To outsiders, our life is a mysterious one, filled with strange sayings, regimented rituals, and daily traditions that seem superstitious and backward. If a person wants to live in the Sharawood or even wander it sfety, they must learn how to feed the forest with rhyme and ritual. Only this is not how we think of it, our rhymes and rituals are merely the Old Ways, passed down from generation to generation. To us, the Old Ways have spiritual connotations, always observed and not to be shared with outsiders.
- We must open the eyes of our dead, lest the deceased wander lost and angry through the wood, unable to find their way to the afterlife.
- Sinners confess their transgressions by cutting themselves and dripping their blood upon the thirsty forest floor.
- A bloodless person cannot pass to the afterlife. Consequently, the dead are never buried, lest the roots exsanguinate them before the souls can reach the gods.
- One of the greatest punishments is to be buried - dead or alive. Reneants of the buried haunt the Sharawood. Every dawn, they return to their graves, and the root wicker cage that was once their circulatory system.
- Any manufactured structure built without sacrificing blood to the forest shakes itself down upon its owner.
- In a year's time, Treants grow from those dead who have commended themselves to the forest with sap, seed, and ritual.
- There are places in the forest that give or take youth, but only the unborn and the dead can find them.
- We extinguish torches before midnight. This practice is related to a far older tradition: We must not permit white moths to gather, lest a mora hide among their number.
- If you count butterflies one less than your group's number, one of you will die.
- An evil creature is born every time a "civilized" man enters the woods.
- Sharawood's beasts must never leave the forest as tamed companions of outsiders, lest the beasts become infatuated with "civilization" and become half-men, the abominations that outsiders call lycanthropes.
- If you nail the skin or hair of a sick person to a tree, the tree will absorb part of the disease and lend its strength to healing the illness.
- Every year kin, friends, and lovers celebrate the upcoming spring by giving each other blood-dyed pieces of thread. Each shall wear the thread until a tree signifying their relationship blossoms, whereupon the bearer drapes the thread across the blossoming branch. It is an ill omen if the tree never flowers.
- Every plant has a theme, a power, and a purpose. Flowers tend to be beguilers, and that is perhaps why outsiders are so fond of them. True power lies in leaf, stem, and root.
- Salt is incapable of holding magic, and makes an excellent ward against magical creatures, enchantments, and curses. Salt-encrusted springs are worth more than gold and one of the rare reasons that we emerge to trade with other settlements.