The Beast Fears Fire - Perils of the Great Bogsong

The destruction of the Ketteleye and formation of the Gulf of Catastrophe caused a lot of dramatic changes which persist to this day, one of them being the Bogsong micro-climate that persists along the western half of the Gulf. Warm ocean currents dominate this area in a tight bend that leaves a visible dividing line in the waters of the Gulf. The Bogsong climate is significantly warmer and stormier than the rest of the region, and has become home for animals and plants not seen elsewhere in the region.

The Great Bogsong is a subtropical bayou that extends along the western shore of the Gulf, north along the Crickton/Savel border to the foothills of the Surlycrow Plateau. It's one of the largest swamps in the world, and, given its recent formation and difficulty of travel, most poorly mapped.

It's hard to call the animals and plants that live in the Great Bogsong invasive, exactly, since the climate, topography and everything else about the region changed drastically from when it was part of the Ketteleye, but most of the things you can find there are new arrivals since the creation of the Gulf of Catastrophe.

The Great Bogsong has become a home for an incredible variety of dangerous plants and animals, most of which are not getting individual entries. Some highlights:

Alligators [Threshold 2 | Harm 2/Drowning] - Savelish gators aren't generally aggressive towards humans, but anything they think they can eat, they are going to try. Alligators are very optimistic.

Salt Water Crocodiles [Threshold 3 | Harm 2/Drowning] - Crocodiles are not native to the continent, so who knows how they got here, only that they are here and seem to like it quite a bit. What goes for gators goes for crocs, only being a meter longer requires less optimism on their part when it comes to grabbing humans.

Marsh Elk [Threshold 2 | Harm 1] Grayish-furred elk who might be one of the only large animals once native to the Ketteleye that adapted to the Great Bogsong. The are not the greatest tempered ungulates you ever met.

Venomous Snakes [Threshold 2 | Harm 1-4 depending on species/Poisoned, Sick, or Paralyzed]. The good news about the Great Bogsong is that there are, currently, no constrictor snakes large enough to threaten people. Hurray. There are several kinds of venomous snakes, ranging from the merely dangerous to the almost immediately lethal. Most common is the shore viper, which is a lot like a copperhead which doesn't mind dips in the ocean. Most famously lethal is the Kingdevil, who's got some impressive warning coloration and packs some very powerful neurotoxins in it's venom sacs.

Goblin Pitchers [Threshold 2 | Harm 1/Trapped, Paralyzed & Digesting]. To the person who's never been to the Bogsong, this seems like an especially dumb way to die - Underworld-infused pitcher plants grown to the size that a person could conceivably die in, but here's the problem: Fresh water is really hard to come by in the Bogsong, and goblin pitchers contain most of it. Boring through the wall of the plant releases mildly paralytic digestive juices which contaminate the water, so your only choice is up over the top. Inside the pitcher, there are hairs that, if you touch, also cause those juices to be released, so getting the water can be, to say the least, tricky.

The Bogsong is also a popular place for evil spirits (wisps especially), ghouls, ogres and monstrous spiders, to say nothing of the kind of people who come here from Crickton and Savel because they do not get along with their neighbors.

Add in swamp gas, sinkholes, geological instability (there was once a very extensive network of caverns somewhere in the western edge of the Ketteleye...), poisonous plants, and you get a place where almost no one ever wants to go.

But the trees are quite lovely.