The village takes its name from the small woodland encircling it, a sheltering ring of trees that breaks the worst storm winds. This wood is tended and protected by a vigorous druid circle known as the Talkers to the Trees. The Talkers prevent reckless cutting by leading a band of foresters and personally overseeing all harvesting of the forest’s bounty.

Because of both the woodland and the druids who care for it, Kirinwood has developed several distinctive local products. The village produces large quantities of fern-and-mint wine, a green drink that clears the throat like an icy winter gale and tastes, to some palates, rather like chewing spruce bark. The villagers also brew a fiery mushroom ale, sold for 5 silver pieces per hand keg and widely judged worth three times that amount. For the same price they also sell wagonloads of mushroom gravy in hand kegs, a commodity eagerly sought by restaurants up and down the Dragon Coast.

In addition to these specialties, merchants will find all the usual produce of the farm country here. Corn, oats, and wheat are brought to Kirinwood’s three mills and from there to the village market, where they are sold alongside eggs, alfalfa, poultry, and fruit. Kirinwood lies in the heart of Cormyr’s apple country and is also near the western bogs that yield bushels of raspberries and blueberries, many now gathered by the gawl crawler method. This innovation, borrowed from Surkh on the Deepwash, uses hungry green worms to eat berry stalks after baskets have been placed beneath the bushes, causing the fruit to fall cleanly into the baskets with less labor than hand-picking, though the lowest berries do get somewhat crushed.

All this makes Kirinwood an excellent place to buy food in bulk and of no small interest to travelers curious about druid-guided forestry. Yet for all its produce, orchards, and mills, the village’s one truly famous curiosity is the Falling Tower.

Places of Interest in Kirinwood

Unique Sites

The Falling Tower

This remarkable structure might more properly be called the Tower That Will Not Fall, for it has been “falling” for centuries without ever completing the descent.

The Falling Tower was once the seat of the Kirinar noble family. Ardest Kirinar, finding his home too remote from the power struggles of central Cormyr, sought influence by founding both a college of wizardry and a brotherhood of mages that he hoped to control. The scheme ended in disaster. Rival and ambitious spellcasters fought a duel that destroyed the college, most of its lesser students, the entire Kirinar family, and Ardest’s dream alike. It also obliterated the lower floors of the tower.

What remains is the upper bulk of a large, square timber tower, its upper floors ringed by alternating clock faces and oversized bay windows, floating some sixty feet above the ground. Powerful magic still holds it aloft. From time to time it drifts a little from side to side or turns slightly when buffeted by heavy flying creatures or strong winds.

Adventurers occasionally explore the mostly empty structure. Purple Dragon patrols check it regularly to ensure that stirges or other flying monsters do not claim it as a lair. On several occasions, visiting adventurers have left behind ropes hanging from the lowest floor, and Kirinese youths have dared to climb up for play and exploration. As a result, several rooms have been burned out, and anything small, portable, and easy to find has long since been stolen.

Hidden Secrets

Not everything has been found, however. Hidden closets and secret passages are still being discovered in the tower, and locals advise searching every pillar, since most of them reportedly conceal some kind of hiding place. Somewhere in the drifting dark of the tower there is also said to be a gate that, when activated by the proper trigger, transports the user to the subterranean citadel of the lost mage brotherhood.

Since the battle that ruined the tower supposedly consumed the warring mages in devouring fire, one might assume that this underground citadel has never been plundered. Yet strange evidence suggests otherwise. From time to time mysterious floating severed arms and shattered weapons appear inside the tower, suggesting that some adventurers are indeed finding their way to the hidden citadel—and that something there is still defending it. A recent minstrel’s ballad tells of many-limbed snakemen armed with scimitars who can cast spells while fighting. Because the song is recent and the first mention of such guardians, it may simply be colorful invention.

Shops

Galandor’s Glassworks

Glassblower and Lensgrinder

This modest shop makes use of the fine white sand found in ridges north of Kirinwood to produce glass beads, marbles, and small figurines. The marbles sell particularly well to thieves, who scatter them behind themselves to make pursuers slip and tumble.

The proprietor, Galandor o’ Galandor, is a dwarf nearly as tall and fine-featured as a man; his family has intermarried with humans for some five generations. Every living member of the Galandor family works in the shop, and the family is widely loved and respected in the village.

The Galandors are especially famed for two things. The first is their custom lenses, made for those with failing sight. These are ground to individual need and sold to nobles and wealthy folk in both Cormyr and Sembia for thousands of gold pieces apiece. They also offer ready-made lenses in assorted strengths for 500 to 1,000 gp. The second specialty is a line of ornamental glass birds and other small figures that contain air chambers and finger holes so that they can be played like tiny ocarina-like instruments. These usually sell for 40 to 60 gp each.

One unnamed temple in the Vilhon Reach recently commissioned sixteen blown-glass dragons with channels through their bodies so that incense smoke could drift from the creatures’ nostrils and open jaws.

The Galandors’ workmanship is of the highest quality. While waiting for wares, clients are entertained in a comfortable seating area where they may sip herb tea or mild mushroom ale. Around this space hang various temptations for the purse: beautiful glass wind chimes, hanging drift sculptures, and in particular a striking arrangement of glass blades in descending sizes.

Restaurants

The Old Troll’s Foot

This dim, rather rustic establishment is owned by Orbrar of the Talkers, one of the senior druids of the Talkers to the Trees. In keeping with his outlook, the restaurant has been made to resemble a sort of forest glade. Ambulatory fungi are used liberally on the bark-and-vine-draped walls and ceilings, and these are supplemented by driftglobes that drift freely from grotto-like chamber to grotto-like chamber.

The menu is dominated by agricultural and vegetable fare. Dishes range from cold potato soup to spicy asparagus-and-artichoke bean broth. Roast boar appears only when boar meat is brought in from elsewhere or when Orbrar allows one of the very few Kirinwood boars to be slaughtered. Bacon and wild wood sausage are more reliably available, though both are so heavily herbed that they can overwhelm less adventurous palates.

The restaurant’s special dish is, naturally enough, Old Troll’s Foot. It is not, of course, troll flesh, but rather a secret preparation of forest roots, mushrooms, herbs, spices, vole meat, and beef from especially venerable cattle. It is, by all accounts, delicious—but it costs 5 gp per serving.

Most diners are well advised to accompany it with fresh bread, fiddlehead butter, and berry crumble tarts, the latter a sweet, gooey mixture of local berries. The ideal drink with such a meal is either firewine or glowfire, both served here. The firewine is astonishingly hot. The staff claim that it is aged for a full decade after purchase before a keg is opened, which they say is the secret of its smoothly blazing potency.

The Old Troll’s Foot is worth a visit for no other reason than the chance to say one has drunk earthworm-and-bark tea.

Taverns

The Unicorn’s Pool

This tavern takes its name from a local legend that a family of unicorns once regularly drank from—and dipped their horns into—a pool on this site, thereby rendering its waters equivalent to a potion of sweet water. The druids assure visitors that this tale is nonsense, but the tavern remains an excellent place to drink, and its curtained booths are especially recommended to travelers of discriminating tastes.

The Pool offers a full assortment of popular drinks, most of them sold in bulk, usually by the hand keg, so that buyers can entertain companions on the spot or carry away what remains once they are capable of standing again. Persistent local rumor insists that a mind flayer and a lich are regular patrons, always attended by capable, heavily armed human bodyguards to discourage attack. I am told they can be found in their favorite booths on most nights.

I saw both figures, but one longtime patron insisted they are actually mischievous dopplegangers. According to this story, they invite folk to drink with them, loosen their tongues, gather useful secrets, and then sell such information at a profit.

Inns

Daliver’s Door

Daliver’s Door is a pleasant inn built around the idea of privacy. The walls drink sound, and the suites are separated by little winding corridors and closets arranged so that one chamber’s entrance cannot easily be seen from another. These features, combined with the low lighting, make the place ideal for trysts and paid romantic company, though they can also make it something of a maze for an ordinary traveler.

Guests who are nervous about spies or enemies should be warned that the same layout could hide a small army. It is known for a fact that several wall tapestries contain spyholes used by the staff, and one guest complained of hearing giggles from unseen observers while entertaining a local lady in his room. It would not be surprising if there were peeping places even in the bed hangings.

Yet for all that, Daliver’s is one of the very few inns in the damp coastal lands that remains truly warm enough for open-shirted comfort in winter. Its handsome proprietor, Daliver, is a somewhat-retired adventurer who employs three tall, immensely muscled bouncers to keep order. By their looks, one might guess there is gnoll blood somewhere in their family lines.

Thanks to those bouncers and the layout of the house, Daliver’s Door offers a degree of quiet, exclusive accommodation rarely found outside monastic establishments.