In 2,927 AC, a monk of the Path of Returning Waters named Shan Lian raised a monastery around an ancient cedar in the western mountains, guided — the story goes — by the kodama of the Great Willow. Yanagihama was founded to support the builders, then the monks, linked to the mountain retreat by the long Pilgrim's Path. Shan Lian's parting gift to the town was the Eternal Lantern, which has burned without fuel beside Dawnstep Bridge ever since.
After her death the monastery emptied, and the old daimyo turned the town to timber: bridges, the dam and its mill lake, the Northridge terraces, and the loathed lumber lords, who bled the town for the forge cities and entertained aristocrats on its back. In 2,969 AC woodcutters sent against the monastery's great cedar came home dead and walking — the Night of Splintered Steel — and the Pilgrim's Path has been shunned ever since.
When the Severing came in 3,013, the lumber lords fled and the garrison melted away. Yanagihama, remote and self-reliant, was spared the worst. Their abandoned estates rot on the ridge; the town lets the forest take them, which feels like the politest way to bury the era.
Yanagihamans sort themselves by riverbank. Southbank holds the founding families: traditionalists, farmers, keepers of the old ways, who think the jorogumo are monsters best avoided. Northridge holds the lumber-era arrivals: pragmatists and growth-minded merchants, some quietly open to whoever ends up ruling the province. Plenty of folk stand apart from both. The factions bicker about everything except what matters: when the town is threatened, Yanagihama closes ranks. (Your deeds will build reputation with both factions — your GM tracks this.)
Townwide notables: Governor Wen Zhao-Lin, the empire's forgotten and surprisingly decent administrator, whose manor doubles as the town's bank and treasury; "Granny" Seo Hwa-Yeon, retired imperial guard captain and the town's iron spine — there is very little that happens in Yanagihama that Granny Seo doesn't know about; and "Old" Tachibana Jiro, retired carpenter, family patriarch, Southbank's spokesman, and the town's living history.
Yanagihama — Settlement 4
N · Town · Isolated lumber town
Government Appointed governor (Wen Zhao-Lin)
Population 225 (73% humans, 6% half-elves, 4% halflings, 4% kitsune, 3% elves, 3% tengu, 2% nagaji, 5% others)
Languages Shenyan (Common), Jinghu, Elven, Halfling, Kitsune, Nagaji, Tengu
Religions the Imperial Shrine, Inarihime, the Widow of Ashes, Aishin, the Path of Returning Waters, others (small shrines)
Threats malicious spirits, ravenous vermin, struggling self-sufficiency, supernatural influences, territorial beasts
Teeth-Clenching Teamwork Yanagihama's residents help one another despite their differences. You can attempt to Request help from another Yanagihama resident even if they're indifferent or unfriendly to you, but you do so with a −2 circumstance penalty.
Reading the maps
The printed town and hinterlands maps come from the original published adventure, so a few labels differ from the names we use at this table: Willowshore = Yanagihama · Ceiba River = Keyaki River · Duyue River = Ayuri River · Tan Sugi Monastery = Okusugi Monastery · Gree Silk Peak = Kinugasa Peak · Eyes of Fumeiyoshi = Eyes of the Gaki · "To Karahai" = to Shiosaki. Everything else matches.
Numbers match the town map. Unlabeled buildings are homes, shops, and farmhouses — including, perhaps, yours.
W1. First Flame Ironworks — The town smithy since the monastery's construction days: cookware, tools, hinges, locks, and honest steel. Hagane Yuki (kitsune blacksmith) inherited the forge from her father a decade ago.
W2. Yanagihama Stables — Veterinary care for livestock and pets, plus animal rentals and tack. Owner Gong Sang-Hyun and his teenage son Mu-Yeong are famous for their affection for anything on four legs. (The stables' working livestock is also why most local households politely decline to eat beef.)
W3. The Imperial Shrine — A darkwood-trimmed shrine housing a small limestone figure of the celestial bureaucracy, shovel in one hand and trowel in the other — blessed, the story goes, in the great counting houses of Hú Guó before being ferried here.
W4. The Quiet Garden — The old cemetery, its urns dating to the town's cremation-practicing founders, kept immaculate by Yeo Su-Min (elf herbalist) — once a pilgrim of the Okusugi Monastery, now the town's source for elixirs, reagents, and herbs.
W5. Silverfern Lodges — Two woodland compounds south of town, their organic woodwork the legacy of eight Eirendor adventurers who settled here in the town's hungry early years. Their descendants remain; the lodges are the traditional gathering place of Yanagihama's hunters and rangers.
W6. Tachibana Estate — Old Tachibana's sprawling family compound, built to house two dozen relatives, its outer walls whitewashed with limestone mixed — the superstitious patriarch made sure — with blessed salts and holy water.
W7. Thrice-Lucky Inn — Founded as a brothel by three clerics (of Kazehana, Midorihama, and Tsukuyomi, naturally), converted to an inn when politics forced the issue. The owner, Mother Iva (genderfluid half-elf), kept the building on a legal technicality unearthed by the town's lawyer — and runs the warmest common room in the province.
W8. The Milling Houses — Fifteen mills — water, wind, muscle — ensure the town never wants for flour. The millers' leader Bae Han-Sol keeps morale high with stable wages, pushed-back quotas, and midnight snacks. This year's Reenactment Festival is his to run.
W9. The Nine Ear Shrine — From outside, a humble grain hut; below, a stone sanctuary housing a fifteen-foot marble nine-tailed fox of Inarihime. Fifteen years ago a mother of the Um family hid her baby here as a corrupt guard rounded her family up for execution — and a skulk of foxes surrounded the shrine until help came. That baby, Um Bo-Ra, now serves Inarihime here as a young priest; whatever people think of her family's old troubles, most respect her dedication. Fulus, scrolls, and talismans available.
W10. The Lady of Souls — The cathedral of Aishin, raised in the lumber era to keep the dead resting. Its priestess, Livia Marcanthe — Imperion-descended, from Hú Guó — visited Yanagihama once as a child and counts her posting here as the Veiled Shepherd's own design. She plays her flute among the graves to soothe the newly buried.
W11. Dawnstep Bridge — The town's heart-crossing, and home of the Eternal Lantern, the founder Shan Lian's undying gift. By provincial custom a town must keep a lit lantern at its entrance or crossing — an unlit town is an abandoned town, and abandoned towns invite things. Yanagihama, characteristically, keeps two.
W12. The Industrial District — The lumber lords' old workshops. Most closed when their masters fled; still working are Cloud Paper House (a paper mill run by Karasu Mina, tengu guild leader and senior bookmaker), Jadeite Essentials (a distillery), and Rebel's Leatherworks (a tannery). Mina quietly organizes the district's stranded laborers, whom the governor ordered to keep working after their employers vanished.
W13. Woodraft Lake — The dam's mill lake, which drowned the valley shrine of the Widow of Ashes when it rose. The town refused to relocate her shrine — a Widow's sanctuary under the water seemed exactly right — and treats the lake as hers. The governor who ordered the dam built died under a landslide on a cloudless day; draw your own conclusions.
W14. The Dam — A minor marvel of fitted grey marble with two great wooden gates; the wheel that opens them rings a bell to warn everyone downriver. Maintenance falls these days to the inventor at Second Best (W18).
W15. Downtown — The governor's manor (and bank, and treasury) stands northeast of the crossroads; south of it, the old imperial barracks, commanded by watch officer Jiang Wu. North stands the stage of the Seven-Colored Songbird theater, whose director Okabe Shun (kitsune) runs the weekly Cloud Opera and periodically auditions new performers. Nearby: Treesparrow's Rest, the family grocery of matriarch Natsume Sawa, and the Happy Kappa, the town's only public bathhouse, whose owner Ha De-Jun (halfling) is famously obsessed with cleanliness.
W16. Lin and Laws — The empire's laws, revised by generations of self-serving rulers, are a bag of contradictions — which keeps the independent lawyer Lin Su-Yin in steady work. Lured here by the lumber lords with promises of a quiet rural life, she found Yanagihama's legal tangles worse than Kumocho's, and her library has doubled accordingly.
W17. Mercantile Street — Two-storied red-brick rows housing the town's newer trades, chiefly the woodcarvers' guild — organized so the lumber lords could never play favorites. Elected guild leader Mok Eun-Ji is heaped with praise for her carving and would secretly rather be a painter.
W18. Second Best — Inventor Hou Jian-Yu arrived from Shiosaki five years ago with his blacksmith father, certain he'd show the "second-rate smiths of the countryside" how it's done. He was promptly humbled, stayed to learn, and named his workshop as a reminder. His clockwork gadgets have won loyal customers — and Hagane Yuki trusts him with the dam.
W19. The Hand of Spring — Until Doctor Maganda Dalisay arrived, the town made do with home remedies and traveling priests. "Doctor Dali" practices an unfamiliar mix of acupuncture, purified chemicals, and surgery — and charges by what the patient can spare, which has made him beloved faster than his methods have made him understood.
W20. Mother's Coil — A tower of dark basalt that appeared overnight fifteen years ago, to the town's lasting awe, when the nagaji wizard Asagi of the Coil bought a farmer's plot and unpacked. Asagi — a devout Midorihaman — took in Igarashi Kohana after false-merchant "parents" abandoned her in town, and raised her as their own. Asagi died last year; Kohana continues her adopted parent's arcane studies alone, and sells scrolls, formulas, and wands.
W21. The Keyaki-Ayuri Exchange — Warehouses and a trade office built at Governor Wen's order to grow the town's commerce with Shiosaki. The exchange manager, Han Gi-Woo (cleric of Kazehana), took the post on Granny Seo's "advice" — whatever Granny Seo has on him, he wasn't able to refuse.
W22. The Fisheries — Fish keeps Yanagihama fed; locals preserve the big ones and raise the small in backyard ponds. Foremost among the fish-keepers is Nezu (ratfolk fisher), whose uncanny nose for weather gives her catches an edge.
W23. The Dock — Built fresh at the Keyaki's mouth after the dam closed the old moorings. Run by Devan Sindhu (nagaji shipwright), hired by the Exchange for his boat-building skill; river boats for rent or sale.
W24. The Mushroom House — A remote brick farmhouse that smells of manure and discretion. Mushrooms aren't the only thing grown here: Orla Bramble (elderly halfling smuggler) can get almost anything, for the right price — with, it should be noted, Granny Seo's explicit blessing.
W25. The Cerulean Teahouse — The lumber lords' onetime pleasure-house, kept alive for years through sheer stubbornness by the aristocrat Mei Zhu-Lan — banquets, lodging, anything that paid. She died last winter without a will, her relatives all refused to move here, and the fine old building now stands vacant and slowly going to ruin.
W26. The Abandoned Estates — The lumber lords' manors, picked clean and left to the moss as the politest available way to bury their era. An abandoned shrine of Tsukuyomi sits in one of them, and more than one neighbor has wondered aloud whether someone ought to take the Moon Lord home rather than leave him bereft in the ruins.
W27. The Leshy's Saloon — The local leshies predate the town and joined it on their own schedule. Their tea farm and traveling tea-trade — brewed pots and teaware carried in rectangular bamboo packs — are a beloved town institution. Since the Cerulean closed, their leader Ridgeline Moss (agender leshy teamaker) has turned to crafting bespoke blends for favored customers.
W28. Bones of the Forgotten — Yanagihama's unkept burial ground for the marked dead: criminals whose Mark of Crime tattoo was carved into their very bones, so the stain outlasts the flesh. Recently, someone has raised wooden posts hung with paper shuriken over the unmarked graves — silent protest that some buried here died unjustly. Or perhaps insurance against a bitter ghost.
W29. The Great Willow — Atop the lowest of the Trimountains stands an ancient willow of unusual size, home to the kodama who — Shan Lian's own memoir says — guided her to the site of the Okusugi. Pilgrims and townsfolk alike pay it reverence; foragers sell what its hill provides.
W30. The Spider Gate — After the Night of Splintered Steel, the town demanded a second guardian lantern at its entrance. A departing aristocrat donated a giant stone garden spider; the town found it hideous, assumed it housed a guardian spirit anyway, and has long since adopted "Ugly Cute" as its beloved mascot. The lantern in her fangs is perfectly ordinary, and the town would fight you over it regardless.
Rolling forested hills rise west to true mountains; east, the Ayuri River runs down to the inland Sea of Ghosts, where Yanagihama's nearest real neighbor — the fortified market of Shiosaki — stands a long day's ride away. Closer to home: the Keyaki River and Dragonfly Creek; the Gorge of Fangs and Teeth, the old stone quarry; Gourd Lake, whose kappa expect offerings from fishers; Kinugasa Peak, the hinterlands' highest point; the barren sinkholes called the Eyes of the Gaki, where nothing grows; Mirror Lake; the abandoned Lumber Camp; the burnt-out Canary Inn; a lonely Hunter's Hut; the failed Old Village Expansion on its unreliable stream; and, at the end of the overgrown Pilgrim's Path, the ruins of the Okusugi Monastery — den, they say, of ghosts or worse.
The forest itself is the Yūreimori, and its reputation is earned — deer and boar by day, but wolves, black bears, giant stag beetles, and enormous spiders off the roads, and worse things after dark.
Six roads and trails leave the map: north toward fallow ruins and the night-blooming Moon Marsh; northeast to a bluff-top cattle ranch on the Sea of Ghosts; east-northeast through the deep Yūreimori toward tiny Foxhollow (three days) and eventually the Kibo No Taiga passes; east to Shiosaki, the town's lifeline to the world; northwest along a forgotten trail to a long-abandoned shrine; and south down the long "Apple Road," named for the wild grove that fruits gloriously every fall. The city of Kumocho lies beyond the mountains to the southeast — far enough away that its troubles, like all the province's troubles, feel like someone else's story.
For now.