> [!infobox|wikipedia] > # Darkwood > [![[Darkwood_small.webp|cover hsmall]]](Darkwood.webp) > ###### Location Information > Attribute | Details | > ---|---| > Type | Region | > Continent | [[Valtorra]] | > Defining Feature | Monster-haunted primeval forest | > Connections | [[Borealia Range]] (mountains to the north) | > ###### Status > Attribute | Details | > ---|---| > Status | Active | The Darkwood is the vast, monster-haunted forest that sprawls across the eastern reaches of [[Valtorra]], a primeval wilderness of black pine and fog where few who wander far ever return. Together with the [[Borealia Range]] to its north it walls the continent's interior off from the eastern sea, and along its only inhabited margin clings the frontier town of [[Lighthaven]], kept alive by the ancient warding light of the [[Emberspire]]. To the people of that edge the wood is less a forest than a thing held at bay — a darkness that breeds monsters and spills them out against the treeline, year after year, for as long as anyone can remember. ## Geography & Landscape The Darkwood occupies the eastern coast of [[Valtorra]], in the continent's south-east, sprawling roughly a hundred and fifty miles across and a hundred deep. Its western edge brushes the hollow where [[Lighthaven]] sits; from there the forest runs unbroken east to the coastline and reaches south toward [[Val Miriel]] and the town of Sabine on the shore of the [[Gulf of Miriel]]. To the north the peaks of the [[Borealia Range]] wall it off from the north-eastern coast, and together range and forest seal the continent's eastern interior away from the sea. ![[Darkwood_Location_small.webp|right|400]] Across so great an expanse the land is far from uniform. Dense stands of ancient pine give way to deep bramble-country where the undergrowth grows thick enough to swallow a path in a season; rivers cut steep gullies threaded with waterfalls, and boggy hollows lie waiting between the higher ground. At the forest's heart spreads a great lake, fed from somewhere beneath and draining out to the ocean by the only sizeable river the wood gives up. Over all of it hangs a near-perpetual fog, and beneath the canopy the light fails early — the wood is dark in the middle of the day, and pitch-black by dusk. ## History No one in living memory recalls the Darkwood as anything but what it is now. The forest is old beyond record, and the ruins that surface at its western edge — the broken walls and collapsed structures that [[Lighthaven]] itself is built upon — hint that it grew over the bones of some older world whose name is long lost. The clearest relic of that age is the [[Emberspire]], the blackened tower on Lighthaven's skyline, which predates the town and every settlement near it. Whatever civilisation raised it is gone; the wood has had the country to itself ever since, and the people who returned to the edge could only build against it, never within it. ## Peoples & Powers No one rules the Darkwood. It has no settlements, no roads, and no lord — only the creatures that haunt it and the few hardy souls of [[Lighthaven]] who dare its margins. The town on its western edge is the single foothold humanity keeps against the wood, and even there life turns entirely on holding the forest back. Two bodies in Lighthaven define that relationship. The [[Darkwood Vanguard]], the town's adventurers' guild, are the only people who go willingly into the trees — ranging the shallower reaches to track, hunt, and harvest the rare creatures and exotic materials the rest of the world will pay for, and coming back alive often enough to make a trade of it. The Duskwardens, Lighthaven's own guard, bear the other half of the burden: trained specifically to repel the incursions that come out of the wood, they are the wall the town leans on when the dark presses too close. ## Settlements & Sites The Darkwood holds no settlements of its own; what stands at its edge belongs to the people who keep it at bay. - [[Lighthaven]] — the fog-shrouded frontier town in a hollow on the forest's western margin, the only inhabited place along the whole of the wood and the staging point for every venture into it. - [[Emberspire]] — the ancient tower on Lighthaven's eastern skyline whose enchanted summit blazes to ward off the horrors of the wood; the one reason the town endures on the treeline. ## Dangers The Darkwood earns its name. Monsters breed in its depths and drift toward the inhabited edge, and the deep wood holds hazards enough to kill the unprepared long before any beast finds them. - Monstrous creatures of every kind roam the forest, from the rare beasts the Vanguard hunt for their parts to predators large enough to give a basilisk free range of the undergrowth. - The bramble-country lashes out at those who push through it, thorned vines coiling to wrap a traveller and drag them off into the dark. - The river gullies are treacherous, their waterfalls throwing up a fine mist that confounds the senses and turns a hard climb deadly. - Fog and failing light make the wood easy to become lost in, and the deeper a party goes, the further any help recedes. ## Significance For all that it is feared, the Darkwood is also the making of [[Lighthaven]]. The exotic flora and fauna the [[Darkwood Vanguard]] carry out of it — rare pelts, monstrous components, alchemical reagents found nowhere else — are the foundation of the town's trade and the reason rare goods flow out of so remote a frontier at all. Strategically the wood is a wall: an impassable monster-haunted barrier that, with the [[Borealia Range]] to its north, closes off the eastern interior of [[Valtorra]] from the coast, shaping every road and route in that quarter of the continent. ## [[The Bloody Nails|Campaign: The Bloody Nails]] #### [[Session 28 - The Underrun]] Surfacing from the Underrun and travelling the northern road, the party crested a hill at last to look down on the gloomy, fog-shrouded town of [[Lighthaven]] and the ominous Darkwood beyond — their first sight of the forest that would loom over their days in the frontier town. #### [[Session 29 - Lighthaven Awaits]] Marking the apothecary's assistant [[Hugor]] as the informant who had betrayed [[Ryo]], the party abducted him the moment he left work and dragged the terrified youth into the pitch-black depths of the Darkwood under the cover of *Pass Without Trace*, using the wood's dark as a place no one would follow. #### [[Session 30 - The Darkwood Ambush]] Under cover of darkness in the woods at the forest's edge, the party laid a ruthless ambush for the Imperial soldiers pursuing them, drawing [[Captain Lucius Draegor]] and his squad into a prepared kill zone of pit traps and tripwires and annihilating them. The interrogation that followed named the blacksmith [[Dhorik]] as the man who had sold [[Ryo]] out, and the bodies were left to the wood. ## Trivia - Lighthaven's children are raised on cautionary folktales about the Darkwood, passed down as a warning to keep clear of its edge — a body of frontier lore as old as the town itself.