The Heath

The Heath is a heavily forested basin, hemmed in by large mountains to the South, Kingdom Plantae to the North and the Belfry to the West. The main basin has a semi-tropical microclimate with a Monsoon season in summer, and quite heavy rain at this time. Midwinter tends to be much more dry: the southern mountains experience heavy snowfall and much of the jungle vegetation experiences seasonal die-back. This has made it difficult for Kingdom Plantae to establish a colony in the region. Motherwort is likely to survive well in this biome.

Soil quality wasn't always very good in this region, consisting mostly of last season's dead plant matter. However, as the area has been walled off to the Southeast for several centuries, a large quantity of leaf litter and topsoil has built up along this part of the Heath, resulting in quite a deep and boggy substrate where magical creatures and large semi-deciduous trees thrive. In winter, the largest trees shed their large 'summer leaves' and sprout a smaller winter canopy that can cope with cooler weather and the occasional snowfall from the mountains. There are several semi deciduous genera: Teak, Kino, Fairy Beeches, Kantankara and Great Laurel.

Encounters in the Heath
What can the party find inside the Heath itself?

Encounter theme: Endurance. Exhaustion and debuffs are the true enemies in the semi-deciduous jungle

Angry Desh jungle dwellers! They use magic, projectiles and ambush tactics. They do not want to engage strangers in melee where possible, and wear wooden masks and ghillie suits.

Assume that everything the party encounters, fauna or flora, is dangerous to them in some way and probably wants to kill them.

Holwel and Le Crand Crô
Holwel is on the southern tip of the Protecting Wall, dominated by the distant but huge and imposing peak of le Grand Crô.

The mountain is the tail end of a transverse fault that runs roughly northeast / southwest and piles up lumpy rock at the inland end. Back in some primordial age, the sea would have come a long way inland. The main peak is geologically quite young, but the rock itself is very ancient continental stuff. There are some copper veins, as well as micro-faults that run up the mountainside and easily erode into crevasses. Rock in the micro-faults is smooshed into a greenish, soft substance that makes climbing treacherous.

Further up the mountainside there's a lot of rhododendron, wild camellia, and fragrant tussock. Eventually this gives way to spiny bushes and dwarf versions of the Fairy Beech and Kantankara trees, then moss and lichen, then solid snowdrifts. Spring is peak avalanche season, and scree slopes carved out by avalanches persist through Summer, to get overgrown again by Winter. Where meltwater can't find a way off the mountain, it often carves enormous crevasses or sinkholes, that can extend over 600ft into the caverns under the mountain.

Béta
Holwel gets a share of the fun Heath flora that's self seeded around the little township of Béta. Protected by the big wall, Béta gets a nice warm down-draft of relatively dry air, in between drizzly showers off the mountain. In summer the air is rich with the smell of teak flowers (white and fragrant). Kino trees produce little yellow flowers in bunches, and the Fairy Beeches do a large seasonal mast which produces a lot of pollen. Huge flocks of tiny nectar and pollen-eating birds, as well as big iridescent sap-eating wasps, flock to the town in summer. It rains a lot in early Summer and is dry with snow flurries in Winter.

Béta is relatively small but densely built, with lots of chalets for pilgrims, and large two-storey barns for housing alpaca, horses and mules. Béta is close to the big stables at Augéa and the locals have access to the... not so fancy stock, which they have started to selectively breed for use as pack animals. The mule industry is pretty new but successful. So, the township has two sources of income, from the pilgrims and from the mounts. Unfortunately, farming's pretty tricky in the lee of the big wall, and in the shade of a huge mountain. So Béta has to import some of its food from the Fertile Swathe. Given the Spring Wars have done damage to nearby farmlands, pickings are a bit leaner than usual and the locals complain about the cost of fruit.

The Holwel Springs temple is built on a hefty rock outcrop to ensure it avoids avalanches and spring meltwater. It's an elegant building made out of the local granite and marble, in a very simplistic style - almost a smaller version of the Wedge in Piedamonte, a tall triangle with rounded edges. Inside the temple is a large apse containing shrines to various deities, as well as an alcove for each Cartel and human House. There's also a crypt entrance that leads to an ossuary full of carefully cleaned bones, mostly human with a few elven skulls in the mix. Some people like to preserve their ancestors' remains here. A few of the skulls are even gilded or have semi precious stones set into their eye sockets. Exploring the very foundations of the ossuary reveals the skulls and bones of quite a few Desh.

Inside Holwel Grotto
Holwel Grotto is a large and fairly stable cavern that fills with huge quantities of alpine meltwater in Spring, settles down in Summer and is moderately active in Winter. The rock composition is coarse, pink-grained granite with patches of old marble. Deeper into the cavern there's a high ceiling and some quite lovely stalactites, though Spring floods tend to smooth things out closer to ground level. Bats and the occasional Roper are known to dwell here. People venture inside in high summer to harvest bat guano, so there is a good trail with sections of rope-and-piton, hand-cut steps and brackets for fixing torches along the way. A couple of overhangs have been cut into the cavern wall for people to take short rests.

The greater cave system has seen 4-5000 years of intermittent use by sentient kin.

Things the party can find further in:
Goblin Cult of the Skull sites - ossuaries like the one at Holwel Temple but these skulls are carved, set into the cave wall, and slowly sealed in by limestone sediment.

Goblin Avernus Pits - ritual sites where offerings are tossed into the fissures of mountain faults. One particularly deep crevasse looks like it may have once been volcanic but an earthquake has sealed it shut at the bottom, with a soft, cakey green stone. Rusted-out tripod bases are forever stuck in the limestone as stalagmites have grown around the old ritual furniture.

Desh hermitage or pilgrimage nooks: these would have been monastic retreats deep in the darker recesses of the caves. Any traces of the monks wouldn't be valuable - this is an ascetic practice. Perhaps some interesting cave art and person-shaped indentations in the rock, made from hundreds of years of sitting and sleeping monks...

Smuggler caches! Lots of human and elven criminal elements like hiding their stashes in the dark.

Dead pachyderms and other ancient beasts of legend, frozen with fur and flesh intact, or leaving huge bones behind. Most of these probabyl fell to their deaths in a sinkhole from high above. (include dragon parts?)

Traces or hobo signs left by Belfry scouts further in

Creature lairs: wild bullette tunnels are useful conduits deeper in but could be risky. Strange spiders that have been parasitised by fungus.

the Belfry
This distinct 'plug' of sedimentary rock sticks up out of the surrounding strata. The Belfry interacts with contrasting rock and soil types; it is mostly composed of a sandstone and limestone mix, with its strata at almost 90 degrees to the landscape. It erodes rapidly under the heavy tropical and subalpine wind and rain that flows through from the West.

North of the Belfry the terrain is smothered by dense mycelium, which forms towering bolete-shaped fungal growths and which also helps to protect the area against incursions from Kingdom Plantae. The mycelium pre-dates the arrival of the Roma, but it works well with grey elves' society, diet and needs - so you could say there is a symbiosis at play. The mycelium doesn't seem particularly interested in the rock of the Belfry itself.

To the far West of the Belfry, the flora changes to include more cherry, bamboo and chestnut trees in the areas where there isn't a lot of mycelium. There are also a lot of pretty orchids and further East, access to stands of bamboo forest.