This hamlet of about 70 folk is located on the north side of the mouth of the River Chionthar west of Baldur’s Gate. Its stone houses nestle in a natural bowl in the cliff top overlooking the river, and a warning beacon is maintained on the cliff top to alert Baldur’s Gate to attacking ships. In fact, the name of the settlement comes out of its history of being attacked by sea. Of old, pirate raids on Baldur’s Gate were numerous. Ulgoth was a stout, bristle-bearded pirate of great girth and greater reputation. The beacon was said to “singe Ulgoth’s Beard” by robbing him of surprise so that the raiding force he led was met by ready resistance and hurled back with the loss of many pirate lives, including Ulgoth’s own. (He tried to use a ring of flying to escape the fray and was last seen heading out to sea, his flying corpse bristling with twenty-odd arrows.)
The hamlet consists of sheep-herding families, who keep their sheep on the rolling grasslands behind the cliff, and some fisher-folk, who transport their boats up and down the cliff by means of a cradle of massive cables. None of them are wealthy. The Beard lacks a road link to the interior, though pack mules have an easy journey over the grassy hills to and from Baldur’s Gate. There’s no tavern in the Beard, though one resident brews his own dreadful ale and sells it at 1 cp per tankard. Ulgoth’s Beard also has no inn, but travelers can camp out in a ruined keep just north of the hamlet, on the lip of the bowl. The keep was once home to a cruel pirate lord, Andarasz, and legends speak of undead lurking in the storage caverns beneath the keep. All of the storage caverns have already been searched by many eager pirate crews over the years.
Beneath the wizards house is a small stone hut fitted with double doors. This is the entrance to his own extensive network of caverns, where several monsters loyal to Shandalar – living mushrooms, locals swear! - shamble about in the darkness harvesting mushrooms. The mage makes a steady income growing his “shrooms” for the tables of Baldur’s Gate. Some apothecaries in that city dry them and sell them whole or powdered for use in cooking, healing, or the enchanting arts. Shandalar has a huge variety of mushrooms and sells them for as little as 1 cp per handbasket (for plain brown garnishcaps, used mainly in beef stews and pies) to as much as 5 gp each (for deadly poisonous gloomshrooms, favored in the making of poisons, flesh-numbing physicians. unguents, and blindness healing ointments).
Most of Shandalar’s sales come from the garnishcaps and two other cooking mushrooms: small white rock buttons (2 cp per hand basket) and succulent frilled felarndon ’shrooms. Shandalar’s three beautiful daughters (and, it is rumored, apprentices - see below) take a floating disc of these into Baldur’s Gate’s market daily. Shandalar is known to have agreements with powerful pirates and outlaws. He keeps certain treasures safe for them in the hidden depths of his mushroom caverns in return for steep annual fees (1,000 gp per chest).
Elminster says the daughters are his apprentices, warns that Shandalar rivals Khelben “Blackstaff” Arunsun of Waterdeep in power, and that his daughters are no slouches as mages either, and further says that the mushroom caverns contain at least one gate to elsewhere in the Realms (just where, he’s not certain). The guardians of the caverns include myconids, as the locals say, but they are also home to mechanical spiders of the wizard’s own making and even more dangerous predators. Several bands of thieves have died failing to evade them.
