The Lightning-Struck Tree

Page ID

event:222e750d-95cb-4950-a6e0-b4c2ead49ebe

Source files

events.json

Revisions

1

Download JSON

{
  "event": {
    "options": [
      {
        "outcomes": {
          "failure": {
            "text": "The shade is inviting, but the ground is covered in sharp glass fragments from the fulgurite. You sit on what you think is a clear spot and immediately feel something poke through your pants. Glass, everywhere. Comfort denied."
          },
          "success": {
            "text": "You sit in the shade and eat. The breeze through the remaining canopy is the closest thing to comfort you've felt all day. Near the roots, you notice a small seep - water, barely a trickle, but clean. You fill a container."
          }
        },
        "skill_requirement": {},
        "text": "Rest in the tree's shade. Cottonwoods mean groundwater - this is a good spot."
      },
      {
        "outcomes": {
          "failure": {
            "text": "The fulgurite shatters the moment you try to extract it. The formation looked solid but had internal stress fractures from the thermal shock. You're left holding a handful of glass splinters and a lesson about gentle hands."
          },
          "success": {
            "text": "You dig carefully around the base and extract a tube of fulgurite - sand fused into glass by the lightning strike. It's about thirty centimeters long and perfectly hollow. Fragile, but intact. Collectors and crafters pay well for natural glass."
          }
        },
        "skill_requirement": {},
        "text": "Examine the fulgurite at the base. Lightning glass has value if the formation is intact."
      },
      {
        "outcomes": {
          "failure": {
            "text": "You identify the greenish tint as possible copper content, but when you test the surrounding soil by taste - a common prospecting technique - all you get is a mouthful of dirt. The copper signature in the fulgurite might be from a source that's already been leached dry, leaving nothing economically viable at the surface."
          },
          "success": {
            "text": "The fulgurite has a greenish tint - copper content in the local sand. That means there's likely a copper deposit within a few hundred meters, leached into the topsoil over millennia. You take a sample of the fused glass and scan the surrounding terrain. Sure enough, a low ridge fifty meters east shows the distinctive blue-green staining of copper carbonate on exposed rock."
          }
        },
        "skill_requirement": {
          "smelting": 3
        },
        "text": "That glassy crust - the mineral composition of the fulgurite tells you about the soil chemistry here."
      }
    ],
    "text": "A massive cottonwood - rare in this terrain - stands at a bend in the trail, split almost perfectly in half by a lightning strike. The wood is charred black along the split, and the ground around the base is fused into a glassy crust where the strike superheated the sand.\n\nThe tree is still alive on one side. Birds are nesting in the upper branches, unfazed by the destruction below.",
    "title": "The Lightning-Struck Tree",
    "type": 2,
    "uuid": "222e750d-95cb-4950-a6e0-b4c2ead49ebe"
  }
}