Sunflower Market - Encounter Town Map

# Background Lore

There is a small and apparently unremarkable little town a few days south of the capital city. The town is barely more than a score of houses surrounding the Southern Road. Decades back, the small town of Greenroad was nothing of interest. It was only a farming town and not even an important one. Most farms there consisted of subsistence farming operations. What little extra they produced was sent north to the capital but it was nothing of substance.

Things are different now that Greenroad features the Sunflower Market; a one-week long festival that happens once in spring and once in autumn. Greenroaders harvest the beautiful oversized sunflowers from nearby fields and sell them to visitors and tourists. The festival comes to life during the night when the recently bloomed flowers attract great numbers of fireflies. The small town becomes the host of a wondrous spectacle of moving night lights.

It is a mystery how the festival came to be, or what the real origin of the particular strain of sunflowers that they sell during the festival. The locals do not bother explaining any of these conundrums. Worse yet, they encourage people to share many legends and myths that explain the origin of the flowers. Not all of those can be true, as some of them contradict each other, however. The most popular explanation goes like this:

About forty years ago, a dryad and her father tree were magically transported to the material plane after both worlds aligned during the winter solstice. The dryad, Agariah, wanted to go back but she was tied to her tree, which had no way to move. Agariah studied the foreign night skies of the material world for weeks to try to predict the next alignment which would let her return. She discovered that the next time the skies would align in the same way would happen in thousands of years. She sunk in sadness at the knowledge that she would never see her loved ones again. Her lifespan was only as long as her tree, and it would probably not last that long. She laid down by her tree and slept. Agariah never woke up again. Her body decayed, the magical fibers of her body became part of the soil and food for the next generation of plants. A bed of beautiful oversized sunflowers sprouted from her dying place and spread around the area, close to Greenroad.

Whether this is true or not, the locals encourage that legend as it mystifies the town and brings more people each harvesting season when the festival happens. During the festival, locals and some traveling merchants show their wares and try to sell anything they can. With each passing year, more people come to enjoy the festival or profit from it. Nowadays, it is guaranteed that a performing company or two will be present to showcase their plays and musical talents.

Download a free version of this map and read what we wrote for it on our [Blog](https://www.elventower.com/209-sunflower-market/).