Hon'kin Temperate Forest

Place

Place Name:

Hon'kin Temperate Forest

Biome:

Temperate Forest

Size:

Unknown

Continent:

Unknown

Subcontinent

Unknown

Geography

One of the main features of Hon’kin’s geography is its general lack of variety. Everywhere, the same trees and the same stones and the same paths. This helps travellers get lost and stay lost, which is exactly what the Rubel clan wants. The Rubel clan has put up some helpful maps and landmarks telling you how to get to their Summit Hall, but they don’t offer a whole lot of advice on actually getting out of the forest. There is one fairly big lake in the middle of Hon’kin, though. It’s called the Oasis Lake, because there are few other sources of water in the forest.

Unless you find a well sitting invitingly by the path, or a canteen of water hanging invitingly from a branch. Yeah. Unless you dig the well yourself, don’t drink from the wells, and definitely do not drink from the canteens, not even if it’s your canteen of water that you just lost a few minutes ago. But since the Oasis Lake would be difficult to poison without also killing all the fish in the lake and creating a terrible stench — it’s always safe to drink from the lake, so long as you don’t see or smell a host of dead fish. That’s why it’s called the Oasis Lake.

But just because the lake can’t really be poisoned doesn’t mean that it’s safe to approach and drink from. There’s probably at least fifty traps on each of its beaches and at least fifty men who’ve fallen for them. The Oasis Lake is sourced by rainfall and drains into underground reservoirs; there’s no directions or guidance to be had from nonexistent rivers in this forest.Perhaps you’ve been invited to the Summit Hall. Good for you! The home of the Rubel clan is a grand place, built from long, straight timbers and decorated with carved marble.

The interior is equally grand, being a spacious room occupied by a large banquet table which is always filled with food. The Summit Hall of the Rubel clan is easily found and easily left. It’s surviving afterwards that’s the tricky part. Oh, so you want to survive a visit? Very well. Don’t eat anything in the Summit Hall — it’s all poisoned. Even the food that your host is eating is probably poisoned too… he just has the antidotes. And don’t touch anything in the Summit Hall, either. The members of the Rubel clan know how to make poisons that kill you by seeping into your skin.

You know what, just for good measure, don’t breathe anything in the Summit Hall. Gaseous poisons are a thing and even if the Rubel clan doesn’t have those poisons now, due to their limited technology, they probably soon will. The above is good advice for just surviving in Hon’kin in general. Don’t eat anything, don’t touch anything, don’t breathe anything. But you also have to remember not to step on anything, too — fake floor traps and rope traps are among the most common used by the Rubel clan.

Plants

Both the summers and winters of Hon’kin are quite mild, but the thickness of the vegetation of the forest is limited by the rainfall, since the only other sources of water in Hon’kin are underground reservoirs which most plants can’t reach. In damper years with more precipitation, the vegetation will be much larger and prevalent, as opposed to dryer years with less precipitation. Still, even in the dryest of years, the oldest trees in the forest will stay green, thanks to their deep roots reaching the underground reservoirs. The trees in Hon’kin generally grow either quite tall or quite broad.

In either case, they generally grow pretty straight, and make pretty good planks if you chop them down and saw them up. There are exceptions, of course — I’m looking at you, Myipol trees — but Hon’kin’s trees are just overall exceptionally useful for all manner of carpentry, whether that’s bowmaking or shipbuilding. Not that there’s much of a use for shipbuilding in Hon’kin, it’s about as far as you can get from the sea. But the Holoraft tree is perfect for the lazy man who wants to go boating on the river without the bother of building or buying himself a boat.

Dis'tyl are trees that grow hollow. All you have to do is chop one down, seal off the ends, cut yourself a hole to sit in, and hey presto! You’ve got yourself a boat. A clumsy boat that could very well tip over as soon as you get into it, but it’s a boat nevertheless. No survey of Hon’kin’s vegetation could possibly be complete without mentioning the poisons that grow there. The Rubel clan is much to be thanked for making them so famous — though they probably would have done the same with the poisonous plants of every other forest in Taerel, had they decided to take up residence in those forests.

Hon’kin’s variety of poisons nevertheless surpasses by far the average forest’s variety of poisons; Hon’kin not only has one of the largest arrays of different kinds of poisons, poisons with different potencies as well as different effects, but it also has poisons in greater quantities than most other forests. The Rubel clan has some basic poisonous plants that they use all the time, so often that they have gardens of them: oleander, dayrik, nar'hil, and komaka. But there are also even more poisons that they know of that grow in the forest, among them being the extremely rare de'akora.

de'akoras are enormous creepers that grow on the oldest of trees. Their tiny fruits are where their deadliest poison lies, but their gigantic leaves will induce severe nausea for months. The Rubel clan sometimes poisons their targets with de'akora leaf, just to play mind games. It really is interesting to see the way a man’s friends will react when he suddenly gets very sick as they travel through Hon’kin. Considering how difficult it is to find de'akora berries, they’re not really worth their salt when distilled into a mediocre poison.

But this poison does turn neon purple the faces of those people who ingest it. So maybe there’s some uses for it.

Animals

If, in any place, there’s a multitude of poisonous plants that will kill basically anything that eats them, then at some point, some animal which can survive eating those plants, and prosper and reproduce abundantly because of it, is going to stroll right on in and do just that. Predators won’t be able to eat it unless they too can survive the poisons that run through its veins, and it’ll always have plenty of food. In Hon’kin, this animal is the rizaroc. You know those furry rugs made from animals, the ones that still have the animals’ heads attached to them?

A rizaroc is like one of those rugs come to life, except it’s colourful and feathery, it has arms that are wings made of bright yellow and red feathers, and it can stand and climb trees — yes, with its feathery arms. It has tiny hooks on the end of its wings. It’s a peculiar sight, to see a bird (or a bird-like creature) using its wings as an aid in walking. rizarocs don’t fly everywhere they go for the same reason that they use their wings to help themselves walk: their feet are enormous, and extremely heavy. The reason their feet are so unwieldy is because their feet are huge talons capable of rending solid wood.

No one knows why rizarocs have such big talons, since rending solid wood (or any tough object, really) isn’t a part of their normal everyday lives. These talons do help them cling with unrivalled tightness to the branches upon which they sleep, and they do scare off would-be predators who have yet to realize that eating the poisonous rizaroc is a bad idea, but otherwise, the talons seem to have no uses. rizarocs don’t even eat nuts — they eat a large variety of plants, including poisonous ones, but they don’t eat nuts, because there are no nuts growing in Hon’kin.

The talons of the rizaroc will probably continue to mystify scientists for quite some time. While the rizaroc is an actually poisonous animal and actually eats poisonous plants, there are other brightly-coloured animals that are only pretending to be poisonous. One such animal is the Painted qualira. Painted qualiras come in a hundred different colours. Some of its unusual colour is natural, but much of it has been added by artificial means. Qualiras take ordinary, non-poisonous flowers, and crush the petals in their spit, mixing the resulting substance with a few other ingredients, like dirt.

The end result is a dye that will probably stain their fur for quite a long time. Male qualiras are especially prone to painting themselves up, because that’s how they’ll attract females. Female qualiras paint themselves up too, to make sure predators don’t start thinking that they’re less poisonous than the other qualiras, but it’s not quite so much of a priority for them. Qualiras are surprisingly intelligent and dextrous; they’re often trained by the Rubel clan to put poison in traps that would otherwise be too delicate for the larger hands of a kin’toni to handle.

Historical Timeline of Ages

Age Name	Dates	Controller
Stone Age	Before 1E 0	Unknown
Copper Age	1E 1–1E 2200	Unknown
Bronze Age	1E 2200–1E 4400	Unknown
Iron Age	2E 0–2E 700	Unknown
Ancient Age	2E 700–2E 2200	Unknown
Middle Age	3E 0–3E 2050	Unknown
Early Modern Age	3E 2050–3E 2600	Unknown
Industrial Age	3E 2600–3E 2700	Unknown
Machine Age	3E 2700–3E 2800	Unknown
Atomic Age	3E 2800–3E 2850	Unknown
Space Age	3E 2850–3E 2875	Unknown
Information Age	3E 2875–3E 2900	Unknown
Genetic Age	3E 2950–3E 3000	Unknown
Awakening Age	3E 3000–3E 3415	Unknown
Twilight Age	4E 0–4E 500	Rubel Kin'toni Clan

Place

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Hon'kin Temperate Forest

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This article is written by Xerxes Worldweaver. Copyright 2026 Xerxes Worldweaver. All rights reserved.