The Wood is Growing - RPG Blog Carnival

The theme for this month's RPG Blog Carnival is It's Not Easy Being Green, which sounded interesting. So here's a mini-campaign or setting.

The Wood has been growing

Not in the usual way - a thicket here, a tree there - but like an advancing army. Not so long past, perhaps as little as ten years, around the monastery was fields. Now, it is an embayment on the edge of a vast, tangled sea of green stretching northwards as far as can be seen. Perhaps as far as the distant mountains. Perhaps beyond even that. 

A moon past, some men from the village went to cut wood for their fires, as they had for years. They were never seen again, nor - after the screaming stopped - heard from. The same could be said of the party sent to search for them a sennight later. Or the warband pursuing the wild-elves one moonlit night.

Young, brave men are becoming scarcer and scarcer. This cannot continue. If it does, the village will not continue. The realm itself may not continue - but surely the trees must stop when they reach the sea?

As the party penetrates deep into the Wood, news of their progress is widely transmitted. The trees talk to each other - or else the animals carry messages? - it's hard to be sure how. The deeper they get, the stranger things get. Trees hundreds of feet tall. Entangling roots that move with purpose. The vengeful dryads on the edges of the forest - back when there was still light - might have made the villagers flee in terror, but they are tame compared to the horrors of the deep wood.

Eventually, should the party make it to the sacred grove at the centre, they will find the dreadful druid-lich who has made the Wood an extension of themselves. The Wood cannot be stopped while the druid-lich still lives. And the druid-lich cannot be killed while the Wood still stands.

Suggested Monsters

• Wild wood-elves, of uncertain loyalty. Perhaps the druid-lich is, or was, one of them?
• Lesser druids, servants of the druid-lich, imbued with strange and dark magics.
• Dryads, unrelenting guardians of the forest.
• Treants, shepherds of the armies of awakened trees which march forth in conquest
• Carnivorous plants and entangling vines, ensnaring and trapping adventurers, funnelling them into the path of the forest's defenders.
• Giant spiders and giant ants, dwellers of the deep forest. And if the insects are this large, how large must their prey be? Or those who prey upon them?
• Strange fungi growing in reefs atop colossal fallen logs.
• Elementals (fire and water), great forces drawn upon by the druid-lich.
• Will-o-th'-wisps, drawing adventurers deeper into the Wood.
• A dragon, which believes all the gold in the Wood is its by right.
• The druid-lich themselves, imbued with immense power to command living things, to control the elements, and to shape themselves as they wish. Their soul is bound to the Wood; so long as even one stem survives, the druid-lich can be restored.

Robgoblin Reviews - The Monster Overhaul

I was going to write something about how game designers need to go hiking. But, actually, it turns out that a lot have. Fifth Edition's ludicrous statement that an average person can walk 24 miles a day whilst carrying a 150-pound pack is, fortunately, an outlier.

Best of the bunch, IMO? Probably AD&D 1st Edition, at least of the D&D variants. If you're still running 5e, for some reason, the AD&D rules are easy to steal for a house rule.

So instead, here's a review of The Monster Overhaul by Skerples.

Bottom line up front? It's excellent, go buy it now.

It is, in short, everything you need from a monster book. And nothing you don't need. Sure, bits are weird - it's Skerples, after all - but even the weird bits are useful. All the classic monsters are present: goblins, liches, dragons, and the likes. Usually with a unique twist, because nobody needs to see the same old statblocks again.

While the book is systemless, it's adaptable to some types of systems better than others. Any of the monsters could be run straight out of the book, if using Basic or Advanced D&D as your rules. I assume the same is true for GLoG. Fifth Edition, you're going to have to work at it - or take Skerples's advice, and use your existing rulebooks for basic statistics but use abilities from The Monster Overhaul. That's probably fair, and it's good that - despite the obvious, and explicit, old-school leanings - the book makes at least a nod towards what it calls 'games with a higher power level'.

And the abilities are fun as well as being easy to run at the table. No need to wade through spell descriptions for liches or druids, they have unique abilities there on the page. A dragon which breathes swords at you? Yes please. A centaur that's half centipede, half man? No thank you, I'd like to sleep tonight... but the stats are there.

Don't think that the book is just lists of monsters, though. There are random tables aplenty, for all sorts of things. Appearance. Motivation. Unique special powers. What flavour the monster is. Yes, really. Some of them give you interesting powers if you eat them. Most of them just taste horrible and will make you explode - or wish you'd exploded. 

Which is fair. I don't understand the fixation some people have for eating monsters.

And then there's the Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Golem. If you're eating that one, you're the monster.

Scattered throughout the book, at least one to a chapter, are generic locations: a Wizard's Tower, a Dragon's Lair, a Shipwreck. They're tropey. That's the point. When you draw up a map, and don't know what all the rooms are for? Go consult the models.

Even the indexing is excellent. There's the usual stuff: alphabetical, by HD, by typical dungeon level (or, in this case, by the type of room on that level). But there's also an 'Index of Monster Utility', for those times you need something to show up and tell the players to please stop eating Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Golems. And a surprisingly useful, and logical, Celestial Index of Benevolent Knowledge.

A few random highlights for me?

The Random Lifecycle Generator, for one. It's in the 'Strange Water' section, for weird sea creatures. But it works equally well for any other type of creature. Because why can't mature wizards have be sessile and reproduce by spore dispersal? What did you think those towers were for, astronomy?

Also, the Referee guidance. How to handle players receiving wishes (grant them, and embrace the chaos!). And how to handle evil in games. I will quote directly, because it's an important line:

You cannot mix the two options. Either Orcs are people, or they aren't.

Seriously, the book is almost worth it just for this section. Page 60, people, go read it.  

And finally, because I can't gush about this for too long, the actual physical artifact. This is a fantastic book. It is well laid out. Everything comes readily to hand; where a creature's entry extends over two pages, those pages are facing pages. The tables are clear. Even the inside endpapers are put to work. It feels nice and hefty in my hands, suitable for use - in a pinch - to bludgeon one's foes.

Though that would get blood on it, which would be a shame.

There are a few typos, but nothing major (I can't even remember them at the moment), and certainly don't detract from the text.

I look forward to running a game again so I have an excuse to use some of these monsters. They deserve to make some unwitting PCs lives miserable.