Description
The Rifenmist Jungle is an endless mass of natural chaos. The floor is covered in vines and clustered with wide-trunked trees, spiny ferns, and carnivorous plants. The land is hot and humid, pocked with valleys that lead to marshland and quicksand pits, and some regions are afflicted with a spreading fungus. The jungle becomes denser the further south one travels.
Before the Divergence
Before the Founding, a primordial titan seed was planted here which would remain unborn and slumbering at least into the late Era of Reclamation, and its energy was responsible for the extraordinary overgrowth of the Rifenmist Jungle.
In the Age of Arcanum there was a society called the Qoniira Tetrarchy in the jungle region south of Byroden. The Qoniira respected and honored all magic, regardless of its nature (good or evil, natural or humanoid-wrought) but the civilization was thought to have been wiped out, leaving only ruins. (Shaun Gilmore and Opal have different historical recollections about when Qoniira fell; he says it was some years before the Calamity, she recalls they were wiped out when the Calamity hit.)
At the end of the Calamity, a great army of treants marched south across the valley that would become the Mornset Countryside to create the Rifenmist Jungle to border the lands poisoned by the Strife Emperor during the Calamity.
Era of Reclamation
More than eight centuries after the Divergence, the Rifenmist Jungle was still poorly mapped by travelers from the northern regions of Tal'Dorei, and few travelers who enter the jungle return. Attempts have been made by humans and elves of northern Tal'Dorei to colonize the jungle, but they were quickly rebuffed by the elves of the Orroyen tribes, having sent the clear message that no cities are to be built south of the jungle's edge. The people of the Mornset Countryside are superstitious about the jungle, and few enter it except to parlay with the Orroyen.
As of 812 PD the hobgoblins of the Iron Authority in the Beynsfal Plateaus had been at war with the jungle itself for years, but had made little ground against the land.
The adventure hook The Holocaust Seed in the Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting, set in 812 PD, involves figures of dark intent seeking out and beginning to awaken the primordial seed. If the primordial's rapid development is not halted, it will rise and terrorize the continent; if it dies, the Rifenmist Jungle may die with it.
At some point, Opal and Ted's dad ventured into the Rifenmist Jungle, and later stumbled out of the jungle naked, feverish, and afraid.
In 842 PD, when a mysterious rune caused an ash-blown mesa to suddenly rise in the Scar of the Cinder King outside Emon, Shaun Gilmore suggested that the nature of the rune could be deciphered with the help of writings from the ruins of Qoniira, and he helped a group of adventurers to head in that direction. The adventuring party, which would later be known as the Crown Keepers, eventually made their way to the ruins of the Qoniira Tetrarchy and with Melora's blessing found their way to its remaining hidden city, Niirdal-Poc.
Behind the scenes
The Rifenmist Jungle was left deliberately vague in the original Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting sourcebook, allowing GMs to take advantage of the mysteriousness of the far-off realm. The Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn sourcebook, set around 836 PD, has additional elements from Exandria Unlimited Prime, which included an extended trip into the Rifenmist Jungle and the introduction of the Qoniira Tetrarchy.
Artwork
