Drowned Forest The World of Greyhawk & The World of Greyhawk Wiki The current year for our World of Greyhawk campaign is set during 579CY. Inspired By Gary Gygax

Deep within the Viscounty of Salinmoor, the Drowned Forest stands as a haunting testament to nature’s decay. What was once a verdant woodland has been swallowed by the encroaching Hool Marshes, leaving behind a skeletal landscape of gray, rotting timbers that jut like jagged teeth from the black, stagnant mire. A heavy, perpetual miasma clings to the forest floor, born from the meeting of warm marsh mists and cool sea air.

This thick haze is more than mere fog; it is a choking soup of spores released by the massive, multi-colored fungi and bloated mushrooms that have replaced the lush foliage of old. These spores are so dense they frequently blot out the sun, casting the entire region into a twilight of sickly greens and bruised purples. The silence of the woods is deceptive, broken only by the wet schlorp of boots in the mud or the distant, rhythmic gurgle of gas escaping the peat.

Every step feels like a struggle against the very earth, which seems hungry to pull the living down into its cold, anaerobic embrace. Beneath the surface, the water is a graveyard of submerged roots and ancient, waterlogged trunks that wait to snag the unwary.

Unnatural life flourishes in this tomb of trees. Shambling mounds, indistinguishable from the rotting heaps of vegetation until they strike, prowl the murky shallows. Twisted blights—animate, thorn-covered husks of what used to be healthy saplings—skitter through the upper reaches of the dead canopy, their movements jerky and predatory.

Near the center of this rot, the atmosphere grows heavy with the stench of ammonia and sulfur. Massive puffballs, the size of houses, pulse with a dim, internal rhythm as if they were the forest's own diseased lungs. Here, the ground is no longer mud but a carpet of yielding, white mycelium that feels uncomfortably like treading on flesh.

At the forest's dark heart lies a festering wound: an abyssal portal born from the corruption of a twisted decanter of endless water. This rift, dedicated to the Demon Queen Zuggtmoy, leaks foul energies that fuel the forest's rapid, fungal transformation. Here, the air is thickest with the smell of wet rot and ancient malice, as fungal thralls—former explorers and cultists—wander aimlessly, their bodies host to the Lady of Fungi's parasitic whims.

The sounds here shift from the natural to the horrific. The groaning of the dying trees begins to mimic human voices, a cacophony of wooden shrieks and whistling wind that drives the sane to madness. Overhead, the sky is entirely obscured by a canopy of interlocking fungal shelves, creating a claustrophobic tunnel of shadow that stretches for miles in every direction.

For the people of nearby Saltmarsh and Seaton, the Drowned Forest is a place of superstitions and nightmares. It is the most dangerous corner of a province already defined by misfortune and gloom. To enter is to risk becoming another silent monument in a woods that never stops drinking, where the only thing that grows is the corruption of the Abyss.