Old Halfwood

A farming village in the great woods north of Cathalon, burned and seized by Laewendas's soldiers ~40 years ago — punishment for petitioning the crown to reject her. Long abandoned and reclaimed by fast-growing pioneer forest, it now stands as fire-blackened ruins amid old field-squares and collapsed fence posts, infested by a wandering necromantic undead blight. Its witch church-hall and a herbalist's hut still stand in good condition.

(Heard as "Halfwood" / "Hathwood" (and joke-rendered "Hufflepuff," misheard once as "Blackwood"); a table-only name with no confirming source.)

Session 45

• Discovered off the forest road. The party, marching off-path toward the Menagoles, finds the village by following old farmland and a quarter-mile signpost; the surrounding wood is pioneer-species trees grown over abandoned fields in ~20–40 years.
• A nest of undead. Thalia's Primeval Awareness reads 15–20 undead in the hex (~8 in the village): morgue corpses in the church undercroft, wandering villagers, a half-skeletal postmaster, a pitchfork-killed farmer, and a zombie elk in a hollow tree. All are trivially weak; the party clears them and burns 9½ bodies on a pyre.
• The petition and the massacre. Via Silithane's Speak with Dead, the dead postmaster reveals the village's fate: he carried the mayor's petition — a motion rejecting the "false queen" Laewendas, signed by 800 citizens — to the crown at Cathalon; "the palace refused this delivery. Several days later, soldiers seized Halfwood… the blue jackets did not prevail, and we fell red by nightfall."
• Not the source. Fenric's magic-sight confirms the undead share one spreading crimson necromantic curse (corpses one week to ~50 years dead, all afflicted) but finds no source here — the blight wandered in from elsewhere and reanimated the old battlefield dead. The party resolves to follow the trail to its origin.
• Its name lives on in the loyalist settlement New Halfwood, being raised nearby by Thanhold, who fought in the original battle.