“Fabian’s Garden” is an arboretum covering several city blocks in Outport, surrounded by a high stone wall. Inside visitors and worshippers of The Lady of the Woods find a sanctuary from the bustle of the urban island region. Majestic specimens of some of the longest-lived trees in all of M’Kal watch like sentinels over the gardens, still bearing scars from the flames that consumed much of the city during the Dragon War. The temple is used as a druid grove by the priests and priestesses that care for the grounds, each of the trees bearing spells that the druids may draw upon in times of need.
High Priestess Tarabeth V’is gave up long ago trying to explain to people what a temple of Shiallia was doing in Outport, or why the golden goddess even had a temple at all. Instead, she just ushers them into the sanctuary of the temple complex’s walls, which encompass several city blocks on the otherwise completely urbanized island. Inside, visitors find a breathtaking collection of trees, bushes, flowers, and even woodland creatures. A few of the stately giant trees growing in the temple’s forest/gardens date back to the first century of the founding of Outport, when the Innocent Prince set aside the 20 acres of land as a nature refuge. Once beyond the foliage that hides the wall (from the inside), visitors can hardly believe they are in the middle of a city, and can even imagine the forest is natural, though it is kept in a state beyond what can usually be found naturally, by the temple’s caretakers. Tarabeth is a wood elf druid; her animal companion is a sailsnake named Clee.
15 Create the second priest of Fabian’s Garden in Outport
Maegera Chancey is a half-elven urban druid of Shialia in Outport. She originally hailed from Horizon Towers, where she gained fame as the founder of the Mended Gear chain of taverns. Later in life she became tired of the business, finding that her creation was becoming too lawful and organized for her tastes. Rather than dismantle it (which would have suited her fine, but would have disappointed many patrons and would have betrayed the many tavern owners who had put their lives into making the chain successful, not to mention the scores of impoverished people who relied on the chain’s charitable services), Maegera decided to fake her own death. After seeming to perish in a grain silo explosion at one of her chain’s main suppliers (who she paid off for the damage, in exchange for his silence), Maegera made her way down the continent to Outport, where she found a welcome place and blessed anonymity among the priestesses of the goddess Shialia’s famous inner-city forest. Maegera conducts tours of the grounds during the day, and runs the temple’s charity services in the evenings, drawing upon her years of administrative experience with Mended Gear. It seems that although she could leave the tavern chain behind her, she couldn’t shake her innate need to organize things.
16 Create the Third priest of Fabian’s Garden in Outport
Mogwurt is a slaad favored soul who serves Shialia in her temple in Outport. As slaadi are prone to chaotic mutations and variants, Mogwurt is no exception. She has horns which branch in random directions, nine points on the left side and thirteen on the right, though one could not call her rack “atypical,” since that type of antler structure is exactly what one would expect on horned slaadi. When she was a child, Mogwurt came to the Material Plane through one of the random portals that open in Limbo at chance intervals, which she explored out of pure curiosity. The portal dumped her in the middle of the Tilted Cup taven during a barfight. She made such a shocking entrance that the brawl stalled immediately, and no one could overcome their surprise sufficiently to carry on the effort. She took her interdimensional travel very hard, crying that she wanted to go home, and eventually getting herself tossed out by the tavern owner, who had never set eyes on a slaad before. Upon forcibly exiting the tavern, Mogwurt found the order and structure of the Outport urban environment painfully disconcerting. She was wailing in distress when two priestesses of Shialia came upon her, who took the orphaned child back to Fabian’s Garden to care for her and try to locate a way for her to get back home. Unfortunately, at the time none of the priests or priestesses at the temple had the ability of dimensional travel. Mogwurt was stuck in the Material Plane long enough to grow to love the temple and its grounds, and each of the clergy who served the goddess. By the time she had reached late adolescence, Mogwurt had decided to stay, no matter whether a way could be found for her to return home. She is responsible for some of the more fanciful and colorful combinations in the Garden, including the plantings of flowers in the crooks of the tree branches.