In the Ironwood

Question: Although you've established that the other Titans are still up in the air, in the picture for Muspelheim, you have passages to Kaminokaze, Terra, and Mirkwood. What is Mirkwood supposed to be?

Ah, yes - sorry for any confusion. "Kaminokaze" here stands for the Titanrealm of Sky, which may or may not end up being Japanese-helmed in our final rewrite (it's what it's being called in our current games, because the PCs accidentally installed Raijin and Fujin as its major avatars and consequently have mostly flooded the islands out with unceasing rain). "Terra" refers to the Titanrealm of Earth, which will definitely not be called that but which hasn't been worked on thoroughly enough yet to have a name. Once we get those things ironed out, we'll change the map to show correct names.

Mirkwood, on the other hand, is totally supposed to be there, and you'll also see a passage to it in Ourea, deep in Mughdavana. Mirkwood - or, more properly in Old Norse, Myrkviðr - is the great, nigh-impenetrably deep and dark forest of Norse myth, a sort of barrier zone mentioned in various texts as a wilderness that is difficult to pass through and generally populated by magical creatures and monsters. In Scion, it's a vast Terra Incognita that is a trackless, challenge-filled forest that even Psychopomps and gods of the hunt can't pass through too quickly or easily. It's Mirkwood that Geoff and his band were lost in for months in search of trollwives and lost Scions, and also Mirkwood that Aurora's band ventured into in order to meet the Fenris Wolf itself. It's the quintessential magical forest, and it connects to a lot of places as a result; wherever a forest is legendarily deep and dark, it's likely to have a passage that leads an unwary traveler into the Mirkwood.

Scion: Ragnarok refers to it merely as "the Dark Forest" (which is what "Mirkwood" literally means), probably to avoid confusion with Tolkien's Mirkwood (which is also based on the Norse forest!). It may also be called that in order to easily combine several very similar Norse forest-Terras under one heading - Jarnvidr, Hoddmimis, Galgvidr and so forth - thus capturing the idea of the deep, monster-filled Norse forest in a centralized location called many names instead of a bunch of fiddly little Terrae that don't really differ from one another too much. Ragnarok actually sets the whole shebang as part of the Norse Overworld rather than a separate Terra, but we decided it worked better as its own entity, especially considering that so many foes and frenemies of the Norse gods tend to live there.

We're not worried about our players being confused by Tolkien's Mirkwood, so we prefer to call it by its Norse name instead of just "the dark forest".