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So, last night my group took out Dyr'ryd and shut down the Tree of Shackled Souls using the collar that they got from Moltenwing. It was a pretty fun encounter; they had previously gotten Grehlia to help them and show them where the tree was, and basically raced straight there. Shutting down the tree alerted the remaining baddies (Fish & Ardeth, plus Ti'irok and his many flamewarder minions), who all rushed in a few minutes later. It was an epic encounter, and somehow they all made it out alive (barely).
Anyway. They made some knowledge (engineering) checks about the tree, and realized that it's made out of adamantine with a mithral core. They then realized that these are very precious and expensive metals. See where this is going?
Has anyone else had this issue? Anyone know how much the tree might weigh, or how much of these metals might be in that beast? I don't think I have a problem with the party being particularly wealthy; they are 16th level PCs after all. Then again, I don't want them to end up with billions of gold.
Think of what that tree had been doing - sucking souls to power a massive gate to an infernal plane. That metal is cursed. If they can't figure that out by themselves, let them sell parts of it or make stuff out of it. Being a rat-bastard DM, I would rule every product of that metal cursed, possibly haunted, with the souls of shackleborn drained by the tree.
And no, remove curse wouldn't cut it. Wish or miracle would be required to untaint that tree, possibly from an epic-level caster.
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Cursed metal, excellent idea.
It reminds me of "Halls of the Mountain King" from Wolfgang Baur's Open Design.