The Aranya Wold¶
The great ancient forest inland of the Landfall Coast — deep Custodian country, and the first place the colony learns that Nandana's wilderness is older and made. Named, like the oversoul, for the wild itself.
[!quote] "There's a cathedral under the canopy. Not a metaphor. The trees are growing in rows a mile wide, and the rows point at something." — survey team, first push inland
The setting¶
A vast, cultivated forest — impossibly old growth arranged with a faint, unsettling geometry. The Wold is a Custodian terraforming heartland, threaded with Choir-nodes and hiding ruins beneath its roots. Pushing through it is how the colony first makes contact with Aranya and first glimpses the Progenitors' hand.
Terrain that tells a story¶
| Feature | Origin | On the board |
|---|---|---|
| Old-growth canopy | Engineered forest | Full concealment; vertical fights; camo favors both sides |
| The Rows | Trees planted in mile-wide patterns | Sightlines that "point"; navigation and objective hints |
| Sunken ruins | Buried Progenitor structures | Elevation + hard cover; salvage; Choir-node objectives |
| Choir-nodes | Relays of the oversoul | Capture to sway the Custodian grid |
Where the secret starts
The Coast is survival; the Wold is revelation. This is the biome where a player stops thinking "hostile planet" and starts thinking "somebody built this." Seed the first legible ruins and the first words from Aranya here.
Strategic value¶
The Wold's Choir-nodes are the earliest handholds on the Custodian grid — the beginning of turning Act 1's enemy into Act 2's ally. It is also thick with salvage: the forest floor is where humanity's exotic arsenal first comes from.