#100 Hardwood Bog

Age: 200 Years

Hidden or Lost?: No

History: Where do the criminals of the Fey world go when they transgress against one of the countless Byzantine laws that were brought to the material realm when they fell into the mundane? The answer is Hardwood Bog, a colossal tree stump from a-time-before-time which has been transformed into an unbreakable jail.

The magical prison was founded by Everflower, The Sunrise King, who realized that the material world was ill-equipped to contain the most devious and violent of his own kind. In a rare instance of cross-clan collaboration, Everflower convinced the greatest goblin architects in the land to carve an impenetrable prison complex into the ancient stump of a long-dead Emperor Tree. With impenetrable wood, suffused with ancient magics and roots that extend out into the very multiverse, it made a perfect jail for beings with impossible powers.

Impervious to magical manipulation or brute force and located endless leagues into deadly swampland, Hardwood Bog quickly became known for its eternal sentences and cruel conditions. Among the prison’s unique punishments there are the Blendgrounds, a field where impossibly strong inmates, such as the tyrant Esper Dragonarm, are phased into the ground itself, unable to move for eons at a stretch. There are the Silent Hollows, dark cells in which no sound can be created, trapping rogue mages in a timeless cage of their own futile struggling.Or there’s the Maddening Fair, an illusory carnival where inmates are eternally taunted and lost in an infernal fun fair.

Hardwood Bog is overseen by Warden Plex, a sadistic and imaginative goblin, who is empowered as part of the arrangement that created Hardwood Bog. Plex commands an army of swamp creatures, hags, rock golems, and malevolent fairy folk who act as prison guards.

But perhaps the coldest aspect of Hardwood Bog lies in its deepest cell, the most heavily warded and least visited. for this is the cage of Everflower himself, deposed by his people for the creation of the blasphemous prison. The powerful elf king was hunted down and captured to be held up alongside the villains he helped contain.

Even after centuries in his dank oubliette, Everflower remains steadfast in his conviction that Hardwood Bog can be a tool for justice, a place for reformation and healing. Even if every day proves him otherwise.

1. Sharp Tooth Gate

2. Frog’s Eye Towers

3. Vile Cleansing Pods

4. Blendgrounds

5. The Maddening Fair

6. Liar’s Stocks

7. River of Foul Waters

8. Re-Education Worms

9. Guards’ Pleasure Hall (‘The Knot’)

10. Pillars of Execution

11. Evidence Baskets

12. Warden Plex’s Apartments

13. The Silent Hollows

14. Everflower’s Oubliette