Kalyna Country – Part 2 - Where the Roots Remember

 

Classes & Paths of Kalyna Country

Adventurer (Rogue Analogue)

Adventurers in Kalyna Country are quick-footed, sharp-eyed folk who live between fields and fairy tales. They’re the ones who know how to cross crumbled bridges, bargain with gremlins, or unjam a relic gate with a spoon and a prayer. Whether sprinting across leyline-charged ruins or sneaking past Corpseman patrols, they survive through wit, guts, and a healthy dose of village gossip. Many adventurers double as couriers, scouts, and odd jobbers for towns too stubborn to die.

• Prowler: The shadows under the Babas’ gaze, these figures move between legality and rebellion. Spies, smugglers, and freedom fighters, Prowlers ensure truths survive where laws do not. Their smiles may lie, but their loyalty runs deeper than grave-roots.

• Scout: Trailblazers and survivalists who know every edible mushroom and every haunted tree by name. Scouts are the first to enter dream-distorted paths or blazing grainfields, marking routes with ribbon charms and chalked pysanka sigils. Some claim to hear the land whisper, guiding them like an old friend.

• Scrap Foot: Daredevils of the open road, Scrap Foots are racers, delivery demons, and dust-cloaked legends of the Solstice Race. Whether carrying a giant duck keychain or fleeing a relic tantrum, they treat every journey like a stage. They’re fast, flashy, and fueled by perogies and pride.

• Troubleshooter: Fix-it folk and relic wranglers, these tinkerers keep Baba relics humming and ancient tractors coughing to life. Whether it’s defusing a warded boot trap or patching a leaky leyline tap, they’re indispensable in every self-respecting village. They’re the ones grandmothers trust with the kettle and kids trust with a slingshot upgrade.

Channeler

Channelers are vessels for power—ancestral, arcane, or mechanical. Their magic flows from folklore, fuel, or faith, manifesting through dance, embroidery, or the wrenching open of haunted engines. Often blessed or cursed by a Baba, they balance emotion with expression, becoming icons in communities where miracles are maintenance work.

• Faustian Mechanic: This path has conflicting origins.  One tale says it came from a shopping trip to the Great Western Mall of Edtown.  Other believe it started when the Malarkoids of St. Paul started educating the masses. Folk inventors who made deals with power through parts and prayers. They graft tractor engines into totem armor and coax spell circuits out of forgotten mall fountains. These mechanics barter with junk spirits and treat St. Paul as a sacred pilgrimage of salvage and weird wisdom.

• Sentinel (Rushnyk Warden): Relic-bound knights who wear oaths like embroidered cloaks. Whether sworn under a solstice moon or by a field-shrine burning with visions, they uphold the old laws—wherever they still hold. Their rushnyks (embroidered cloths) aren’t just symbols but woven wards passed down in blood.  These also represent the warrior monks of the The Orthodoxy.

• Witch: Kalyna’s Witches live in shrines, barns, and backrooms. Tied to spirit-world rhythms and seasonal rituals, they weave blessings into veils, soups, and lullabies. Often called Baba’s daughters (or sons), they heal with a glare and hex with a hug. Every Baba likely trained a witch—or was one.

Combatant

Combatants are Kalyna’s front-liners—warriors forged in scrapyards, sausage plants, and Solstice arenas. Whether brawling with shovels or swinging relic scythes, they embody the raw strength of survival and ritualized defiance. These fighters don’t speak in spells or sermons—they let fists, flames, and frying pans do the talking. From barnyard brawls to psionic duels at the local fairgrounds, Combatants prove that when everything else breaks, the body becomes the last sacred weapon.

• Brute (Traditional)
  These are the kielbasa-clubbers, dumpling-duelists, and shovel-swingers who view strength as both an inheritance and an act of worship. Raised in the culture of the New Cimmerians, they live by a creed of community and raw might. Whether defending the Pysanka with a dented pot-lid shield or bare-knuckling a mutant hog during harvest, Traditional Brutes are revered folk warriors whose combat style is equal parts farmhand and folklore. 

• Brute (New Age )
  New Age Brutes bring neon flair and old-school fury. Solstice racers turned gladiators, hockey-stick bruisers, armored cowboys—they weaponize speed and swagger. Found in stunt shows, brawl pits, and thunder-chariot jousts, these brutes are as likely to rev an engine mid-fight as they are to flex their embroidered armor. For them, every battle is a performance, and losing isn’t part of the script.

• Commander

Commanders in Kalyna Country are not just tacticians—they're tradition-keepers, parade marshals, and kitchen-table negotiators. These natural-born leaders can transform a church choir into a resistance cell or turn last year's harvest into a rolling supply caravan. With booming voices and boots caked in leyline dust, they carry the weight of villages on their shoulders. Their presence is steadying—a reminder that even in the weirdest winters, someone still remembers the plan.

 

• Deadeye (Marksman Path)
  Deadeyes are the guardians of the ridgelines—sharp-eyed snipers, duck-blind prophets, and iron-nerved duelists. With relic bows or bolted-together rifles, they protect borders, shoot omens out of the sky, and settle disputes with a single crack of thunder. Folk whisper about them like ghost stories: “She can shoot the lice off a Corpseman’s scalp,” or “He once winged a demon mid-jump.” During festivals, they win marksmanship contests. During invasions, they end them. Whether etched with saintly symbols or customized with leyline scopes, their weapons are more than tools—they're community promises.

Psychic

Psychics are the dream-drunk, leyline-tuned, emotionally explosive weirdos of Kalyna Country. They serve as translators for the land’s subconscious, interpreters of prophetic livestock, and counselors to those lost between timelines. They speak with ghosts, scream with storms, and sometimes cry radioactive tears. Everyone fears them a little. Everyone needs them more.

• Eruptor
  Eruptors are emotional warheads with legs. Folk legends follow them like sparks—tales of villages vaporized over bad coffee or taverns levitated during breakups. And while some of those stories are mostly exaggerations, it’s true that Eruptors channel elemental chaos through their volatile psyches. Most keep their power tightly in check, unleashing it only with surgical fury—or just enough to make people think twice. Whether forging molten justice or bluffing with a flicker of flame, Eruptors walk the line between feared pariah and folk hero with terrifying grace.

• Mentalist
  With a touch of a hand or a whispered poem, Mentalists unravel minds and soothe nightmares. They're the village therapists, lie detectors, and accidental prophets. Some wear folk masks to shield themselves from the thoughts of others—or to keep others safe from theirs. In a land where dreams can bleed into daylight, a good Mentalist is worth their weight in silver dandelions.

• Psi-Warrior (Didukh Sentinel)
  These stoic protectors wield emotion as a blade, their weapons often bound in sacred harvest sheaves called didukhs. Sworn to defend dreamers and farmers alike, they stand tall at crossroads, watching for omens and monsters. Many wear capes embroidered with family griefs. When they raise their sheaves, winds hush and spirits take notice.

• Rocker
  In Kalyna Country, songs are spells, and some instruments cry louder than bombs. Psychic Rockers blend bardic bravado with brain-shaking feedback, turning battlefields into concerts and roadside rests into raves. They’re the heroes of verse and volume, using psychic frequencies to bust undead skulls and raise festival spirits. Every Feylin has a favorite Rocker story. Every Corpseman has a tinnitus memory.

Ritualist

Ritualists are the engineers of the unseen—the ones who map the wind, bless the livestock, and rewire the bones of the world with ceremony and chalk. Often half-wizards and half-weather-vanes, they keep Kalyna Country’s balance humming, even when the harmonics go haywire.

• Artillery Mage: These are recent addition to the ara, but the high magic and the widing road was just too tempting and the locals have started to learn this way.  These mobile spellcasters specialize in long-range arcane bombardment, often sporting embroidered goggles and glowing with neon glyphs and sass.

• Magister: The Molfars, Archivists of dream-folk tales, these reclusive scholars haunt traveling mushroom libraries and shrine-buses. They read tea leaves and leyline pulses with equal clarity, translating forgotten Baba directives into village survival plans. Many are half-mad. All are vital.

• Rainmaker: They have many names: Hradiwnky (hail-men), khamarnyky (rain man). Vital during droughts and celebrations alike, Rainmakers draw down clouds with dance, song, and ancestral curses. They walk the fields with thunder god tattoos and whisper to weather spirits like old friends. Every harvest season depends on their patience—and their rage.

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Kalyna Country – Where the Roots Remember

Stumpy Magree’s Field Notes:

"Now don’t mind the twitchy squirrels or that whisperin’ wheat—Kalyna Country’s always been a bit... chlorophyllosophical."

Y’see, this isn’t just east-central Alberta anymore. Nope. Since the ol’ Hodgepocalypse came rootin’ through, this patch of prairie’s gone from quaint to quite quixotic. Kalyna Country—named for the highbush cranberry, bless her boughs—is now a sprouting land of dreams, folklore, and radical rootstock rewilding. Some folks say it’s the largest blooming museum in the world, at over 20,000 square kilometres! That’s more real estate than Prince Edward Island, if you’re keepin’ score in acres and echos.

And oh, it remembers. It remembers every settler’s sigh, every frog’s dream, every whispered wartime promise stuffed into the roots of a rushnyk and buried for safe-keeping.

Weather Forecast: Partly Ritual with a Chance of Rainchant

Kalyna’s weather don’t listen to the jet stream. No, sir—she listens to memory, prophecy, and maybe a few too many enchanted cabbages.

• Spring bursts forth like a seed with caffeine: psychic blooms, amphibian philosophers, and rain that burns truth into the soil.

• Summer is a fever dream of firestorms, gossiping dust devils, and crops that either bolt with joy or sulk ‘til autumn.

• Fall hangs thick with golden fungal fog—the Amber Veil—where spirits get lost in their own nostalgia.

• Winter is a snow-glitched broadcast, complete with animated drifts and frost glyphs muttering secrets only birches understand.

 —Stumpy Magree, Sproutologist and Memory-Moss Tier III Interpreter

Beaver Hills Moraine — The Whispering Woodlands

"Now don’t go pickin' bark without askin’ first. These trees got opinions—and memories."
—Stumpy Magree

Once a hummocky pocket of boreal beauty and glacial leftovers, the Beaver Hills Moraine has since become one of Kalyna Country’s most politely haunted places. Here, trembling aspens sway even when there’s no wind, and jack pines creak with the sound of old gossip. You’ll find spruce thickets that echo back your footsteps, and willows that lean in to eavesdrop on your dreams.

Leylines knot beneath the mossy soil, creating what the locals call a harmonic tangle—suitable for ceremonies, bad for compass readings. Rare Wolffia still blooms in kettle ponds, though nowadays it hums lullabies and turns pink under full moons. Some say the trees here were the first to hear the Babas return and still blush when you mention their names.

• Natural Traits: Trembling aspen, jack pine, black spruce, balsam poplar; rich wetland flora; home to moose, lynx, sharp-tailed grouse, and waterfowl.
• Magical Features:
  • Trees with memory bark that replay past conversations.
  • Glacial kettles act as scrying bowls after rain.
  • Root systems share rumors across miles—watch what you say near a stump.
• Cultural Use:
  • Preferred spot for vision quests, reluctant proposals, and psychic picnic lunches.
  • Rainmakers, Witches compete to maintain sacred groves—some trees have unionized.

Central Mixedwood Subregion — The Verdant Tapestry

"If the trees start hummin’ in harmony, don’t worry—that just means the land likes ya. If they start singin’ off-key? Run."
—Stumpy Magree

This stretch of land is where the boreal and the prairie had a long talk, shook hands, and decided to raise a family. A proper patchwork of aspen, spruce, and jack pine, stitched together with muskeg seams and low rolling hummocks, it’s as good for livestock as it is for leyline lounging.

Beneath the roots, the soil murmurs with warmth—a holdover from old fire spirits who took up residence after the Hodgepocalypse. New settlers speak of “green ghosts” that hover above berry thickets, guiding honest foragers and scaring off greedy ones. Aspen groves here are known to wander, slowly creeping from their original roots, following faint psychic melodies carried by the wind.

• Natural Traits: Aspen, jack pine, black spruce; fertile glaciolacustrine soils; habitat for deer, coyotes, and migratory birds.
• Magical Features:
  • Trees that rearrange themselves overnight to form glyphs when seen from above.
  • Soil holds emotional memory—walk barefoot and relive someone else’s first kiss or last regret.
  • Leyline intersections often marked by out-of-place plants (orchids, sunflowers, or giant mushrooms).
• Cultural Use:
  • Ideal for berry-picking rituals, seasonal festivals, and druidic karaoke.
  • Widely used in teaching circles about leyline farming and emotional composting.

Dry Mixedwood Boreal Subregion — The Transitional Grove

"Now here’s where the trees start whisperin’ ‘bout grass, and the grass whispers back."
—Stumpy Magree

This is where forest meets prairie in a polite but tense neighborly standoff. Tall trembling aspens cluster like gossipy aunties, while balsam poplars lean in over sandy ridges as if eavesdropping on the bluestem. Hazelnuts grow wild, stubborn, and twisted—like most of the locals.

The land here isn’t sure what it wants to be, so it tries a bit of everything: hummocks, shale ridges, sinkholes full of frogs with divination powers. It’s one of the best places to spot transitional species—magical and mundane alike—like the infamous camoruffalo (half moose, half shuffalo, all attitude). Wetlands here don’t just store water—they store dreams, memories, and sometimes whole ghost villages if you aren't careful.

• Natural Traits: Aspen, balsam poplar, beaked hazelnut, wild sarsaparilla; uplands over shale and sandstone; bogs and fens cover ~15%.
• Magical Features:
  • Psychic frogs that only croak prophetic warnings during eclipses.
  • Floating lights known as “will-o’-wisps cousins” that lead you to secrets—or snakes.
  • Bogs where whispers rise with the mist, sometimes giving advice, sometimes taxes.
• Cultural Use:
  • Popular with mystics seeking thresholds between states—forest/prairie, dream/waking.
  • Locals claim if you plant a wish and feed it sarsaparilla root, it may bloom into a quest.

Northern Mixedwood Subregion — The Boreal Frontier

"Cold don’t kill ya out here—it just puts your thoughts on ice for later. Makes for great daydreaming, if your nose don’t fall off first."
—Stumpy Magree

This is the edge of the wilds, where the land exhales mist and the moss listens close. It's colder than a snowman's handshake, with summers that flirt more than commit. Here the trees lean tall and hushed—black spruce bogs stretch endlessly, dotted with poplars that always look like they’ve seen something unspeakable.

The wetlands—fens, bogs, dream-pools—cover most of the region, and they’re brimming with spirit echoes. Some folks say the wind here doesn’t just whistle—it tries out lullabies, testing them on lost travelers. And when the auroras come, they dance to tunes the soil remembers.

• Natural Traits: Black spruce, aspen, balsam poplar; fens and bogs dominate up to 80% of the area; lynx, owls, hares, boreal songbirds.
• Magical Features:
  • Moss with memory—step on the wrong patch, and you might see a vision of someone else’s dream.
  • Ice that hums beneath your feet when the stars align.
  • Trees that exchange gossip by shedding frost patterns in arcane runes.
• Cultural Use:
  • Place of solitude and reflection—ideal for oath-taking, exile rites, or secret Baba meetings.
  • Home to “singing traps”—spruce groves that replicate your voice to lure out truths (or enemies).

The Crystal Groves — Shardwood Wilds

"Pretty from afar, prickly up close. Just like my cousin Darlene. Only she doesn’t shatter when insulted."
—Stumpy Magree

Dotting the Northern Lats like scattered jewels in a snowbank, the Crystal Groves are haunting, breathtaking, and temperamental as a Baba with a bad foot. What look like radiant trees are psychic growths of quartz-like crystal, grown from wind-blown shards that nestle into the permafrost and feed on leyline resonance.

They grow for years, absorbing ambient magic, psychic leakage, and the occasional lullaby before becoming brittle and exploding into the sky like glitter bombs of doom. Entire harvesting towns have vanished in chain-shatter events—though a few lucky survivors come out “touched,” glowing eyes and all.

Crystal fragments are used in everything from woo-wear to psi-batteries to Faustian gadgetry. But harvesting them? That’s a ritual dance of science, instinct, and just a bit of prayer.

• Natural Traits: Forms clusters 8–15 feet high; mimics tree shape with root, trunk, branch-like structures; germinates from wind-carried shards.
• Magical Features:
  • Stores emotion, memory, and spell-resonance. Mishandle them, and you might hear someone else’s heartbreak—or last battle cry.
  • Old groves pulse in tune with Dreamtime moon phases.
  • Chain-shattering events are called “Shardstorms,” feared more than blizzards.
• Cultural Use:
  • Harvested carefully for powerful psychic conduits and enchant-tech.
  • Ritual sites for binding pacts, storing ancestral echoes, or just a really dangerous wedding venue.

Central Parkland Subregion — The Mosaic Meadow

"Ain’t nothin’ patchworked better than Baba Marichka’s quilt—except maybe this land. Mind your step though—some of these wildflowers bite back."
—Stumpy Magree

If Kalyna Country had a grandmother’s garden, this would be it: a stitched-together landscape of aspen groves, fescue grasslands, pothole ponds, and whispering streams. The Parkland is Alberta’s old soul in a younger dress—bountiful, fickle, and just a smidge enchanted.

It’s where forests dip their toes into prairie dreams. The wildlife is abundant, the soil sings with fertility, and magic flows just under the surface like water in spring thaw. Even the weeds seem to grow in poetic meter. But don’t let the beauty fool you—folks say if you plant without offering a verse, your crops might grow upside-down or gossip about you.

• Natural Traits: Aspen, fescue, rich black loam, ponds and wetlands; deer, coyotes, beavers, and hundreds of birds.
• Magical Features:
  • Fields bloom in sync with music played nearby—common for bard-farmers.
  • Certain flowers act as magical reagents—but only if picked while reciting old rhymes.
  • Streams may rearrange themselves to spell prophetic warnings.
• Cultural Use:
  • Breadbasket of Kalyna Country, favored for spell-farming, dream-gardening, and storytelling contests.
  • Location of seasonal gatherings where whole villages recite their year’s tale under the moon.

 Prairie Parkland Rewilded — With Bonus Portals

 

"The hills here don’t roll—they grumble. And if the soil starts singin’? Best drop a dill pickle and walk backward 'til the wind forgives you."
—Stumpy Magree

This stretch of Kalyna Country is where the land shook loose from old cartography and started drawing its conclusions. Once open prairie stitched with poplar groves and wetland seams, the Hodgepocalypse rewrote the script. Now the Parkland doesn’t just look different—it behaves differently.

Leylines knot like tumbleweed below the surface, and every glacial kettle might be a portal, a pond, or a poet depending on the season. Some hilltops are ancient Baba shrines that tilt slightly toward constellations that no longer exist. Old shrines spin, bogs belch out dream-gas, and the very soil carries memories like gossip—sticky and strange.

• Natural Traits: Aspen and birch groves, glacial kettle lakes, rich loamy soil, pothole wetlands, rolling moraine topography with abundant wildlife.
• Magical Features:
  • Twisted Parklands: Trees hum when hugged and sometimes offer unsolicited advice.
  • Black Soil Fields: Incredibly fertile if you barter with the under-root folk.
  • Glacial Kettles: Reflect your true self—or your worst fear. Sip the water and dream for three days.
  • Relic-Hills: Mound-top shrines built by pre-Baba pilgrims; now spin slowly at twilight unless properly anchored with an offering.
• Cultural Use:
  • Pilgrimage route for seasonal ritualists, herbal diviners, and stargazers.
  • Popular among fortune-chasers, lore-hunters, and that one uncle who swears the duck god owes him money.

Elk Island Eldritch Park — Where the World Slips

"You ever walk through a fog and come out dreamin’ of a future that didn’t happen yet? Yeah, you probably wandered into Elk Island. Happens to the best of us. And the worst. And the duplicates."
—Stumpy Magree

Once a crown jewel of conservation nestled within Alberta’s Beaver Hills, Elk Island was famous for its lakes, forests, and its roaming herds of elk and bison. Post-Hodgepocalypse, though? It’s no longer just a park—it’s a psychic fracture zone where time and memory drip like melted snow into parallel puddles. Shuffalo migrate through in semi-lucid herds, guided by instinct and haunted lullabies. At the same time, the native lakes now act as mirrored portals into the Dreamtime—sometimes shallow reflections, sometimes bottomless thresholds.

Elk Island’s ecology still holds on: aspen stands, black spruce tangles, bog sedges, and rich marshes serve as anchors to the old order. But layered overtop, or underneath, or within are ripples of unreality. You'll find silver-antlered elk who speak only to the sleeping, bogs that whisper your forgotten regrets, and lightning-struck birch groves that try to rewrite your personal history.

Containment Protocol: Strathcan Militia Frontier Zone “E-17”

Recognized as Zone E-17 “Twilight Nest”, the park is under a fluctuating containment order by the Strathcan Militia, who consider it a Class Red Persistent Anomaly Site. Barbed psionic fences line the main ingress points, monitored by Auto-Scribes and Leyfield Calibrators. Patrols avoid deep incursion due to the risk of temporal bleeding, parallel hallucinations, and vanishing squads. Despite this, freelance adventurers and “ley-trippers” regularly bypass the perimeter in search of lost comrades or rumored relics.

Standard Warning: “Entering Twilight Nest without sanctioned ritual tethering is punishable by forgetfulness, duplication, or worse. Proceed with sealed dreamcatchers and backup consciousness imprint.”
— Posted on all official signage, largely ignored

• Natural Traits:
  • Rolling moraine terrain, shallow lakes, marshes, wetlands
  • Boreal Forest canopy: aspen, birch, spruce
  • Wildlife: Bison, elk, moose, shuffalo, beavers, waterfowl
• Magical Features:
  • Dreamtime Rifts: Natural portals appear seasonally (and unseasonally), often centered around flyway ponds or ancient beaver lodges.
  • Echo Fauna: Creatures that shimmer with “after-images,” some benign, others very not.
  • Living Trails: Paths reconfigure nightly based on emotion density, lunar phases, and forgotten songs.
  • Shuffalo Lures: Bioluminescent moss forms glowing herd shapes, confusing predators and travelers.
• Cultural Use:
  • Still considered sacred ground by some Dreamwalkers, though entry is now taboo without psychic shielding.
  • Secret site of Baba communions during moonless nights—rumor has it even the Cosmic Baba avoids entering alone.
  • Has become the subject of art, religion, and at least three contradictory ballads.

Redbog Hollow — The Hum in the Muck

"Cranberries shouldn’t hum in harmony, and they sure shouldn’t know your name. But here we are."
—Stumpy Magree

Once just another lowland bog wrapped in boreal brush, Redbog Hollow has since fermented into something far stranger. Nestled in the wetter folds of Kalyna Country’s parkland edge, it was always a haven for rich flora—cranberries, sphagnum moss, tamarack, and sedges thick enough to lose a mule in. But after the Revelations, the hollow changed. The cranberries began to sing. Not out loud, no—at least, not at first. They hum in dreams, forming lullabies and warnings. The deeper you sleep nearby, the clearer the chorus.

Botanists blame arcane saturation, druids blame bog spirits, and the Strathcan Militia marks the place with skull-stamped caution tape and a “Do Not Snack” advisory. The real reason? No one knows for sure. But every year, more pickers vanish, and a few come back changed—glowing eyes, berry-stained teeth, or too full of poetry for comfort.

The bog itself shifts slowly, like it’s breathing. Old folk say if you listen long enough, it’ll tell you stories no one's supposed to know—about Baba betrayals, the time before times, or even your own future. Sometimes those stories come true. Sometimes you do.

 Ecology, Flora & Fauna (the ones that stay put, anyway)

• Natural Traits:
  • Bogs, marshes, and peat wetlands with acidic pools
  • Cranberries (wild and... less wild), sedge, tamarack, pitcher plants
  • Wildlife: Waterfowl, black bears, bull moose, megafauna like the Mudsnout Wapiti
• Magical Features:
  • Humberries: Cranberries that pulse like heartbeats when danger nears; if eaten, they induce prophetic fugue states.
  • Whisper-Peat: Clumps of moss that recite lost poems or mimic the last words of the drowned.
  • Spirit Sinking: Step wrong and you might not fall in—you might fall sideways, into a memory not your own.
  • Bog Eidolons: Mushy revenants made of peat and bone who offer riddles and regret in equal measure.

Strathcan Militia Status: Quarantine Zone “M-3: Red Hollow”

Classified as a Green-Red Zone, Redbog Hollow is under passive containment. The Militia maintains ritual ward-posts along traditional footpaths and sends in periodic "picker sweeps" to extract lost civilians (or what's left of them).

Containment is complicated by the bog’s mobile geography and "sedative aura," which causes many patrol members to nap mid-sweep. Use of gas masks, runed footwear, and anti-prophecy charms is now standard protocol.

Memo from Officer Brank Klyshko, 7th Watch Division:
“If the berries start singing your childhood nickname, extract immediately. Do not respond. Do not harmonize.”

Cultural & Folkloric Use

• Traditional site of Autumn Pilgrimages by Baba-tied villagers, especially those seeking lost family or forgotten truths.
• Home to whispered stories of the “First Canning Circle”, where a Baba taught the secret of soul-preserving jam.
• Known to generate Living Recipes—parchments made of leaf-vein and bog ink that teach you to cook exactly what your soul needs (though sometimes it’s mud).
• Has been declared a Dream Hazard by Strathcan psionicists, but remains a must-visit for hedge-witches, poets, and ambitious jam-makers.

Metal Mushroom Forest — Where the Spores Build Cities

"Back in my day, mushrooms went in soup. Now they file grievances and build suburbs. Times sure change."
—Stumpy Magree

Once the wooded borderlands near the town of Vilna, this patch of Kalyna Country has since been overtaken, root and relic, by the Metal Mushroom Forest, a spore-choked biome where fungi decided it was their turn to be architects. Towering 10–20 feet tall, these mushrooms don’t rot—they rust. Made of bio-organic metal and threaded with ley-conductive mycelium, they heal from damage if left undisturbed, forming groves of regenerating shelter, tangled canopy roads, and sometimes even functioning structures.

The forest is the domain of the Trollitariots—fey-born fungal collectivists with a militant work ethic and an unreasonable number of clipboards. They have converted much of the forest into a self-organizing sporepunk utopia: part commune, part fortress, part surreal bureaucracy. Their “city-hall-cap” mushrooms double as control towers, meeting chambers, and occasional defensive turrets.

But the ecosystem doesn’t just stop at metallic mushrooms. Spores here act like ambient software—infecting nearby life with fungal upgrades, including sapient moss, walking lichen, and grumpy tool-sprouting vines. It's beautiful in a brassy, buzzing, ominous kind of way.

Ecology, Flora & Fauna

• Natural Traits:
  • Replaces native boreal forest with towering fungi
  • Bio-metal mushrooms with magnetic caps and conductive stalks
  • Spore clouds visible under moonlight—shift color with mood of the forest

Cultural Use & Folklore

• Seen by techno-herbalists and forge druids as a holy site of biological industry.
• Pilgrimage point for anarcho-alchemists, steam-witches, and fey labor radicals.
• Occasionally emits a harmonic resonance that draws in lost souls, sonic mages, and the especially suggestible.

And, of course, the spores here never forget. Say something rude near a toadstool and it might file a complaint—with the weather.

The Baba’s Scar — Where the Star Fell, and the Baba Didn’t

"You know it when you see it. Or when you stop seein’. Either way, bring salt. And maybe say a prayer to a Baba who ain’t listening no more."
—Stumpy Magree

The Baba’s Scar isn’t just a crater. It’s a wound in the world, punched into Kalyna Country when one of the Eight Babas battled a Star-Thing that came screaming out of the rifted sky like a comet of spite. The stories change—some say it was the Western Baba, some say it was Gothic, and a few whisper that it was all of them, bound together like a storm. What’s clear is this: the thing fell, and it took a chunk of the world’s sanity with it.

Now the Scar glows faintly by day and blazes like a cosmic ulcer by night. It sings in radio static, drawing in memories and distorting time in fits and starts. Trees nearby grow in reverse. Birds speak in borrowed voices. The land grieves, and it does so loudly.

Surrounding the central crater is the Weeping Ring, a sickly halo of withered trees and warped underbrush, forever dripping dew even on the driest days. The ground here pulses with delayed echoes—footsteps, whispers, even old music from radios that aren’t there.

Ecological Remains & After-Effects

• Natural Traits:
  • Former boreal mixedwood region; now mostly deadfall and mutated regrowth
  • Spoiled wetlands with glassy, oil-slick water
  • Scattered iron-rich soil “scabs” that shift when stared at too long
• Mutated Fauna & Flora:
  • Moonburn Vines: Grow in spirals and radiate soft light that causes confusion or inspiration
  • Ash Elk: Once majestic, now ghostly and flickering—move in loops, never leaving the Scar’s edge
  • Tearsedge Grass: Blades that drip saltwater and recite prayers in rustling wind

 Cultural & Folkloric Reverence

• Pilgrims and zealots still visit the Weeping Ring, convinced they’ll receive visions from the fallen Baba
• Some villagers blame the Scar for dreams of apocalyptic kindness—where people burn beautifully to save others
• Once a year, on the Night of Unanswered Cries, nearby settlements leave bundles of dill, garlic, and song scrolls at the edge of the woods
• Known to produce Echo Relics—fragments of Baba tools warped by the impact (used in some classes as arcane foci or dangerous relics)