Morgana was a witch who lived in the wizard’s tower at the edge of Freedale — see Morgana’s Tower. When the White Forest curse began creeping toward the town, Morgana went into the forest herself to fight whatever was causing it — and never returned. The Fallen found her body in her own basement in Session 9.
She was also, it turns out, a constructs engineer of real consequence: with her Academy colleague Verelda, she designed the guardian line that now stands watch across the Academy.
The Rumor — Confirmed
Locals said that when the cursed vines swallowed Freedale, they carried Morgana’s body back and left it at her tower — as if in mockery. Since then most townsfolk avoided the place, believing it haunted.
Approaching in Session 8, Aren’s pendant registered a strong undead presence beneath the tower. In Session 9 the party found out what both signs meant, and the rumor was essentially right — her body was in the basement, behind a door barred from the outside. The undead were ghouls that had gotten in and were feeding on her.
Her Death (Session 9)
The body in the basement is a woman, dead roughly two decades — skin and bones — though her remaining flesh had been eaten within the last few hours or days by the ghouls the party killed.
- Her face was covered by a mask over the eyes and brow. Red hooked a claw under it and pulled it free: hollowed-out eye sockets. The eyes had been gouged out before she died — not eaten afterward.
- Aren’s medicine check read the rest of the corpse: the remnants of a prolonged magical battle, spells hurled at her that wounded her over time. She died fighting, not ambushed.
- In her pocket, radiating faintly: the Guardian Command Amulet — her guardian’s “charm.” She was carrying it when she died, and it came home on her body.
- Aren spoke last rites over her so she might rest.
So: something in the White Forest fights with spells, and takes eyes. Whether the mask was placed on her by whatever killed her, or something she wore herself, is unknown.
Her Papers (Session 9)
Inside the tower The Fallen recovered Morgana’s own writings — a journal spanning several years and a letter to a colleague at the Academy. Together they are the closest thing yet to a firsthand account of the White Forest curse from someone who studied it deliberately.
The Journal
An undated entry near the back of the book — almost certainly among the last things she wrote before leaving.
- She had watched the forest through a scrying font in the tower for “the better part of a decade.”
- Her word for the trees is “wrong” — “not sick, not dying, just wrong, the way a face is wrong when it’s smiling and shouldn’t be.” Whiter every season, and the birds no longer land in them.
- She grew up in that forest — “before it was anything anyone in Freedale would recognize now, before the whitening, before the silence where the deer used to be.” She left when she was young; her childhood friend Yssa stayed, as she always said she would. Morgana never asked her why, and the guilt over it runs through the whole entry.
- She independently confirms Freedale’s omens: children vanishing and returning “as though no time passed for them at all.” Her conclusion: “Something in that forest is not just decaying. Something in that forest is reaching.”
- The fate of the coven is unknown to her — she doesn’t even know whether Yssa is still alive.
- Dia used to tell her an old story when she was small: someone who fell before anyone else ever fell — someone the forest itself is supposed to remember even if no one else does. She had always dismissed it as a tale to keep children away from the tree line. “I’m no longer certain of that.”
- She closes by naming what she did before leaving: sent what she knew to Verelda, asked the guardian to hold the tower, and went to look for herself — “because I don’t think anyone else is coming, and I am tired — genuinely, finally tired — of being the one who left.”
The Letter to Verelda
Written before the first frost, to Verelda — a colleague at the Biblioplex with ties to the Quandrix faculty. Warm, wry, and clearly a long correspondence between equals.
- The two of them collaborated on constructs: Verelda supplied the theory (an “animating lattice”), Morgana built them at her forge. The watchmen of the Biblioplex owe their design to this work — a fact both women deliberately kept from the Academy’s deans. (A quiet new wrinkle in the Session 3 Biblioplex incident.)
- On the curse: whitening trees, animals “behaving as though they no longer recognize this as home,” and now children. She had seen the edge of it herself, “from a safe enough distance to still call it ‘study.’” She judged that it would not stay at a distance much longer.
- Her instruction if she didn’t return: “If I am gone longer than a season, do not send anyone after me — send them after whatever I find instead.”
- She asked Verelda to keep an eye on the tower, noting that the guardian “answers only to its charm.”
Verelda’s Reply
A third document turned up in the tower’s foyer at the end of Session 9: Verelda’s answer, under the seal of the Academy, dusty and never collected. She argued with Morgana about going, asked her to write before doing anything past looking, threatened to send someone after her “on a very fast horse,” reported the third guardian still “holding steady,” and mentioned a Dean Lassette who laughed herself out of a dinner table over it.
Her closing line — “Write back the moment you’re able. I mean that” — sat unopened in the foyer for twenty years while Morgana lay in the basement. Full text in Sessions/Session 9.md.
The Tower’s Guardian
Morgana’s letter establishes that the tower is held by a construct guardian — the third of its kind she and Verelda built together.
- Early versions had an unstable temperament: one “nearly cleaved the poor delivery boy in half over a mispronounced password.” Verelda’s lattice correction fixed this; it now “holds a much steadier temperament.”
- She left it standing watch on purpose — “I’ve asked the guardian to hold the tower as it always has” — and expected it to still be there for “whoever finally comes to dust the place.”
- The “charm” is an object, not a word. The party spent Session 9 hunting a spoken password before finding the Guardian Command Amulet in her pocket. It is a shield guardian command amulet; Asha held it out, the construct scanned it, flashed green, and stood down.
- The guardian line is now a campaign-level lead. The tower’s construct is an older model of the same guardians standing watch at the Biblioplex — and per Asha’s history check, those guardians are posted throughout the Academy. Since each amulet binds one guardian, the Academy likely keeps a control room holding all of them.
People in Her Papers
| Name | Who they are | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Yssa | Childhood friend; they were “girls together in that forest.” She stayed when Morgana left. Presumably of the coven. | Fate unknown — Morgana herself didn’t know |
| Verelda | Academy colleague at the Biblioplex, connected to the [[Quandrix College | Quandrix]] faculty. Theorist behind the guardians’ animating lattice. Morgana sent her everything she knew. |
| Dia | Told Morgana stories in childhood; source of the tale of the one “who fell before anyone else ever fell.” | Unknown; likely long past |
Session 10 — Her Network Outlived Her (August 26, 2026)
Hundreds of miles north, in Pentamarone, The Fallen met a young glassblower in the market who fled Freedale as a child during the curse — and who knew Morgana’s name.
- Morgana told her family where to go. She was “relatively prolific” and had connections with many different covens and guilds, and she kept a list of places she considered safe havens for people fleeing the curse. Pentamarone was on it. The glassblower’s family survived because of it.
- She had worked with Madame Verre — head of the WitchCrafters — “in the past,” on something the glassblower couldn’t name.
- Told that Morgana was dead, the woman’s response was simply: “A great witch.”
This adds a third dimension to a witch previously known as a recluse who studied a forest and built constructs with an Academy colleague: she was networked across the witch world, and she used that network to evacuate people ahead of the curse. It also gives the party a live lead — Madame Verre knew her, and may know what she was working on.
(She was also, per the glassblower, the reason Freedale’s survivors ended up in an Empire border city at all — the refugee population of Pentamarone is partly Morgana’s doing.)
Session 11 — Or Was It Rellyona? (September 9, 2026)
Over drinks in Pentamarone, the WitchCrafters’ masters were asked what they knew of the White Forest coven. They knew the curse and knew a coven had lived in the forest, but nothing of what became of it. One detail came loose along the way:
“I think I’ve heard there was a witch in a town near the forest who sometimes worked with Rellyona, if I remember correctly.”
The party confirmed she meant Morgana, and told them she was dead.
This complicates Session 10. The Freedale glassblower remembered Morgana working with Madame Verre; the guild remembers her working with Rellyona, Verre’s long-dead predecessor. An insight check said the witches are telling the truth as they know it.
Either Morgana’s association with the guild spans both women — which would make her much older, or the relationship much longer, than assumed — or the distinction between Verre and Rellyona doesn’t mean what the party thinks it means. See Madame Verre.
Significance
Morgana is the first known individual to have deliberately gone into the White Forest to confront the curse — a lead on both the curse’s nature and what became of those who tried to stop it.
Her papers gave the party a decade of firsthand observation of the whitening, the claim that the curse is “reaching” rather than merely spreading, and the existence of a coven contemporary (Yssa) who may still be inside the forest. Her body gave them something sharper: proof that whatever is in there fights back with spells, and wins.
Her legacy is also unexpectedly practical. She left The Fallen a working scrying pool, a teleportation circle, 500 gp of spell components, and a war construct they can command — and, through the guardian line she built with Verelda, a structural weakness in the Academy’s own security.
Open Questions
- Who gouged out her eyes? Taken before death, and her corpse shows a prolonged magical battle. Something in that forest takes eyes.
- The one “who fell before anyone else ever fell” — the forest is supposed to remember them. Party speculation ties this to The Seeker of the Sinful Spoils (the winged, taloned woman of Asha’s dreams), but nothing in Morgana’s papers names her — this is theory, not canon. See Dia.
- Verelda holds a copy of Morgana’s research — “I’ve sent what I know to Verelda, in case my instruments say more than I do.” She is at the Biblioplex, reachable, and does not know Morgana is dead.
- Yssa and the coven — Morgana couldn’t say whether any of them survived the whitening.
- The abjuration infusion circle in her workroom — she was warding something in her final months. Against what?
- The mask over her eyes, and how the ghouls got into a basement barred from the outside.
- The password was never tested. The party’s best guess remained Yssa; the amulet made the question moot at the tower, but the word may still matter.
(Resolved in Session 9: the “charm” was an object, not a password; the undead beneath the tower were ghouls feeding on her body; her font was found intact on the second floor.)
Related
- Morgana’s Tower — her home, and now a party asset
- Freedale — her home town; her tower stands at its edge
- White Forest — where she grew up, where she went, and where she died
- Yssa · Verelda · Dia — the three people named in her papers
- Guardian Command Amulet — the “charm,” found in her pocket
- Biblioplex — its watchmen descend from her and Verelda’s guardian work
- Aren Greycloak — detected the undead beneath the tower, and spoke her last rites
- The Fallen — broke into the tower at the close of Session 8; cleared it and found her in Session 9
First Appeared
Session 8 (July 22, 2026) — named by Freedale’s tavern-keeper; the party entered her tower the same session. Her journal and letters were recovered, and her body found, in Session 9 (July 29, 2026). (Never met alive; confirmed dead ~two decades.)