Forgotten Moors
"Come, come, and Antilis will guide you, my new friends. This place is not so unsafe as its stories, for how could I or my neighbors live here if it was. I promise you it is safe enough, provided you stick with me. And please pay no mind to the shadowy movements within the mists. Tricks of the mind, you have my word of honor." You hear a slight cackle, humored yet you almost detect something else in the tone from the strange halfman before you, as she flicks open her revolver, insuring all five shots are loaded. "Though just in case, perhaps avoid making direct eye contact with them, aye?"
Some 80 to 100 kilometers south of the national capital of Kelethan, uncomfortably close now in this day and age, one would notice a rather harsh but transitional terrain change. Trees becoming more gnarled and twisted, brush and undergrowth becoming thicker, more aggressive, more obscuring. Fog thickening, the ground beneath their feet softening into muck and mud, with pools of watery muck becoming ever more common. One cannot say for sure when one crosses the threshold, as it were, to truly leave well patrolled and occupied Depenwood, however what is certain is within one hundred to one hundred and fifty kilometers, one will have left the reach of any authorities or enforcement within the nation, and have fully entered the twisted, misty, tangled, dangerous and confusing region known simply as the Forgotten Moors.
Geography
Kel'vinshi Ruins by Keon Croucher (discord name, drizzt103) was the input operator, Midjourney AI took those inputs and put the image together.
"Do not trust anything resembling a road or wagon tracks. Be suspicious of every footprint if you see any at all. The deeper you go, the more the terrain itself will seek to fool you. A cursed place, this, for deep within the mists, so it is said, hide not one but two World-Wounds. Or, if you wish the best advice of an old elf who's half lost his mind can give you, just don't go off into that Ascended Forsaken place! The things you'll see....the parts of yourself that place will consume....it isn't worth it. Trust old Wyloth on this, if you are wise."
A very old elven hunter, bitter and deep in his cups.
The Forgotten Moors are, as one might be inclined to realize, best described as a temperate to cold swamp or marshland, though one dominated by gnarled and twisted forests, with the grounds all between them covered in strange creeper foliage that seems to feed off the swampy, marshy muck. No true pools or stagnant bodies of water dominate the space here, the vegetation is still quite thick, but in some places the ground is so soft, slimy and wet you will sink to your knees (if you are a human sized individual, so one can imagine the dangers for halfmen or gnomes), though best of luck to any trying to discern which regions are soft and more liquid than dirt from just eyesight alone. There is also a near constant mist that gets thicker and more....energetic the deeper into the Moors you go, as shadows within it, strange tricks of the light, become more and more common. Or at least what one should hope are strange tricks of the light.
The Moors cover quite a large area, and despite their obvious lawless status, they are not unclaimed, merely lost. Though the details or the location within the Moors are not known, it is generally accepted knowledge and well understood that the Moors are the result of one, if not two, World Wounds within the deepest bowels of the region. This explains their slow, almost creeping engulfing over the decades, and the tendency to get darker, more twisted, and dangerous the further into them one is foolish enough to go. It also explains the few first hand accounts of the strange unspeakable denizens, creatures with far to many appendages, beings seeming as much plant and mud as flesh and bone, strange terrors and worse stalking the deepest regions of the Moors. It is also generally accepted knowledge that somewhere within the region, perhaps sunken and lost forever, perhaps not, lays the remains of the sacked and desecrated village of Kel'vinshi, likely amongst others. Some even theorize the that the ruins of Kel'vinshi may be one of the centers, a location of a World-Wound, given the atrocity and heresy committed there an age ago.
Comments