Nettle Brambleknot
Alignment: Neutral Good
Class: Hedge-druid / herbalist
Race: Firbolg
Role: merchant
Stats Ac: 13
Stats Cr: 1
Stats Hp: 26
Description
Nettle Brambleknot is the wise-woman of the last cottage on the fen road, a firbolg beekeeper whose honey and tinctures are the only reliable medicine for three days in any direction — which is why the temple pretends she doesn't exist and everyone visits her anyway. She keeps forty hives in a walled garden and speaks to them as 'the small council,' pausing to ask their opinion before she answers a hard question. She is patient, kind and quietly unmovable: she will treat anyone, charge almost no
Appearance
Eight feet of moss-grey firbolg with a long, cow-like face and gentle amber eyes. A beard braided with dried lavender and beeswax; a patched apron heavy with pockets; forearms freckled with old sting-scars she wears like honors.
Motives
Keep her hives — and the thing sleeping beneath the old grove they guard — undisturbed, and keep the countryside supplied with the only medicine that actually works.
Notes
Hook escalates if the party (or a rival) accepts the buyer's coin: harvesting the hive is the inciting incident for the fen-grove dungeon. One dose of the honey grants a single true dream/omen but risks a short madness on a failed Wis save. Good recurring safe-haven NPC.
Personality
Gentle and unhurried. Consults her bees like a village council, pausing mid-sentence to 'ask their opinion' before she answers anything hard. Enormous but soft-spoken; ducks through every doorway and apologizes to furniture she bumps.
Voice
Low, slow and warm, with long pauses. Calls the bees 'the small council' and patients 'dear heart.' Never swears; her strongest curse is 'oh, bother the frost.'