The Heart of Darkness
The Flaywilds
The Flaywilds are massive forest stretching over the heartlands of the Eightpoints. The home of monsters, deranged cults and lurking predators, it has largely been left to its own devices for centuries. However, with the crash of the Seraphon Temple-ship the Xo’axtu, rapid and uncontrolled mutation has spread through the forest like wildfire. Paths open and close in the night, drawing unwary travellers into their boughs. Long-buried secrets are being uncovered. The forest itself is being choked out by the daemonic jungle emanating from its dark heart.
Into this green hell, the Coalitions must march if they are to reach the ruins it hides. Some of the locations here will be explored in greater details in the opening Paths of the campaign. However, there is much more to discover and unearth in time.
The Wyrmtongue River
A sprawling waterway that winds its course through the jungle. It is one of the few easily navigable paths across the Flaywilds, but because of that it is also one of the most dangerous. Many have sought to use its concourse for their own ends, and those that live upon its banks guard it ferociously.
Drawn as ever to the impending conflict, tributaries of the Ur-river have opened above and below the Wyrmtongue’s length, their realm-spanning magics bringing mercenaries, heroes and killers like pirhanna to the scent of blood in the water.
The Four Pyramids
During the descent of the Xo’axtu, four Celestial Pyramids broke from its side and and fell into the sprawling forest. Home to ancient star gods, these pyramids are some of the few landmarks that rise above the forest floor and make navigation in the jungle possible. Each will be explored in more detail during the campaign, yet for now they serve as markers and rough regions within the Flaywilds.
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The Pyramid of Tzunki
Duskholt Reach
A wide stretch of river, shallower and slower- moving. Not quite a lake but close.
Dozens of small sandy islands with knots of scrubby trees are scattered across it. Brinegrave A dead mangrove, roots submerged in salt water. Large salt crystals encrust the trees and make crossing arduous and unpleasant.
The Mire of Whispers
A haunted swamp. The trees are infused with skulls and the spirits of the dead. The gheists whisper false prophecies, cursed secrets and lies of betrayal.
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The Pyramid of Tepok
The Menhir Coil
A spiraling ring of stone monoliths, twisting inward and down into a valley around a sinkhole. Seen as both a forest tomb and a sacrificial altar.
Wyrdroot Hollow and The Veins
A long steep-sided ravine, stretching east-west. The massive tree roots worming out of the cracked stone are twisted and distorted into leering faces, which appear contorted as if in pain. The roots drink deep from the gurgling Varanite stream that bubbles malevolently along the floor of the canyon.
Wyrmstirge
Pillars of basalt tower over the forest canopy. Huge winged serpentine beasts nest on their peaks and flanks.
The Crown of Boughs
The forest canopy, high overhead, blocks out all daylight, leaving the deep forest beneath in darkness, save for their luminescent fruits that ripen unpredictably for just a few days before they shrivel and die.
The Root Gates
A knotted wall of enormous trees with a high arched opening. Ichor drips from wounds in the bark.
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The Pyramid of Chotec
The Wyrdbirth Womb
A marsh flooded with tainted blood that mutates any who fall into it. Very little of the Womb represents stable landmasses that rise above the deadly fluids, connected to one another by a handful of surviving, rickety bridges and boardwalks of wood and bone erected by the local ogors. The Womb-Gut Butchers consider the Womb a holy place, the first site where their daemon god-beast Typhoraxia battled the vicious pretender Bahuq’Tlan, spilling one another’s blood, viscera and body parts.
The Wyrdspine Mountains
A small mountain range, spanning much of this region with a number of unique features along it. Despite the heights the mountains reach at times, the Flaywilds’ aberrant trees still manage to take root and swell to enormous sizes, creating an upper canopy of branches thick as highways that wrap around one another to create narrow paths to wage war upon. The Wyrdspine’s caves and ravines are filled with countless dangerous predators, as are the forest floor and dense lower canopy. While the branches of the lower canopy restrict large creatures and especially flying vessels, the upper canopy is sparse enough to allow large creatures, like wyverns and gryphons, and even smaller Kharadron flying vessels to navigate.
The Smokemire
A dark and stinking swamp, with highly flammable gasses bubbling up from the water. Flamespurts illuminate the smoky fog from within. A burned clearing around a single tree that blazes with infernal fire. Seen as holy ground.
The Cinderfangs
A group of needle-like metalith islands that hang in the humid air a few hundred feet above the forest floor. Smoke eddies around them in lazy spirals.
Cold Embers
Stunted scrubby trees cover rolling wind-swept hills. The valleys between are cloaked in stinking fog that smells of burning flesh. The soil smokes as if fires burn beneath. The peak of each hill is marked by a standing stone scored by diagonal burns that look as though etched by intense focused heat.
The Obsidian Spear
A huge shard of black volcanic glass juts from the ground at an angle. It might have been hurled by some battling god in ancient times, embedded into the forest like a javelin.
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The Pyramid of Itzl
The Thornfather’s Court
A vast overgrown briar of thorny vines thicker than a man’s torso, with needle-sharp claws. The narrow twisting footpaths that wind almost at random through the Court often lead nowhere and double-back on themselves.
Interwoven briar blocks out almost all light from above. The darkness within is free from undergrowth & small plants. The earth around the trunks is hard-packed & barren. The silence there is broken by something that sounds like hushed conversation, but just beyond comprehension. A malignant intelligence dwells within the Court, worshipped as a god by some It has many names: Thornfather, Old Spiker, The Darkness that Pierces the Soul.
Uzornath
A hilly region peppered with jagged stone outcrops and riddled with dozens of (possibly interconnected) caves. Aggressive and hungry predators lurk in the darkness below the forest.
The Runefane
A towering headstone, taller than the surrounding trees. Hundreds of rotting corpses are piled around its base and trophies hang from ropes wrapped around it - fragments of battered armour, shredded banners and flags, and other more gruesome items.
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The Ruins of the Xo’axtu
Harrowfast
A barely-discernible circular curtain wall is the last shattered remnant of a vast stone fortress once known as Hallowfast. Tumbled moss- covered stones, strangled by thick tree roots.
Slime runs down the walls of the old keep. The gatehouse is split clean in two, the left-half leans at a 45-degree angle. The other structures within are nought but piles of overgrown stone and rotting timbers.
Severed Hand Valley
A thickly wooded vale between four low hills which once bore fortresses that watched over a town in the valley. But long ago, the people of the town turned on their erstwhile protectors and tore down the castles from within.
Bleakstones
An expanse of broken, rocky ground. Very little plant life grows here, the soil is sewn with salt and poisoned blight.
