Factionplotline: In Nature's Footsteps
After 300 years of lockdown, the Herd of Oriria emerges not as conquerors but as one of the few groups that truly kept life alive in the city. Centered at the great lake yet spread across a network of seasonal camps throughout The grove, they claim the district through stewardship, ritual movement, and long memory. They are open, communal, and willing to teach, but they are also vulnerable.
Long before the magical storm, that way of life was already under pressure. The Ivory order settlers had begun occupying prepared camp sites used by the Herd in their seasonal rotations, treating cyclical presence as weak claim and temporary absence as vacancy. The Herd kept trying to teach, host, and absorb outsiders into a gentler relation to The grove, but those efforts met only mixed success.
The magical storm transforms The grove into one of the most strategically important spaces in zyrokhil. Ancient flora reawakens, magical growth returns, and the district becomes a living corridor between factions. At the same moment, the Herd loses its peacemaker: Oriria is killed soon after the storm in an attack by Tharion’s Ivory order group. With their leader dead, captives missing, child-targeting beginning, and their buried sins rising from below, the Herd fractures fast.
Their story is not about nature reclaiming the city through pure ideology. It is about a people who kept life going, only to be punished by every side once that life becomes valuable again.
Plot points/Scenes
During the Closed Gates Period, the people who would become the Herd of Oriria survive in the remnants of the city’s gardens, parks, and green districts. Without magic, they preserve plant knowledge through discipline, seed-saving, oral history, scavenged irrigation, and a careful seasonal pattern of camps throughout The grove. Their central base lies at the lake, but their true claim to the district comes from repeated movement and stewardship across its full breadth.
They remain unusually open to outsiders. They feed, teach, trade herbal knowledge, and try to keep alive a relationship between people and land that the rest of the city increasingly treats as irrelevant or backward. Tlacopani lineages, most of whom are animalfolk, are folded into the Herd’s identity, making them visible targets in a city already shaped by hierarchy and suspicion.
In the last years before the storm, that openness is increasingly exploited. Ivory order settlers begin claiming and occupying prepared seasonal camp spots. The Herd answers this pressure mostly with patience, teaching, and attempts at coexistence, but the strain is already there before the first magical bloom.
In the starving years after the gates first closed, Jentay, an ancestral mother-figure of the Herd, used the Sredil Malheur plant to feed the children of Coinsquare. It kept people alive, but it also carried transformative properties that would later produce the human-plant zombie hybrids.
Then the storm comes. Magic floods back into The grove. Dormant plants surge awake. Ancient routes become overgrown corridors of power. And before the Herd can stabilize this reborn land, Oriria is killed in an Ivory order attack.
Act I: The storm breaks what was already strained
- The storm awakens The grove, making its flora richer, stranger, and far more dangerous.
- Jentay rises from her slumber as a gigantic tree-plant zombie, and with her the other Sredil Malheur infected in Coinsquare. They scatter into the flourishing Grove, while Jentay herself flees into the Sewers beneath the city with a group of other infected.
- Oriria dies soon after in an attack by Tharion’s Ivory order faction, shattering the Herd’s center of trust.
- Some of the Herd who flee the attack on the base camp are taken captive by the Ivory order in the Crane’s, leaving kin networks broken and making it unclear who is alive, missing, or held.
- The grove becomes a strategic corridor overnight, turning an already pressured homeland into a prize every faction now wants to control.
Act II: The Herd fractures fast
- Without Oriria, the Herd loses not only a leader, but the person most committed to patience, teaching, and coexistence.
- Old tensions harden quickly: some want to hold to Oriria’s openness, others want strict territorial defense, and others conclude that kindness has only invited invasion.
- Paths once maintained as seasonal routes become militarized, trapped, watched, or overgrown into dangerous thresholds.
- The Court of gems begins targeting Tlacopani children after the storm, stealing them into its own systems of control and severing family lines.
- Encounters with plant-zombies begin in and around The grove, the Sewers, and the water routes tied to the district, further isolating the Herd in the eyes of the city.
Act III: Blooms and Thorns
- Some camps remain sanctuaries and teaching sites, while others harden into defensive enclaves around routes, shrines, and seed stores.
- Magical plant growth strengthens The grove and gives the Herd real leverage, but using that leverage risks confirming every fear others already have about them.
- The grove’s living corridors begin affecting trade, troop movement, and communication, forcing the other factions to treat the Herd as a political power whether they want that or not.
- The Ivory order frames the Herd as unstable and dangerous, using isolated incidents and the zombie outbreaks to justify deeper incursions.
- The truth begins to surface that the plant-zombies are tied to Jentay’s desperate use of Sredil Malheur after the gates closed.
- The Commune and Bowlscrapers begin interacting with the poisoned consequences of Jentay’s past, making the Herd’s hidden history part of a wider city crisis.
Act IV: Strangling Vines
- The militant parts of the Herd encounter the Sredil Malheur not only as a buried sin, but as a possible answer, and some begin to revere it as the only force still willing to protect them.
- These radicals try to forcibly claim or convert the more peaceful side of the Herd, including attempts to infect them with Sredil Malheur.
- The Herd’s internal fracture becomes open conflict between stewardship, survival, and transformation.
- The Court of gems continues to seize Tlacopani children, while the Ivory order deepens its encroachment under the justification that The grove is no longer safe.
- The question is no longer whether the Herd will radicalize, but which parts of it can still be pulled back.
Act V: Wild Bloom
- Wider Tlacopani wild magic begins to spill outward into the city as bloodlines, magical growth, and ecological instability intensify together.
- The grove’s conflict stops being local and becomes a citywide struggle over movement, territory, children, and magical legitimacy.
- Jentay’s legacy spreads through the water and undercity, allowing plant-zombie outbreaks and poisonous growth to destabilize The bowls and beyond.
- The rest of zyrokhil increasingly treats the Herd as proof that magical resurgence itself is a threat, justifying harsher occupation, abduction, and extermination.
- If unchecked, the city creates the very radicalization it fears: not because the Herd began as extremists, but because every side taught them that stewardship without force is punished.
End state if nothing is done
- The Herd fragments permanently into camps of healers, defenders, and converts of the Sredil Malheur.
- The grove hardens into a lethal frontier corridor where passage depends on factional allegiance, local knowledge, or brute force.
- Ivory order settlers and Court kidnappings turn the Herd’s defensive struggle into a generational blood feud.
- Tlacopani bloodlines become both hunted and unstable, feeding wider panic across the city.
- Jentay’s legacy spreads through the water and undercity, allowing plant-zombie outbreaks and poisonous growth to destabilize The bowls and beyond.
- In the end, the city turns the Herd’s homeland into the center of a war between stewardship, settlement, and monstrous rebirth.
