What follows is a bit of a collaborative effort between one group of my players and I. During our osr-ish 5e Vymrrys campaign I've been running for a bit over 3 months now, I began introducing an NPC character(s) the group took to calling "Soup Ladies". In their starting neighborhood of the city, they stumbled upon an mute old woman who runs a soup and bread storefront in a quiet little alleyway. Throughout their first few in-game weeks in the city, they would frequently stop by the Soup Lady's store to purchase a few containers of soup (stored in small wooden flasks corked at the top) for both rations and healing (1d4-1) purposes.
As it turns out, they've discovered two more Soup Ladies, who look identical. At first they were convinced that it was actually the same old woman who runs multiple stores. I originally had no plans for this throwaway NPC, but the group really latched onto this idea of the Soup Ladies being twins, clones, or something more weird and nefarious. So below I present our combined efforts: the Benevolent Monoclonal Humanoids (aka Soup Ladies).
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Benevolent Monoclonal Humanoids (aka Soup Ladies)
Hidden somewhere among the Myrtacean Graves along the coastline North of the Pearlescent City sits a small but dense grove of trees not found elsewhere in the known (or unknown) world. These particular trees exhibit a high degree of canopy shyness, and are easily identifiable by their multi-braided trunks and gracefully drooping branch systems. Despite their seeming litheness and fragility, the trees are immensely strong, and should an adventurer climb one, they will find that even the thinnest branch can more than support their weight.
The other key identifying feature of this grove of trees are the ovular golden pods that hang from many of the branches. Each pod is roughly 4 feet long and 3 feet wide, with a surface that shimmers brilliantly in the sunlight that filters down through the tree canopy. Like the leaves, the pod's otherwise smooth surface is interrupted by a network of slightly-darker veins that extend down from the pod's connection point with the branch. While each tree would seem to be a distinct organism, the few scholars that have visited the area have shown that they are all connected via a shared root system, making the grove a single, massive monoclonal being.
What is not known by any scholar is what those shimmering, beautiful golden pods contain: despite several efforts, they can not be disconnected from their trees by force or magic, and all pods that have been found on the ground were split in two and empty when discovered.
In fact, each pod contains a single clone of what would appear to be an old woman, silent and stoic, awakened when her pod detaches from the tree and falls gently to the forest floor. When the pod splits and the clone emerges, she quickly proceeds into the surrounding myrtle forest and using thousands of years of clonally-transferred knowledge, gathers materials with which she can craft a large urn. Once the urn is complete, the clone taps her tree of origin and fills the urn with its sap. The old woman, stronger than she appears, hoists the urn onto her back and chooses a direction in which to walk.
When the clone finds an area of civilization she will attempt to set up shop and use the tree sap to make a delicate and delicious soup, each batch of which is identical to the last. It is not known why they do this, or what they do with the money they collect in the process. The soup itself is a gentle golden broth, always the perfect temperature for drinking slowly. When the stock of sap is finally depleted, the clone will make her way back to the grove, where she will burrow into the ground, her body joining with the root system and eventually sprouting a new tree.
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