This week has been a big week, terrain-wise. Monday was Earth Day – which encompasses all sorts of terrain – and today is Arbor Day, which of course emphasizes trees. (Well, it’s Arbor Day in Nebraska, the home of the originator of the event in the U.S. Different parts of the world celebrate it at different times of year.)
We thought it would be fun to celebrate all this terrain by sharing some products by other publishers that help GMs diversify their games and keep things interesting for the players. In honor of Arbor Day we’ll be emphasizing forests, but many of these publishers have supplements available for a wide variety of terrain types. (All product links are to DriveThruRPG.)
If we wanted to use forest descriptions and for some reason weren’t using TTA’s own Bits of the Wilderness: Into the Wildwood (hey, it’s possible), our go-to source for descriptions would probably be Wilderness Dressing: Woodlands by Raging Swan Press. There’s also Campaign Backdrops: Forest and Woodlands, a compilation of description and encounter products, including a few forest villages to drop in. For wilderness dressing of many kinds, check out GM’s Miscellany: Wilderness Dressing, which is designed to “enliven your PCs’ travel both overland and by sea.”
Other forest products that caught our eye recently include 100 Things to Find, See and Hear in a Forest and 100 Curiosities to Bamboozle Players to Find Outdoors, both by Azukail Games. (Bamboozling players is one of our favorite things!) Another one we’d like to try out is The Forest Generator Handbook: Crafting Immersive Forests for RPGs by Happicat Creations. It’s easy to let every forest end up the same, and this book seems like it would help keep away from that.
Another product we ran across introduced us to a term we hadn’t heard before.
Forest Fantasy: A Foragers Guild Worldbuilding Guide is by Lightspress Media. Fantasy forest, sure. (Shrug.) Wrong! Forest Fantasy is a different style of play. From the product description:
“Forest fantasy centers around the natural world, particularly lush and mystical forests, as a core element of the narrative. It’s a genre where the magic and wonder of the woodland take center stage, and where the line between the mundane and the fantastical blurs beneath the canopy of ancient trees.”
Being in a company run by an evil overlord tends to skew one’s point of view, so Tabletop Adventures products tend to end up a bit… darker than the sundappled forest in that product description. However, it’s a mind-broadening concept, and one that would be interesting to explore more.
Remember that multiple varieties of wilderness descriptions are available right now (through April 28) for a special price in the Earth Day Bundle from Tabletop Adventures. Happy Arbor Day, and be sure to get your adventurers out into those forests!
