Whitewood

Whitewood refers to an area in Jhembaz dominated by the bleached branches of undead trees and creepers. While whitewoods have an ominous reputation, they're actually not much more dangerous than any other forest. Their relative barrenness does mean it's hard to find anything to live on in a whitewood, but on the other hand it also means they have fewer dangerous predators than other terrains—though what dangerous entities there are in the whitewood are very dangerous indeed. Whitewoods do have some other hazards of their own; some of the undead plants, such as soulthorn, feed off the living if given a chance, and a living being that stays too long in a whitewood may risk being tainted by its fell energies, leading to a range of conditions known as ghostblight.

Description

Whitewoods get their name from the paleness of the undead plants that pervade them, most of which, if not actually pure white, are very close to it. This comprehensive colorlessness gives the whitewoods an eerie, spectral feel that is not diminished by the near silence that prevails there. The few spots of color and darkness that exist there, such as provided by the eye agaric and the shadowgreen, stand out all the more because of their etiolated surroundings.

Most of the undead plants of the whitewoods are leafless, comprising tangles of gnarled branches that make the whitewood resemble an overgrown briar patch more than a forest. That foliage that does exist there is often distorted or tattered, such as the long, dangling threads of the shroud moss.

Occurrence

Whitewoods are scattered all over Jhembaz, though most of them are quite small, only a few square kilometers in area. Some of them exist where some enchantment went wrong, or some magical effect went astray, and cursed some of the surrounding flora with undeath. Others seem to have arisen more naturally from an ancient tree that didn't fully die, or from some effect of ambient magic that pooled there for whatever reason. In some cases, the reasons for the presence of the whitewood remain unexplained. In any case, there's little pattern to their placement, with patches of whitewood appearing all over the world apparently randomly.

There are exceptions to the rule of the small size of whitewoods, by far the largest being the Witherwood in the eastern part of the world. Exactly why the Witherwood so dwarfs all other known whitewoods is unknown, but this enormous blight is over a thousand kilometers wide.

Life

Whitewoods are sparse in biotic life forms compared to other forest terrains; the undead flora are unhealthy for most herbivores to eat, which cuts out the base of the food chain. They are not, however, entirely devoid of life. Saprophytes such as many fungi thrive in the whitewoods, able to subsist on the undead plants where most organisms could not, and in turn some small animals are able to get by by eating these saprophytes. A few animals have even evolved the ability to live on the otherwise unwholesome undead plants, some by symbiotic relationships with undead microorganisms in their guts, and some by inherent magical powers that allow them to process the undead matter without harm.

While such biological life may be rare in whitewoods, other forms of life exist there. Undead, aside from the pervasive undead plants, are not as common in whitewoods as is widely believed, although it does seem that a slightly disproportionate number of undead are drawn to these terrains. More common in the whitewoods are other entities that are apparently generated by some ambient effect of the undead plants and that resemble undead but are not in fact the postmortal remnants of living beings, known as anatites (or sometimes as "woodwights"). Some etorists classify these entities as unusual undead notwithstanding, but most place them in their own kingdom, or at least their own phylum. Anatites vary widely from tiny things that can be startling but inoffensive to formidable monsters that form the whitewood's greatest dangers.

Borders

While whitewoods tend to have fairly abrupt borders, there is still some transition zone in between, where undead plants and branches mingle with living ones. These border regions often have their own life unique to them, adapted to this mixture of the living and the undead. The lichmouse, for instance, has developed a resistance to the auras of the whitewood and lairs within them where it is relatively safe from predators, but stays near the border because it must venture out of the whitewood to hunt for food. The foelight specifically lives on the interaction between the energies of the living and the undead, and is found almost exclusively at the borders of whitewoods, though there are occasional other areas congenial to these entities.

Resources

Though whitewoods certainly are bare of most of the standard resources to be found in forests, there are still some useful objects and materials to be harvested there. The wood of most of the undead plants is too brittle to be useful in building, but may still have its uses for decoration, and certainly burns well enough to serve as firewood. This last use should be approached with caution, however, as there are side effects to burning some kind of wood—burning spirit ash releases (or creates) small fire creatures called flickerspits.

The magical potential within the whitewood's undead plants is, in fact, perhaps the most important resource to be gleaned from the whitewoods. The ambient magic that builds up inside the plants and is responsible for the whitewood's formation in the first place, and that then accumulates within some of the other organisms that feed on the undead plants, can be tapped for various purposes. Whitewoods supply useful components for alchemy, and materials useful for other magical purposes.