the blade, ending in a single silver leaf at its tip. The metal is always cool and carries the faint scent of freshly turned earth. When its magic is used, the engravings briefly glow with warm amber light before fading permanently for that digger.

Intentional Planting When a creature uses the trowel to bury an object, creature, or portion of remains in soil, the trowel magically plants whatever the digger is intentionally trying to bury. The result reflects the buried thing's nature: a seed becomes a mature plant, a bone may become a skeletal or rootlike growth, and a buried object may become a living plant that incorporates or resembles it. The DM determines the exact form and time required to grow. The magic cannot create a creature capable of independent action unless the buried subject could naturally produce one.

Once for Each Digger The trowel's magic functions exactly once for each creature that uses it to perform a planting. After the magic activates, that creature can never trigger the trowel's magic again, even if the creature's memory is erased, its form changes, or it is resurrected. The trowel remains usable by other creatures.

Ordinary Tool After a creature has used the trowel's magic, it remains a finely made but mundane gardening tool for that creature. A creature can tell whether it has already used the trowel only if it remembers the event or succeeds on a DC 15 Intelligence (Arcana) check while examining the trowel.

Lore

Gardeners say the trowel was made to teach that burial is not always an ending. Some legends claim it plants grief, promises, and even secrets, giving each a form that can be tended—or allowed to overgrow everything nearby.

History

The trowel was crafted by Elian Voss, a hedge wizard who lost an entire orchard to a magical blight. He enchanted it so that every person who used it would leave something living behind. Voss eventually gave it to a traveling undertaker, who used it once to bury a fallen soldier and found a tree growing from the grave by dawn. No two accounts agree on what the tree bore as fruit.

Created by Frazer 👁 44 views