Oytwood 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

To the west of the rotting Rushmoors lies the Oytwood, an ancient forest that feels less like a woodland and more like a vast, wooden tomb. Here, the suffocating mists of the swamp do not dissipate; instead, they thicken, tangling within the jagged fingers of black oak and ironwood. The transition from mire to forest is marked by a line of drowned, skeletal trees that stand knee-deep in brackish pools, their bark peeling away like rotting skin to reveal the pallid, sickly wood beneath.

The canopy above is a dense, interlocking weave of shriveled leaves and parasitic moss, so thick that it chokes out the sun even at high noon. What little light manages to bleed through is filtered into a bruised, sickly violet hue, casting long, distorted shadows that seem to shiver with a life of their own. There is no vibrant green here; the palette of the Oytwood is one of charcoal greys, bruised purples, and the jaundiced yellow of fungus that erupts from every weeping trunk.

The air is heavy with the scent of damp earth and ancient, undisturbed mold, a stagnant pressure that makes every breath feel like a labor. Silence reigns in these woods, but it is not a peaceful quiet; it is the breathless stillness of a creature holding its breath in the dark.

The usual music of the forest—the chirp of birds or the rustle of small game—is absent, replaced by the occasional, wet thwack of a heavy moss clump falling into the mud or the distant, agonizing groan of two dying trees rubbing together in the wind.

Beneath the towering oaks, the forest floor is a treacherous maze of exposed, arthritic roots and hidden sinkholes filled with the same black sludge found in the heart of the Rushmoors. Thick, thorny brambles known as "widow’s lace" carpet the ground, their ebony vines tipped with needles that weep a clear, numbing sap. These vines coil around the base of every tree like tightening nooses, slowly strangling the life out of the forest and leaving behind a graveyard of standing timber.

There is a sense of profound, lingering sorrow that permeates the Oytwood, as if the forest itself is mourning a tragedy forgotten by the world of men. The trees do not grow straight toward the light; they twist and contort in agony, their limbs bent at unnatural angles that mimic the limbs of the "changed" folk in Orlane. Explorers often claim to hear the faint, muffled sound of sobbing carried on the wind, only to find nothing but the hollow trunk of a rotted willow or the rhythmic dripping of sap onto dead leaves.

To enter the Oytwood is to step into a realm where time has curdled and the boundary between life and decay has dissolved. It acts as a grim sentinel for the Rushmoors, a place where the shadows are deep enough to hide the unspeakable and where the cold dampness of the earth seems to reach up to pull the living down into the dark. It is a broken wilderness, a fading echo of a forest that has finally succumbed to the creeping, reptilian rot that flows from the east.