We want to thank the indie publisher Loresmith for providing us with a copy of Wondrous Expeditions: Forests for our review.
Each master has his strengths and weaknesses; in my case one of the issues is the journey through wild landscapes between one place and another, specially in classical systems (like D&D5e or Old School games). When I tried to create those situations it felt like I was making my players repeat the same boring routine; often I am unable to gift the same atmospheres and the same sensations that are easier for me when it comes to exploring cities, dungeons or ruins.
Wondrous Expeditions: Forests is a system-neutral guide for Game Masters who like me need advice in the creation of adventures set, as the title suggests, in common or magical forests.
It is available in phisical format that in the digital version on the official store.
What’s inside? In this review I will highlight the various contents and the ways in which they are exposed.
Expeditions Through the Forests
The first part of this guide is dedicated to insights on expeditions, travels through woods and forests; the interactions with these wild areas are dealt with both from the “mechanical” and from the “roleplay” side.
As for the mechanical side we find some interesting travel methods: on foot, with a horse, with a cart and so on; fighting in areas cluttered by plants, orientation and foraging are also presented, concluding with the effects of the weather.
For the roleplay side we have paragraphs presenting interpretative opportunities related to the forest environment. The manual advices also how to increase the involvement of players by assigning roles; there will be characters hunting and finding resources while others will have to focus on keeping the party on the correct path.
Creating Scenes Embedded in the Setting
The next part of the volume presents the information necessary for worldbuilding and the creation of the right atmospheres in the forests.
Do you want to create a common forest or something special, perhaps one made up of crystals? Which and how many landmarks do you want to insert? How can you describe to players what they feel through their senses?
In order to help masters, the volume presents four examples of wonderful forests, applying what was previously explained in different ways; we thus find a forest of blasphemous origins, one full of life and in constant change, one that doesn’t follow the normal laws of time and one divided into two distinct but connected environments.
Expedition System
This section collects everything written in the previous parts of the guide and condenses them into the mechanics required to create expeditions.
Starting from the planning of the journey and taking into account the foreseen difficulties, the activities are prepared role by role, then the real journey starts and develops. At the end of the journey the morale of the group and any discoveries made along the way are checked.
Adventures and Monsters
Finally the guide contains two interlinked adventures, compatible with D&D5e (but easily adaptable for OSR systems too); they are both set in one of the beautiful forests presented in the examples.
The Root of Sylvanus leads players to investigate a mystery trying to escape from the corrupt place where they are imprisoned.
Shadows of the Marrowgrove continues the previous adventure, leading the characters to clash with the real cause of the corruption that afflicts the forest.
In the final appendices we also find some new monsters, already used in the two adventures but obviously intended also for any other sylvan encounter.
Review of the Aesthetic of Wondrous Expeditions: Forests
The volume is made up of 150 well organized pages; the choice of the font and the layout helps a lot both in-depth reading and a possible quick glance.
Each section often makes use of very useful and well text-incorporated tables, although unfortunately there is a lack of a special index to better locate them within the volume.
At the end of the Expedition System you can find a very useful summary scheme that makes all the necessary information available at a single glance.
What surprised me for an indie production like this is the quantity of images; almost every page has an amazing and consistent illustration. In other products it happens to find different styles that clash with each other or with the general graphic style of the volume.
Wondrous Expeditions: Forests – Review Conclusions
I have to admit that I’m not a fan of system-neutral guides; despite this strong premise in most cases they are still oriented towards at least one type of system (in most cases D20 like). Many of my previous experiences have led me to think of them as long essays on topics that could be summarized in a third of the used pages.
I wanted to make the review of Wondrous Expeditions: Forests because it instead impressed me for the amount of information and ideas presented; most of them (with the exception of adventures and monsters) are actually are not linked to a specific system. The structure of the guide starts with theoretical advice and then leads to increasingly practical examples (insights -> examples -> excursion system -> adventures); this choice has proved successful and I would like to see it applied more in the future.
So if like me you have had difficulty in dealing with this kind of environments and the long journeys to cross them, this guide is for you. If you need worldbuilding ideas and elements to create common or magical forests, I recommend giving Wondrous Expeditions: Forests a chance.