Thundain Thursday: The Dumorian Darkwoods & Scornwood Forest

Every continent has places where civilization stops and something older begins. On Thundain, those places have names — and the two most significant are the Dumorian Darkwoods and the Scornwood Forest. They are not the same kind of dangerous, which is part of what makes them both worth understanding before you walk into either one.

The Dumorian Darkwoods

The Dumorian Darkwoods occupy a substantial stretch of Thundain's interior, sitting in the kind of geographic position that ensures they will never be fully cleared, fully mapped, or fully understood. They are old — older than the Republic of Thrane, older than the Thunder Rail, older than most of the political arrangements that currently divide the continent — and they carry that age the way old things do: heavily, and with a certain indifference to the concerns of whatever is currently living around them.

The trees in the Darkwoods are enormous. Not merely large in the way that old-growth forests are large, but genuinely, unsettlingly large — the kind of scale that makes a traveler feel like an insect moving through a cathedral built for something much bigger. The canopy is dense enough that midday looks like dusk at ground level, and the undergrowth has adapted to that permanent twilight in ways that are not always comfortable to look at closely.

What lives in the Dumorian Darkwoods is a subject of considerable debate among the scholars who study it from a safe distance. The short answer is: things that have been there long enough to become part of the forest rather than merely inhabitants of it. Fey creatures are common, though "common" is a relative term — common enough that experienced guides know to watch for signs of their presence, not common enough that encounters are routine. Stranger things have been reported by the few expeditions that have gone deep enough to find them.

The Darkwoods are not entirely hostile to travelers. There are paths — old ones, worn by use that predates any current nation — and those paths are generally safer than leaving them. The forest seems to have opinions about people who leave the paths. Those opinions are not always expressed immediately, which is somehow worse.

Several nations border the Darkwoods and have developed their own relationships with the forest over centuries. None of them would describe that relationship as comfortable. All of them would describe it as necessary.

Scornwood Forest

If the Dumorian Darkwoods are ancient and indifferent, the Scornwood Forest is ancient and aware. The distinction matters.

Scornwood sits in a different part of the continent, and its character reflects its position — it is a forest that has been in contact with human civilization long enough to have developed something that functions like contempt for it. The name is not accidental. Local tradition holds that the forest earned its name from the way it treats travelers who enter without proper respect: not with violence, necessarily, but with a kind of pointed, deliberate inconvenience that makes clear the forest's opinion of the intrusion.

Getting lost in Scornwood is easy. Getting unlost is harder than it should be, in ways that experienced woodsmen find difficult to explain. Paths that were clear on the way in become unclear on the way out. Landmarks shift. The forest is not large enough, by any reasonable measurement, to account for the amount of time people spend inside it.

The creatures of Scornwood tend toward the cunning end of the spectrum. This is a forest where the wildlife has had centuries to observe human behavior and draw conclusions from it. Those conclusions have not made the wildlife more sympathetic to human concerns.

There are communities on the edges of Scornwood — small ones, careful ones — that have worked out accommodations with the forest over generations. They know which trees not to cut, which paths to use, which seasons to avoid going in at all. They do not share this knowledge freely with outsiders, partly out of caution and partly because they have learned that outsiders rarely listen carefully enough to make the knowledge useful.

Two Forests, One Lesson

The Dumorian Darkwoods and Scornwood Forest are different in character but similar in what they represent: the parts of Thundain that have not been domesticated, that will not be domesticated, and that have their own ideas about what the land is for. For adventurers, they offer the particular combination of genuine danger and genuine reward that only places like this can provide. The things worth finding in either forest are worth finding precisely because most people who go looking for them don't come back with them.

Go prepared. Go respectfully. And if the path behind you looks different than it did when you came in — start paying very close attention to everything around you.

Thundain is the personal campaign setting of John Reyst, creator of d20pfsrd.com — the world's most popular free Pathfinder 1e rules reference, used by millions of Pathfinder players worldwide. Support John's work and get exclusive early access to Thundain content on Patreon.