Hollow Gardens

Hollow Gardens

Like goblin fruit? Want your tasty healing berries in the comfort of your own Hollow? Can do!

Fate's Harvest uses the optional rules in Rites of Spring regarding hedgefruit cultivation. Bear in mind that while the plants themselves will die if taken outside the Hedge, once you have picked their fruits/seeds/leaves, you are free to take those out into the mortal world at will, assuming your Wyrd can support them (see the table on the Goblin Fruit page).

Hollow Garden Merit

As described on the House_Rules/Merits page, Fate's Harvest has created a half-priced Hollow Garden merit to represent how much of your Hollow has been dedicated to active gardening. The dots in Hollow Garden work two-to-one with dots in Size, so for every dot in size, you may have two dots of Garden. A Size 2 hollow may have up to Garden lvl 4, but no room for anything else like Amenities or Workshops. Gazing balls or reflecting pools amidst the foliage, tree-houses, underground tunnels, open-air rooms with delicately latticed walls and ceilings overgrown with twining vines, all of these would be valid options.

It is entirely possible, and feasible, for you to have an extra Hollow with Size 1, Garden 1 growing healing fruits tucked away somewhere along a trod you often use just as a last-ditch "if I'm dying, I can crawl here and eat fruit!" hole in the ground. Just bear in mind that Changelings aren't the only ones who seek out fruit. There is no limit beyond your own XP to how many Hollows and Hollow Gardens one character may have.

Cultivation

Goblin fruits don't necessarily follow standard scientific laws, and fertilizer isn't exactly conventional.

Whenever you want to cultivate a new goblin fruit or oddment, you must first take seeds/shoots/a fruit from the original plant, then bury it where you want it to grow. A plant which needs to be in a swamp still needs to be in a swamp; it won't grow in a fiery desert-themed Hollow.

Once a day, you may try to entice your plant to grow by rolling Wits + Crafts plus or minus appropriate penalties/bonuses below, packing soil/fertilizer around the seed/shoot.

The plant will not grow without some form of fertilizer.

In game terms, use +garden/plant <plant>/<fertilizer>[+/- modifiers] while standing in the room you asked staff to designate as your Hollow Garden. The command does not enforce the day-long wait, but it will tell you if you fail, so you can RP accordingly and try again. (Note: the bonus from fertilizer is hard coded into the command. Any modifiers are environmental/kith/merit related, per your discretion.)

Penalties

• The character is distracted. (-1)
• The fruit/oddment is being transplanted to a wildly inappropriate locale. (-3)

Bonuses

• Blood (+3): A plant may hunger for fresh blood. Enough blood must be spilled (close to a pint; take 1L damage) to soak the ground around the plant. One concern with this is that spilling blood may attract more voracious hobgoblins.
• Carcass (+1): Curling a dead body — be it from a squirrel, cormorant, hobgoblin or human — around the plant gives it the essential life it needs. The body decays very quickly, turning to a unrecognizable pile of moldering waste by the end of a 12-hour period. Again, may attract carrion-feeding hobgoblins.
• Dreams (+1): The character whispers to the plant, telling it one of his dreams from the last three nights. In giving up a dream, however, the character can never again recall that dream (it literally leaves his mind the moment he whispers it "into" the plant). The character will also suffer a –2 penalty to all Expression rolls for the remainder of the day.
• Gift of Attribute (+5): The plant literally draws out one of the character's Attribute dots into itself. The character doesn't usually have the choice of which Attribute; in deciding to give the plant any dot, the plant decides what it wants (though sometimes this may make a bit of thematic sense: choking gallowsroot, for instance, desires Strength while the stimulating leaves of the jarmyn plant demand Stamina). Staff isn't worried, and your +sheet will not be changed. Just keep it in mind. The character regains that Attribute dot after a number of days equal to 10 minus the character’s Wyrd score.
• Gift of Skill (+3): The plant consumes a dot of the character's Skill. As above, the plant decides what it wants as fertilizer. (Again, theme sometimes applies: gallowsroot might leech a dot of Brawl or Melee while magic-empowering fruit demand Academics or Occult dots.) The character regains that Skill dot after a number of days equal to 10 minus his Wyrd score.
• Memory (+2): In whispering a memory to the plant, the character forgets that memory forever but helps the plant grow. The memory must be something more than just a name or phone number; it must be a memory that has a story, however small, attached to it. (For example: "I remember swinging on the old tire over the trout stream, and one day I fell in and almost drowned.")
• Sanity (+4): The character lends the plant some of her own sanity (which helps to stabilize the dreaming nature of the foliage, giving it the constancy necessary to grow to fruition). In doing so, the missing sanity fills in with a temporary derangement (mild) of the plant's choosing. Once more, theme sometimes applies: fear gortach may cause Obsessive Compulsiveness. The derangement lasts for a number of days equal to 10 minus the character's Wyrd score. In our case, since chances are good you won't have an ST planting things for you, please pick something sensible and RP it out!

Per the book, the plants themselves are mildly psychoactive, and will respond to how they are treated/the emotions of the changelings around them when they are growing. See RoS p.130.