Somewhere, lost in the shrouded realms of death, lies a land of endless night where long‑forgotten horrors are revealed to those who travel through the mist.

There, in a crooked house lives a Crooked Man with a crooked grin. He raises crooked arms to a Crooked Tree at the edge of midnight and hears the whispers of the Old Ones.

They speak of a beast that stalks the darkest woods and darkest hearts, a crown of horns upon its head. If you lose your way and feel a warm breath that chills you to the bone, run.

Follow the songs of harvest time, and before long, you’ll find revelry in the dancing shadows of blazing wicker. No matter your story, these lonesome, misty rails will deliver you to where the hallowed cannot save you.

Now is the time to brave the dark wood, beware the witching hour, and weave your own dreadful folktale underneath the Crooked Moon.

You are now prepared to venture through the Shroud aboard the Ghostlight Express and face the terrors that await you in Druskenvald. Nothing in this book is meant to be prescriptive, and you are encouraged to use its contents in whatever way works best for you and your table. With The Crooked Moon as your guide, you are well-equipped to craft an unforgettable and haunting Folk Horror story with your friends.

HERE ARE THE OLD FEARS. Surrounded by looming walls of shrieking fog and forever trapped between dusk and the Witching Hour, Druskenvald is a realm made from the stuff of nightmares. Equal parts dreamland and afterlife, it beckons forth departed souls to be reborn into strange new folk that call this sinister place home. Lurking within the shadows of the night that never stops are ancient and terrible things that even the lord of the land forgot. Whether living or dead, heroic or humble, none are safe from the beasts that stalk the deepest woods and darkest hearts beneath the Crooked Moon.

It is this ever-present crescent with the face of a grinning witch that makes Druskenvald a bit eerie, uncanny, and crooked. It is a vestige of the forgotten, primordial origins of the realm, casting a wickedly gleeful look upon the land as if weaving a plot that only it knows with an inevitably dire outcome. However, to nearly all who live throughout the domain’s provinces, it has simply always loomed high overhead and provided much-needed light in an endless night so filled with terrors.

T H E L A N D B E T W E E N L I F E A N D D E A T H

Druskenvald (DRUSK‑in‑vahld) is a realm that exists outside the lands of the mortal and material. Enveloped in a seemingly endless expanse of eldritch gloom, it exists in a paradoxical state of limbo between the warring furies of life and death. Beyond the misty borders of this domain may lie countless worlds and afterlives, but Druskenvald stands apart—a self-contained demiplane where the living, dead, and everything in between can coexist.

Within these confines is a landmass hewn into the shape of a crescent moon and a dark and roiling sea that stretches from its eastern coastline until it disappears into the haze. Looming mountain peaks to the north and south flank the lands between, forming an enormous continent-sized valley that nonsensically spans numerous environments in a relatively short distance and never experiences the turn of a season. The laws of nature and logic have no dominion over a place that is just as much nightmare and folktale as it is a land to explore.

The mystifying nature of Druskenvald is made most apparent by the thirteen major provinces that comprise it. As if pulled from a child’s storybook featuring a broad collection of varying tales, each of these territories has a wholly distinct biome, topography, and climate. From forest to moor, desert to tundra, swamp to farmland, they all exist side by side like a collection of bizarre patches stitched together upon a grandmother’s quilt. Despite the uniqueness of each Druskenvaldian patch, travel between provinces is not especially difficult, and borders can be crossed with a simple step.

NIGHT OF THE CROOKED MOON

In Druskenvald, the sun never rises. Instead, the land is bathed in an orange glow from the horizon for a few brief hours at the height of dusk, only to be swallowed by the encroaching darkness that dominates the rest of the night.

The Crooked Moon, an eternal crescent with the visage of a leering hag, hangs eternally overhead. Its light waxes and wanes with the cycle of each night as it moves through the sky with no discernible pattern, casting long, creeping shadows. At times, it looms large in the sky, its baleful eye glowering over the land with malicious intent. At other times, it shrinks to a small sliver nearly lost in the night sky, leaving the land blanketed in total darkness.

The people of Druskenvald have adapted to their peculiar 24-hour “day” cycle from the Twilight Hour through the Witching Hour, dividing their time according to the shifting light in their own ways. Some rise as soon as the golden glow of the hidden sun shows itself above the horizon and settle in before the most treacherous hours of night. Others only wake during true darkness. While they may not agree on how to honor Druskenvald’s time, all peoples and provinces have aligned on the same naming conventions for the phases of each passing night.