Rushmoors 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 The Rushmoors are a sprawling, stagnant wound upon the Flanaess, a vast expanse of treacherous fen and black water that separates the Kingdom of Keoland from the Gran March. It is a place where the sun feels thin and the air hangs heavy with the cloying scent of decay. It is not merely a swamp; it is a repository for things the world has forgotten and things that refuse to die, a primordial landscape where the line between the earth and the abyss is dangerously porous.

Beneath the suffocating canopy of weeping willows and gnarled mangroves, the water is a mirror of obsidian, hiding depths that defy logic. These pools are the lungs of the moor, exhaling toxic miasmas that cause the mind to wander and the spirit to falter. Here, the "rush" of the moors is not the sound of water, but the dry, frantic scraping of reeds against one another—a sound often mistaken for the whispers of the many thousands who have vanished into the muck, their bones claimed by the insatiable peat.

The Rushmoors are infamous as the ancestral seat of the Whispered One, the lich-god Vecna, before his ascension. The ruins of his ancient strongholds are said to still pulse with a rhythmic, necrotic heartbeat, buried deep beneath layers of silt and spite. Dark cultists and those desperate for forbidden lore often venture into these depths, drawn by the lingering echoes of the Spider Throne. Most find only a slow death, their life essence siphoned away by the very soil, which has tasted the blood of gods and craves more.

Monstrosities of unnatural pedigree haunt the fog-choked channels. Massive, bloated amphibians with skin like wet leather lurk just beneath the surface, while swarms of stirges and blood-drinking insects turn the air into a shimmering veil of red.

Yet, the true terrors are the "Mist-Walkers"—ethereal remnants of fallen Keoish soldiers and ancient Flan tribesmen who haunt the perimeter of the moors, bound to the terrain by curses that have outlasted the civilizations that birthed them.

At the heart of the mire lies the dread "Blackwater," a region so cursed that even the local lizardfolk tribes avoid it. In this dead zone, the vegetation is calcified and bone-white, standing in stark contrast to the surrounding rot. It is whispered that here, time itself stagnates; those who enter may emerge centuries later, or find themselves aging a lifetime in a single night. The silence in the Blackwater is absolute, a heavy, physical pressure that crushes the will of the bravest adventurer.

The lizardfolk of the Rushmoors are not the primitive hunters found elsewhere, but a xenophobic and cruel people who serve powers older than the current gods. They have built great, ziggurat-like mounds of mud and bone, where they conduct bloody rites under the pale moon to appease the "Sleeper in the Silt." Their chanting, a rhythmic thrumming that vibrates through the swamp floor, serves as a grim warning to any who would dare navigate the labyrinthine waterways without an invitation.

Navigation is a fool’s errand, as the very geography of the Rushmoors is known to shift. Islets of solid ground disappear overnight, swallowed by the shifting sludge, while new, jagged spires of rock rise from the depths like the teeth of a rising beast. To be lost in the Rushmoors is to be erased; the bog does not just kill, it consumes the memory of your existence, pulling your name and your legacy down into the cold, anaerobic dark.

As night falls over the moors, the "Will-o'-the-Wisps" ignite, dancing with a malevolent, sickly green light. They are the eyes of the Rushmoors, guiding the unwary toward the deepest bogs and the sharpest hazards. To look upon them is to see the end of all things—a cold, damp, and lonely conclusion in a land that has never known the warmth of mercy or the light of true day. The Rushmoors do not merely exist; they wait, with the infinite patience of the grave.