Blights

Once areas of natural beauty, Blights occur for still-unknown reasons, but their effects on the land are always the same: a withering or greying of vegetation, a fouling of waters, and a sudden inexplicable, violent aggression in all wildlife.

Some claim that Blights are the work of the Eidolon, but most sages deny this, saying that their cause, while no less dark, can only be the work of the living, not the dead. Lost artifacts, malign in nature, have been known to cause Blights, but some sages correlate their locations with terrible deeds in the world’s past, such as the falling of an Immortal’s blood, the death of a Beast of Legend, or the genocide of an ancient Tribe.

BACKSTORY

Usually they’re places to be avoided, but the studious loremaster may be able to dig up items of power at the center of blights, if they can survive the trip, as at the twisted, poisonous core of most Blights is an Artifact which has been draining energy from the earth for a long, long time.

Blights exist from the Age of Myth onward.

BUILDING

Blights are easy to build, as they’re simply heavily corrupted but entirely natural area. Take the Tolkien approach - the further towards the center you go, the more the area leans into its scariest and most horrific stereotypes. Forests crowd in with watchful things all around; deserts burn with ferocity and freeze with hateful rime, swamps get mud and parasites and water into everything and make you lose your sense of direction, and so forth.