The Hardlow Woods

This dense woodland is packed with ground-hugging thorny bushes, and the terrain is virtually impassable in places. There are also small rocky rifts of up to 40 feet in depth in the western half of the woodland, making travel hazardous. Humanoids sometimes forage here, and there are rumors that larger predators like worgs make their home here. Creeping vines and Spanish-moss style tree parasites with trailing roots are also common in the Hardlow woods; no forestry or scavenging goes on here. This is the most isolated and neglected woodland in all of Haranshire.
There are many local rumors, with a hundred variations on the theme, concerning an evil priest and his followers (said to be assassins) who lived in the Hardlow Woods several hundred years ago, long before Milborne and Thurmaster were settled and populated. Only a handful of frontier farmers lived in the lands then. The priest is said to have belonged to a death cult. The priest and his followers were wiped out by Count Lothar Parlfray, a paladin, and his fellow adventurers. However, several of Parlfray's fellows were lost and the evil priest's dying curse blighted the woodland for nearly a hundred years-another reason why the locals avoid the place, being superstitious of any lingering effects of the curse. In particular, the fighter Dalraith was said to have been swallowed up in a pit of inky tar which drained his life away, so that his suit of magical gilded chain mail was lost with him.

Type

Woods