Blackwood

Blackwood is the name of a forest located on the far northern part of Fiore, several miles east of Clover Town - it is concidered to be one of the most dangerous places in all of Fiore; due to the fact that a very old and powerful Necromancer has choosen to make the forest his home. While the Wizard himself is harmless enough, the forest has been direly affected by his experiments with the Black Arts and remains saturated with raw excess of negative energy --- this only worsened a few years back, when the Necromancer decided to use the forest itself to acclaim more corpses and therefore gain more mindless followers. Trough a several day-long ritual the mage managed to cast a powerful spell over the woods in order to use it to reinforce his army, the spell is referred to by the local populace as Jacob's Curse.

Since then, every living thing which has met its end in the forest has arisen a few days later as undead; walking carcasses who lumber about the forest in search of easy prey, murdering everyone within sight so that they too can arise and become a part of Jacob's rotting empire of undeath: The curse is so potent that even if the corpses are retrieved and given a proper burial they still rise as undead within the mentioned time - the only known means of preventing the dead to rise again is to cremate or thoroughly obliderate the bodies - if even as much as a single finger is left behind, that finger will reanimate itself and scour the forest for prey to kill just like all the other undead.