The Forbidden Zone

The Forbidden Zone is a major badland region in the Prelacy of Middenmark, tied to the dangerous, frontier character of the Northern Reaches. The public Middenmark material describes it as a central feature of the region: a wasteland created after a cataclysm destroyed an ancient city, leaving behind ruined wealth, dangerous remnants, and a power vacuum where Law and Chaos continue to struggle.

In campaign terms, it functions like a haunted scar on the map: not just wilderness, but a place where something civilization-shattering happened. The fact that the region contains “partially destroyed bounties to be looted” suggests treasure, ruins, old structures, and relics, but also instability and danger.

It also appears to affect nearby sites. Mordoom Keep is said to have remained uninhabited partly because of its proximity to the Forbidden Zone, and that same keep is now associated with the Soul Fungus, a supernatural fungal infection that turns victims into fungal undead or “Plaguewalkers.”

The area east of the caravan road is described elsewhere as having chaotic energies that are being monitored by local powers, including the Red Bannermen, because of fears that the chaos could disrupt the natural and magical fabric of the region.

It is a post-cataclysmic ruin-field: blasted earth, unstable magic, half-buried towers, broken roads, warped wildlife, sinkholes into ancient vaults, lingering undead, and strange lights at night. It feels different from normal wilderness—less like “dangerous woods” and more like crossing into a cursed exclusion zone where the rules of nature and magic are damaged.