Harpy Halloween! Don’t let all your lands be fertile fields and pristine wilderness. Here are several examples of cursed lands where adventurers might need to go to accomplish something, rescue someone, or destroy someone or something. Places like this are of little use to humans but harbor monsters of the most dire sort.

1. The Blighted Waste

This is a miserable and magically cursed land, tortured by elementals with a lack of rain followed by flash floods. It is rocky and barren among the hills. In the valleys, it has sparse, bent, and crooked trees, scrub brush, and the sort of animals and monstrous creatures that can scrape a living out of such a place.

Strange auroras light the skies at night with a hellish glow. The weirdest sounds of monstrous creatures baying to one another echo in the dark. Terrible wind storms blow fine dust around, often in cyclones and dust devils, sometimes piling it against the trees and rocks and the few homes of desperate peasants who remain to scratch a living from the ground.

Ruins and abandoned towns and castles abound, with most humanity crowded into a few remaining citadels above the few remaining fertile valleys.

If the dark secret of this land’s problems can be found, perhaps the rains with come steadily again, and the rivers will flow. But for now, the dead walk the night openly, crawling out of the mass graves, while the living cower behind crude walls.

2. The Foul Lake

The ancient capital city of the realm has an excellent aqueduct system and a matching sewer system that gathers all the waste of civilization and funnels it out of the city and into a marshy lake that serves now as a vast cesspool. It is a place of filth and awfulness accessed thru a dense, swampy wilderness filled with outlaws, goblinoids, treants, and others with a high tolerance for stench.

Vultures congregate to feast on the carcasses and offal floating into the lake or hung up among the trees. Otyughs, oozes, and other such monstrosities abound in the hills and caverns, some of which are partially submerged.

Heavy rains sometimes flush out the sewers and cause the lake area to flood, spreading misery and disease to nearby fields. Now and then, some monstrosity manages to slither up the river of misery, into the sewer system, and out into the city…. Also, from time to time, it is necessary to send a hardy–and well-armed–band of men to clear away some obstruction to allow the filth to flow freely out to the sea.

Some strange ruins are found around the lake–remnants of some some ancient folk who flourished here before the lake was fouled.

3. The Boiling Land

A huge, underground field of crevices where subsurface water, driven to boiling temperatures, rises up in springs and geysers, resulting in scalding hot rivers where virtually nothing can live. Even downstream, where the waters have cooled, they remain poisonous and stinking of sulfur. A few scrub bushes and weeds can live off such waters.

A few wretched creatures, as well, are able to survive in such a place–goats, mostly, and creatures that prey upon them. Goblinoids hide in caves and cultivate moss and fungus to augment their goat hunting. Gnolls prey upon both goats and goblins. Various lizards and lizard-like creatures live here as well, including dragons, which can fly beyond the reach of the stinking waters and hunt in pleasant, green lands.

A volcano towers over the land, occasionally belching clouds of gas and–from time to time–lightweight volcanic rock and ash. The ash sometimes covers the ground, smothering life of every sort.

Legend has it that this was once a green and fertile valley, and ancient ruins dot the landscape from the days before the calamitous rise of the volcano that likely buried those unfortunate people–and their treasures–in ash.

4. The Salt Desert

This is a huge, dry lake that once had three river inlets. It had no outlet, tho, and so expanded with the incoming water and contracted with the evaporation of it in the hot, dry clime. Evaporation left the minerals behind and eventually made it much saltier than the sea. But extended droughts in the region left the lake dry, and so it is now a vast salt pan.

Little lives here besides lizards and lizard-like monsters, as well as vultures who follow anything alive, certain it will soon cease to be so. But there are salt miners and merchants here, naturally, who carry away blocks of salt in great caravans.

And there are also mysterious ruins at the edges, hinting that a culture once thrived here, before the rivers ceased to flow in. Cliff dwellings dot the hills, abandoned for centuries, perhaps hiding some secret. Maybe a terrible catastrophe changed things, leaving the lake with no incoming water and causing the entire lake to dry up, forcing the ancient people to move on.

5. The Lake of Lightning

For hours nearly every night, lightning storms light the sky in this mountainous land. The endless lightning occurs over and around a large, brackish lagoon that empties into the sea by a delta. It typically occurs over a bog area formed where the major river flows into the lake.

There is a near-constant roof of heavy clouds, but the lightning is usually high enough to be quiet but for the occasionally crack and roll of thunder. The area is subject to long bouts of light rain and heavy winds sweeping out sea.

Nevertheless, the land is rich with vegetation and wildlife. The locals live in stilt houses around the wetlands and mostly get around in boats. They worship a lightning god and have metal idols mounted on their houses, with chains stretching to the ground, which act as lightning rods. Fires are common in the forest, but the rains tend to keep them from spreading.

A variety of monstrous creatures live in the wilderness and wastelands nearby, including air elementals, trolls, harpies, and hydras, as well as beasts fond of bogs. Humanoid monsters are generally too afraid to stay in the area long. A blue dragon lives on the nearest mountain.

6. The Dark Realm

The Tyrant Queen rules this realm, and her evil influence has wrecked the land. Clouds obscure the sun the great majority of days, and thunderstorms torment the remaining impoverished and starving populace.

Orcs and gnolls roam openly, cutting down the sparse forests and destroying what little natural beauty it once had. The timber mainly just gets sold by the tyrant to neighboring realms, along with iron and copper ores mined by kobolds and by slaves captured on the borders. The realm produces little else of value, so what resources it has must be sold or traded for grain and vegetables.

Cyclones ravage this land, perhaps brought on by the Tyrant Queen’s evil rituals, no doubt. She and her minions live elegantly while the humans, dwarves, and halflings who once thrived here suffer and fear her and her minions. Any who oppose her are arrested and clapped in shackles in a dank dungeon or merely put to death on the gallows that loom in every town square.

Evil witches cavort in the sparse remaining forests, sometimes making sacrifices to dark patrons. Such things are not merely tolerated but protected by the evil queen, and there is little the hopeless good folk can do about it.