Apr 17, 2023 9:43 pm
Holler consists of five distinct mountain ranges: the Great Craggy Mountains, the Ghost Ridge Mountains, the Sootstones, the Faefall Mountains, and the Stygian Mountains, as well as everything in-between. The region is comparable to southern Appalachia in terms of size, climate, and ecosystems. Aside from monsters, cryptids, and mutated life forms, Holler has most of the same flora and fauna that one finds in the real world Appalachia.
Corn Cob Gap
Corn Cob Gap, also known as Rustic Road or Hoofing-It Highway, is a long, narrow L-shaped pass that cuts between the Ghost Ridge and Great Craggy Mountain ranges, terminating at the northern border of the Holler. It provides passage through the mountains for migrating beasts, traveling peddlers, reassigned workers, and shipments between industrial operators. The high country on either side of the gap provides rapscallions and predators perfect hiding places to stalk their prey. Many a traveler has set out on the Gap never to return.
Cussfoot Fens
The Cussfoot Fens occupy a small sliver of territory immediately east of the Hogback Hills and form the Holler’s southeastern border. The Fens give off a fetid smell, partially from the many layers of decomposing mosses and plants, and partially from the dead that are routinely buried there in shallow graves by folks from the Hogback Hills.
Holler residents believe the mud of the Fens has special properties and grants a deep, peaceful sleep to departed loved ones. The Fens are notorious for deep sink holes as well as "cold spots" that can give a traveler the deathly shivers in a matter of moments. The Fens are rife with cryptids, many of whom favor its relative isolation and ample supply of necrotic tissue.
Faefall
Forming the Southern border of the Holler, Faefall appears miraculously free from Blight. However, most view its low, lush ridges as a peculiar haunt, and not worthy of habitation, due to the preponderance of stories about the capricious fae that inhabit it. The landscape almost feels like an illusion — a dream of an unbelievably bright and shining spring. Silver rain showers whisk across a glade. The winnowed light of dusk illuminates the fingertips of a sapling. Birds, wild horses, and herds of elk live easy as you please in bright meadows and apple orchards.
Ghost Ridge Mountains
The mist-shrouded Ghost Ridge Mountains appear an eerie blue when viewed from a distance — some say the blue is simply one’s eyes playing a trick, others that it’s an emanation of the mystical power contained within the Ghost Ridge’s forested peaks and fast-moving rivers.
The fog gets so dense in the spring and autumn that a traveler can barely see her hand in front of her face, and the landscape’s myriad nooks, crannies, caves, and crevasses are home to an unusually high number of haints.
The human population of Ghost Ridge dwells in clan-based hollows. These folks tend to keep to themselves and out of the factories, but a few have left in search of work.
Great Craggy Mountains
The Great Craggies come by their name honestly, marked by jagged, treeless peaks and huge boulders jutting from every slope. Strip mining and deforestation have amplified their rugged and sometimes desolate appearance. Black bears, panthers, and giant-sized mutations of snakes, spiders, and owls roam its expanses. Rock slides, lightning storms, and flash floods are common hazards. The Blight has strongly affected the Great Craggies’ eastern facing slopes, with many burl-boiled trees and poisoned streams.
The Craggies feature some of the most majestic and terrifying views in the Holler, from 800-foot waterfalls to steep ravines that seem to descend into maelstroms of nothingness.
Hogback Hills
On the eastern side of the Holler, the mountains give way to rolling hills and red clay fields marked with small ponds and occasional dense thickets. The western third of the Hogbacks form the foothills of the Faefall. This area boasts its fair share of wildflower-speckled meadows and clear streams. The eastern third constitutes the southern escarpment of the Sootstones, and the land and air here bear ruinous evidence of the Sootstones’ environmental affliction. The central third abuts the Ghost Ridge and constitutes the Holler’s textile belt, home to the largest Ashdown Textile Mill and its company town.
Its residents are hard-working and fiercely independent millhands, and despite the Big Boys’ prohibitions, they have carved out lively monuments to their lifestyle throughout the hills — illegal lean-to bars and jook joints, fallow fields reserved for their riotous stomp parties, and a fair smattering of moonshine stills and serpent churches.
Piney Dirge Plateau
North of the Stygians, the slopes descend quickly to the eerie high plain of the Piney Dirge Plateau. Tall, isolated pines punctuate the mind-numbing regularity of the landscape’s rocky soil, dry gulches, and scattered patches of blackened snow. Rapidly fluctuating temperatures, large dust devils, stone outcroppings sharp as cut glass, and strange orbs of floating Blight make travel extremely dangerous.
The fanatical Church of the Anointed makes its residence on the Plateau, along with other, smaller cults. These worshippers have plenty of diabolical company. Every demon in existence can be found here, along with a bevy of giant predators. Travelers who have survived its horrors often make two exceedingly odd claims about Piney Dirge — "it’s a small patch of ground that seems to stretch on forever," and "the further ye walk, the closer ye get to finding ye true self, if ye have such a thing."
Sootstones
If Faefall is an Arcadian dreamscape, the Sootstones are the nightmarish inversion of that dream. Coal ash chokes the air. Slurry fills ponds and lakes. Dye tanks from textile mills leach poison into the ground. Mountains are stripped bare of their trees or their tops have been blown off entirely, filling the valleys with noxious debris. Mill villages, mining camps, and ad hoc tent towns offer little shelter and comfort to workers on the blind edge of despair.
Industrial toxins mingle with the dark magic to produce a particularly powerful form of the Blight. Mutated cryptids make their lairs in abandoned shacks and demons of every description prey on vulnerable folk.
Some residents of Sootstone believe the Lord has absconded to a remote corner of the universe. Others believe he is testing them to the limits of their resolve and that all this suffering must one day lead to salvation.
Stygian Mountains
The tallest, most dangerous, and most demon infested mountains in the Holler, normal folks don’t set foot in the Stygians and those who do don’t return to tell any tales.