Stream

Small, fast, clear water running down from hills and woods, never far from shade. It chatters over stones, gathers in little pools under the roots and smells of moss, cress and cold rock. Trout hold under its stones, crayfish hide beneath them, and dippers walk straight into the current to feed. People drink from it, wash in it, set mills on it and use it as a boundary between fields and parishes. A stream is easy to cross most of the year, but a storm in the hills can turn it brown and loud in an hour. The clear, stony brooks of the Jura are streams of this kind.

Hear it

• By day: Forest Stream (On Patreon, Guardian tier)
• At night: Forest Stream At Night (On Patreon, Guardian tier)
• Rapids: Mountain Rapids (On Patreon, Guardian tier)
• A waterfall: Small Waterfall in a Forest (On Patreon, Guardian tier)

Adventure hooks

1. A poacher has tickled the same enormous trout out of the stream three times and let it go each time, for luck. The lord has now put a prize on it, and the poacher wants nobody else to catch it before the fair is over.
2. A stream has always marked the boundary between two parishes. This spring it moved twenty paces east in a single night, and the parish now on the wrong side includes the priest’s house.
3. A child keeps finding small wooden boats in the stream, carved with care, each with a tiny painted face. They come from upstream, from a valley where nobody has lived since the plague.
4. The brook that turns a fulling mill has run red since dawn. The fuller blames the dyer upstream; the dyer has not worked in a week, and nobody has seen him in two days.

What grows here

• Broadleaf Cattail (herb). A wetland plant of 1.5 to 3 m with broad strap leaves and a brown sausage-shaped seed head, always in or beside shallow water. It grows across Eurasia and North America and more locally in Africa and South America, from sea level to 2,300 m. Nearly every part is edible, and its leaves thatch roofs and seat chairs. Food of: Horse. Gives: Cattail Rhizome, Cattail Leaf, Cattail Pollen.

Animals

• Hippopotamus (man-killer, in herds, by night)
• Green Anaconda (can wound or kill, alone, at dawn and dusk)
• Eurasian Beaver (dangerous if cornered, in families, by night)
• Eurasian Otter (harmless, alone, by night)

Kept here

• Water Buffalo (can wound or kill, in herds, day and night)

To gather

Cattail Leaf, Cattail Pollen, Cattail Rhizome, Eurasian Beaver Pelt, Eurasian Otter Pelt, Buffalo Hide, Buffalo Milk, Eurasian Beaver Castoreum, Green Anaconda Fat, Hippopotamus Hide, Hippopotamus Ivory, Hemlock Stem, River Pearl Grit, Electric Eel Gland, Sturgeon Roe

To fish

Freshwater Crayfish, Ice Char, River Mussel, River Trout, Grayling, Singing Minnow

Nearby biomes

River, Lake, Pond, Spring

Open it in Biomes — MGS Toolbox