This halfling village lacks an inn or tavern, but it is the nearest settlement to the adventurers’ lure of Durlag’s Tower, and so it often serves as a supply base for intrepid explorers of the tower. This situation pleases the local halfling priests, who are often called upon to heal for hire, which enriches the community. It’s otherwise a sleepy, unremarkable place of shepherds, wool weavers, and other farmers. Gullykin’s own claim to fame is less well known than Durlag’s Tower, but is as valuable to adventurers whose luck is with them. Gullykin stands hard by the site of Firewine Bridge, an elven trading town destroyed in a sorcerous duel so mighty that it changed the course of a stream so that there’s no reason for a bridge of any sort these days. The duel leveled the town and left a large wild magic area that persists today, some 200 winters later, just east of the wood lot and fishpond that marks the eastern edge of the halfling village. It stretches north as far as the honey renderers’ shack in the north wood lot and as far south as the brewery (a building shared by all the halflings, who gather on its steps for a smoke and a chat in good weather).
Firewine Bridge today is simply a stretch of overgrown rubble, a fallow field used by no one. The local halflings warn visitors not to camp there or dig in the field, but don’t do anything against those who do, except to watch in case some buried danger is unleashed. Local legend says some of the folk of Firewine didn’t perish in the spell battle, but were transformed into frogs, slugs, flatworms, lizards, turtles, and the like, and trapped in those forms. Some may still survive. For this reason, locals don’t kill small crawling things. Some lass once inadvertently freed a wizard, one local tale goes, and ended up marrying him. Firewine Bridge has yielded up magical treasure, mostly small trading items such as magnetic, nonrusting nails and spikes, small crystal spheres that glow with continuous inner light (hue and intensity never varying), triple-spiked lightning wards (belt-worn devices that force lightning bolts away from the wearer), sparkstones that can be commanded to produce fire-igniting sparks whenever desired, and glass guardeyes (single eye cusps that once a day can be made to reveal all weapons on the body of any being, that is, the location and outlines of all items the target creature thinks are weapons).
Somewhere at the bottom of one hole is the way into an underground complex of linked chambers, once the cellars of a trading company, said to hold riches heavily guarded by golems and other magically animated creatures. The only way to pass these in safety is to use a ward token, which the locals all say they lack. However, such tokens often turn up elsewhere in the Coastlands, for sale at an asking price of several thousand gold pieces. One is pictured in this guide below, but I must warn travelers that it may not be the true pass token!
