Rifenmist Jungle

The Rifenmist Jungle is a vast jungle covering Rifenmist Peninsula, the southern region of Tal'Dorei.

Description
The Rifenmist Jungle is an endless mass of natural chaos. The floor is covered in vines and clustered with wide-trunked trees, spiny ferns, and carnivorous plants. The land is hot and humid, pocked with valleys that lead to marshland and quicksand pits, and some regions are afflicted with a spreading fungus. The jungle becomes denser the further south one travels.

History
Before the Founding, a primordial titan seed was planted here; it remains unborn and slumbering, and its energy is responsible for the extraordinary overgrowth of the Rifenmist Jungle.

In the Age of Arcanum there was a society called Qoniira in the jungle region south of Byroden. The Qoniira respected and honored all magic, but the civilization was wiped out, leaving only ruins. (Shaun Gilmore and Opal have different historical recollections about when Qoniira fell; he says it was long before the Calamity, she recalls they were wiped out when the Calamity hit.)

The Rifenmist Jungle is poorly mapped by travelers from the northern regions of Tal'Dorei, and few travelers who enter the jungle return. Attempts have been made by humans and elves of northern Tal'Dorei to colonize the jungle, but they were quickly rebuffed by the elves of the Orroyen tribes, having sent the clear message that no cities are to be built south of the jungle's edge.

As of 812 PD the hobgoblins of the Iron Authority in the Beynsfal Plateaus had been at war with the jungle itself for years, but had made little ground against the land.

One adventure hook in the Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting, set in 812 PD, involves figures of dark intent seeking out and beginning to awaken the primordial seed. If the primordial's rapid development is not halted, it will rise and terrorize the continent; if it dies, the Rifenmist Jungle may die with it.

At some point, Opal and Ted's dad ventured into the Rifenmist Jungle, and later stumbled out of the jungle naked, feverish, and afraid.

In 842 PD, when a mysterious rune caused an ash-blown mesa to suddenly rise in the Scar of the Cinder King outside Emon, Shaun Gilmore suggested that the nature of the rune could be deciphered in the ruins of Qoniira, and he helped a group of adventurers to head in that direction.

Society
The nomadic Orroyen tribes are primarily led by a bloodline of primal wood elves who embrace their animalistic natures. They rarely leave the jungle except to trade with others on the pensinsula. Though it is rare for outlanders to be admitted to the tribes, half-elf vagabonds occasionally settle with the Orroyen, and nearly a quarter of the members of the tribes are either human or some other non-elven race.

The dozens of Orroyen tribes have no central government; each tribe is a gerontocracy that subjects prospective leaders and new members to ceremonial trials that often leave scars, not uncommonly maim, and sometimes kill those who undergo them.

The people of the Mornset Countryside are superstitious about the jungle, and few enter it except to parlay with the Orroyen.