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.