Soaked and gasping onto the bank, they feel it—a fundamental shift in their very nature. The sun hangs fixed directly overhead, impossibly hot. The air feels thick, alive.
Over the course of days, each member of the party begins to change. Jig’s limbs lengthen and fur sprouts as a monkey-like tail emerges with a mind of its own. Conrad’s hands fuse and warp into something closer to walrus flippers, his fingers nearly vanishing and making spellcasting more difficult. Francis finds cat ears and whiskers erupting from his head and face, his spine lengthening and curving to such an extent as to be nearly forced to walk on all fours. Mina’s arms merge with her bat wings, creating massive but unwieldy appendages. These are not cosmetic changes—they are the Beastlands remaking them in its image, and they feel right in a curious sort of way, despite some of the drawbacks.
Exhausted and disoriented, the party stumbles inland until they discover the Lantern Cairn of Dym, a crumbling stone tower at the edge of a high ridge. Inside, they meet Dym, an awakened fox of unknown age and wisdom. The fox—a former familiar to the lost wizard Kythron Vex—welcomes them with the hospitality, though he seems very confused at any given moment. Dym explains what the Beastlands truly is: a plane that demands surrender to primal instinct, that reshapes visitors to match its own logic.
During their stay, the party is able to hear faint music emanating from a door at the back of the tower. The party ventures through the back door of the tower, to find themselves in a forest clearing, a sort of back yard. There they witness something strange: a Seelie Court party reveling around the tower, celebrating a reunion with an old friend—completely unaware that hundreds of years have passed since that friend resided at this location.
At the party, the party encounter contests and challenges set by the Seelie Court: a gluttonous bullywug’s eating competition, a treant sapling’s slow-spoken riddle garden, and a leprechaun jester’s three-card game of deception. They win against all such contests, rewarded with strange items or information.
After exiting the tower, the monkey Tarnu finds the party. Speaking with a wise-cracking urgency, the capuchin delivers a warning and a plea: the northern jungle is changing. Unnatural vines—things that resemble nerve tissue—are spreading from the direction of the great world tree itself. These vines hum with a droning, psychic pressure, and animals touched by them become twisted, aggressive, wrong.
The party ventures “treeward” to a lake guarded by large sentient beavers, who warn that the swimming dinosaurs of the lake have become feral and sick. They dam off the lake to prevent more of the corrupted waters from entering, but it is only a matter of time before the dinosaurs die.
Following the corrupted waters upstream, they discover where the train had crossed the stream, leaving behind fragments of its metal encasement, which taint the water as it passes through.
Following the train’s path further, they encounter another major piece of the puzzle: Lymbix Thissara, a fragment of the Meat Train’s own brain that the train willingly shed. What was once a small, subservient part of the train’s mind has fused with a serpentine petitioner and gained independence. Through fragmented telepathic impressions, Lymbix communicates its fear of what the train has become—and its fear of Francis, who hacked the train’s mind. Yet despite its terror, Lymbix becomes an unexpected ally, particularly to Conrad, and helps to ward off any predators of lesser intelligence.
Continuing down the trail, the party comes to the ruins of a village near the base of the great tree. There, they meet Grath, a towering werewolf grappler with vengeance burning in his eyes. His companion Ilyra, a werefox seer, lost her hand battling a creature twisted by the train’s influence—a mutated owlbear, now feral and blocking the path forward. The village was destroyed by the Meat Train during its hurtling passage toward and up the giant tree.
In one of the huts of the village, the party discovers a sick and wounded Ratatosk squirrel, bound to a bed and chattering prophecies. “The crawling god drinks the seeds of divinity,” it warns. Repeatedly, it refers to the “crawling god” in cryptic sentences, before finally expiring.
Grath and Ilyra join the party’s cause, though Grath’s rage for the train and for the owlbear itself burns hot enough to consume them all.
The party’s path now leads inevitably upward: to Yygdrasil, the World Tree that stretches miles into the sky. Towering above the jungle canopy, its trunk a mile wide, its branches holding up the very sky of the Beastlands. Somewhere deep within that living wood, the Meat Train’s brain has taken root and is growing into something… more.
The party ascends. They pass through ancient druidic circles, as gravity bends to aid their climb. They discover a crumbling observatory, about to collapse, full of star charts and astronomical mysteries. They chase and battle the mutated owlbear on multiple battlefields, including a ranger’s roost suspended among spiraling staircases, where they eventually force it to flee further up the tree.
And finally, they climb into the Bleeding Den at Yygdrasil’s festering heart.
There, in an 80-foot shaft weeping crimson sap, surrounded by crumbling mushroom platforms and pools of corrupted fluid, they come face to face with the mutated owlbear, where it makes its last stand.
An epic battle ensues, combatants adhering to the walls and platforms high above the red muck below. The owlbear summons forth corrupted Ratatosk servitors to keep the party busy, while Grath single-mindedly pursues the lumbering creature directly. Lymbix repeatedly warns Conrad throughout the fight that something is coming, something the party has no chance of overcoming at their current strength.
Still, eventually, the party overcomes the servitors and owlbear. Grath lifts the owlbear away from the wall of the tree in his mighty Glory Hold, and suplexes it far below at the chamber’s bottom, barely surviving the epic maneuver himself.
The party prepares to make a hasty departure as per Lymbix’s frantic pleading, but it’s too late… emerging from the crimson pool is a giant amphibious creature with three giant eyes stacked vertically across a horrific red body, massive tentacles flailing. It forces its terrible will upon the entire party, causing all but Conrad to black out and faint. Conrad resists for as long as he can, but eventually succumbs as well.
The party dreams of a descent through hellish landscapes; lands of burning rivers of lava, lakes of blood, armys battling without end. An endless burning city of iron. Fetid swamps of mire and pollution. A landscape of endless fire. And then finally… a realm of cold and ice, drowned in seas of crushing ice floes and black water.
Each member of the party witnesses this hellish descent, save one… Francis has a much stranger dream. What did he see?
The party finally awakens to find themselves no longer in the bleeding chamber, nor surrounded by the leaves of the great tree. Instead, they find themselves in the street of an enormous city, crowded with buildings and creatures too diverse and strange to get a real grasp of. Overhead, peaking through clouds of smog, they can make out… more city?
Jig laments as the realization of where they are dawns on him. “Oh no, not again.”