Mournwood

The Mournwood is an ancient, sprawling wilderness nearby the Sundered City of Wretinridge (Wretinridge Overview.)

When the heavens wept fire and the great meteor cleaved the world and split the city (Astral Descent), an arcane pulse swept across the forest - saturating it with raw, untamed magick. The forest absorbed the pyschic anguish of the citizens who died in the calamity, tumbling to their deaths when the cloud-island was raised into the sky. The roots of the trees drank deep of the trauma, twisting the wilderness into something darker - a forest reborn in sorrow and corrupted by the cataclysm's fallout.

Now, the Mournwood is a place of both the grotesque and the wondrous, where time holds no sway and the laws of men crumble like brittle parchment. Time bends and loops within the wood; a traveler may lose days in a single step or emerge only minutes after a journey lasting months. Its canopy, an oppressive tangle of blackened oaks and ash, smothers the light, leaving the forest floor in perpetual twilight. Beneath this shroud, the air is thick with decay and the sickly-sweet stench of rotting vegetation. Spore-laden fungi the size of a man’s torso glow faintly in hues of pale green and ghostly violet, releasing clouds of hallucinogenic mist that drown the mind in delusions.

The heart of Mournwood is a labyrinth of shadowed glades and choking brambles. Here, nature reigns supreme, red in tooth and claw. Predatory beasts, their eyes gleaming like distant stars, stalk the unwary. Strange, twisted creatures born of ancient magic and malice prowl the depths. To the east, the forest dissolves into foetid marshes, where the ground sucks at your boots and every step threatens to draw you into a watery grave. Craggy hills rise to the south, their jagged peaks silhouetted against the ever-looming storm clouds perpetually crowning the forest. In the north, Mournwood sprawls toward a jagged coastline, where cliffs give way to the open void and the winds carry the distant cries of sky serpents and cloud kelpie.

Yet it is not merely the beasts and the land itself that make Mournwood so perilous. Ancient powers stir beneath the loam, primordial forces that predate mortal comprehension. The forest whispers in a language older than stone, its voice carried on the moaning winds and the groan of ancient trees. Forgotten gods and slumbering horrors are said to dwell in the hidden places of the wood - their presence felt in the unnatural silence that sometimes falls - or the sudden, unnerving sense of being watched. For those who seek the arcane, the Mournwood is a beguiling realm of intrigue and peril. Hidden among its shadowed paths are secrets to unmake kingdoms and magics potent enough to bend the will of gods. But the forest exacts a heavy toll. Many enter Mournwood seeking power or salvation; few return, and those who do bear its mark—a haunted look, an aura of quiet dread, and scars that run far deeper than the flesh.

To enter Mournwood is to step into the scar of a broken world, where the boundaries between reality and nightmare blur, and the weight of cosmic despair presses heavy on the soul. Those who linger too long risk losing themselves entirely, their minds shattered and their bodies transformed into extensions of the forest’s dark will.

Source / Inspired by: Charles Ferguson-Avery, Into the Wyrd and Wild & Gavin Norman/Necrotic Gnome, Dolmenwood
AI Art by Midjourney

"Beyond the reach of roads, past the scope of mortals there is a darkened place.
A shadowed treeline where no-one dares cross and whose boundaries go undisturbed.
With the pace of civilization, we seem to have forgotten an ancient fear.
The fear that forced us to band together in the dark, the fear that led us to build mighty walls, and the fear that shaped us with tooth and claw.
This is the fear of the Wilds, the unmapped forests and wilderness beyond our homes and between our destinations.
However, despite our ignorance, it has not forgotten us."


Between the twisted trees and poisoned mires, a thousand monsters spawn and stalk in lightless groves.
Mages wield dark and strange magics, too raw and dangerous for the civilized world;
ruins of long dead civilizations are host to ancient beings, better left undisturbed;
and an army of madmen and mutants prowl the shadowed trails and pathways,
ever in service to primal gods or savage instinct.


This is not the woods of peaceful fae and beast, but the dark and twisted children’s tales that filled you with terror.
It is a world of fear, madness, and bloodshed; ruled over by the uncaring watch of ancient trees.
There is no bargaining with the primal forces that rule the uncivilized world, as you have nothing they could ever want.
The woods do not care for you.
Never forget that.