Location
Temple of Wisdom
Gellana Mirrorshade's sanctuary of Garl Glittergold
A gem-bright temple of Garl Glittergold inside the Friendly Arm, founded and led by Gellana Mirrorshade and protected by layered gnomish illusions.
General description
The Temple of Wisdom is a low, broad building within the Friendly Arm's walls. From outside it looks deliberately modest: sturdy stone, a shallow roofline, small windows, and a well-kept entrance that gives away little of the glittering sanctuary within. Inside, polished walls are studded with gemstones and raw gold nuggets so that lamplight breaks into scattered sparks of color. The decoration is devotional rather than ostentatious, celebrating craft, wit, luck, and the hidden value of things that appear ordinary at first glance.
Reference details
- Region
- Sword Coast
- Settlement
- Friendly Arm
- Faith
- Garl Glittergold
- Establishment Type
- Temple and community sanctuary
- Proprietor
- gellana-mirrorshade
Key facts
- Gellana Mirrorshade established the temple and remains its ranking priestess.
- Gellana commonly wears a circlet of gems as an outward sign of her devotion.
- Several overlapping illusions discourage theft and make unauthorized movement through protected portions of the sanctuary difficult to interpret.
- Unlike many small gnomish sanctuaries, the temple openly welcomes human supplicants and has converted several travelers to Garl Glittergold's faith.
- Gellana also oversees the Friendly Arm's deep wells, gardens, herbs, and much of the settlement's practical food-and-water planning.
- Traveler's nickname
- Human visitors sometimes call the temple the Shrine of the Short. Regulars know better than to use the nickname mockingly in Gellana's hearing.
History
Gellana established the sanctuary after she and Bentley Mirrorshade helped reclaim the abandoned keep that became the Friendly Arm. The temple grew alongside the inn rather than before it: a place for worship, healing, counsel, and the practical stewardship needed to keep an isolated fortified waystop alive. Its openness to non-gnomes reflects Gellana's belief that good judgment and good humor are not racial inheritances.
Inside the sanctuary
The main worship space is intimate rather than grand. Gem chips, raw nuggets, tiny mirrors, cunningly cut glass, and polished metal catch every flame. Some apparent doors are decorative. Some blank walls are not. Small devotional objects are placed where visitors are expected to notice them only after looking twice, reinforcing Garl Glittergold's themes of wit, discovery, and value hidden in plain sight.
Illusions and security
The temple's defenses favor confusion over slaughter. A trespasser may find a corridor apparently lengthening, a doorway moving to the wrong wall, valuables seeming to vanish, or a pursuing priest appearing where no one is standing. For play, treat these effects as layered deterrents and alarms rather than a single puzzle with one mandatory solution. Gellana can deliberately relax individual protections for invited guests.
Role in the Friendly Arm
The temple is part chapel, part clinic, part storehouse, and part civic anchor. Gellana uses its rooms for private counseling, marriages, blessings, minor healing, and meetings that need more discretion than the inn's common room can provide. Its wells and garden records also make it a useful place for a DM to put information about shortages, unusual contamination, visiting pilgrims, or changes in the settlement that might otherwise have no obvious witness.
Using the Temple of Wisdom
Use the temple when the party needs a quiet counterpoint to the Friendly Arm's busy inn. Gellana can provide religious context, practical local knowledge, discreet healing, or a neutral room for difficult conversations. The illusion wards also make the temple a useful scene for a nonlethal intrusion, a test of trust, or a mystery in which the physical layout itself cannot be taken at face value.
Also known as
- the Temple of Wisdom
- Shrine of the Short
- the Shrine of the Short