A write up of an ancient forest of trees with twisted trunks that move behind your back.
Populate the forest with D10 Landmarks and D10 Residents.
The Dancing Woods:
- Ancient: The old demand respect from the young, and these woods have outlived most. Disrespect the forest and learn just how cruel she can be.
- Coy: Though she remains still under your gaze, out of sight the forest dances about. Leaves chuckle every time the shifting scenes lead you astray.
- Obscurant: Dim light and dense vegetation veil the forest’s secrets. Showing just enough to dare you to look, but not so much as to spoil what you’ll find.
d10 Landmarks to find within:
1. Overgrown Giant - Sound Asleep: A misplaced mound stands without companions. Heaving like a calm sea, it rumbles softly underneath your feet.
- Contagious Dream: On this hill, resting eyes do not wake. Their dream is too large for one: it seeps into the sleep of others, revealing ancient secrets.
- Nourishing Delectables: Plump fruits beckon you with ambrosial scent. Invigorates the famished with a bite, an entire feast conveniently packed.
- Deadly Seeds: Scattered throughout its flesh, once consumed they quickly sprout. Stomach upsets at sun-set, chest breaks together with dawn.
- Cloud Billower: Icy water bubbles like a boil, throwing up thick curtains of mist, engulfing but the tallest trees.
- Colourful Fortune-teller: Bathe in these waters and be cleansed of uncertainty. Dark or bright, your tomorrow colours the fog, portending your lot.
- Full-Moon Bloomer: Buds close to the ground, like a pack on the hunt. But after waxing before waning, they look up as if ready to howl.
- Enraging Pollen: Silver shimmer in full-moon's light. Sweetness fills your nose: Dilated pupils, blood pumping, an unstoppable urge to kill.
- Blinding Colours: Bright garish paint covers all and blurs otherwise clear boundaries. A disorienting cacophony of visual noise.
- Fae Artists: From dusk till dawn, fair folk continue their labour of love. Like proud parents they are easily flattered, and easier still to offend.
- Unavailing Descend: Every step down followed by another, round and round without end, yet the surface always a few steps away.
- Imprisoned Star: Locked away after refusing a lover’s advance, his song reaches up from the depths, promising his savior to grant them any wish.
- Poison Extraction: Bramble safeguards glinting axe. Venomous drops expelled from wicked thorns, drawn up through root from blighted ground.
- Corrupting Axe: Upon touch blight enters the body, voice the mind: “Swear to devastate the forest. Power befalls those who assent, rot those who decline.”
- Morphing Mushrooms: Luminous mushrooms trail towards a yard of fungal delights. Some enlarge, others shrink: an assorted buffet of alterations.
- Fae Watchmen: Fair folk, attracted to the spore bouquet, doze nearby. Upon rousing them, their ruckus will cause the garden to vanish instantly.
- Flour Sacrifice: Babe torn from mother’s bozem, annual sacrifice for baker’s dust. They think she devours it, she thinks they can’t feed the poor soul.
- Dreams to Dust: Silver mesh captures passing dreams. Ground to dust they are useful to the witch’s art.
- Perforated Giant: Arboreal colossus , painted with sigils, decorated with wreaths and riddled with hollows, a different bauble stuffed into each of them.
- Equivalent Exchange: Accursed are those who take without giving of equal worth. Each night another hole, ‘til you are no more or pay your due.
d10 Residents to meet within:
1. Raven Dynasty- Collaborative Schemers: Helpful friends until you lose your use. Conspire with one against other, and other against one.
- Gossipmongers: News is currency, juice its value. Custom demands hosts spill quality tea and guests pay back in kind.
- Mournfully Seeking: In search of lost friendship from time forgotten, Sareom emerges from the earth to look a while, before diving back underground.
- Unremitting Prattler: Starved for attention, Sareom traps any who humor them in endless conversation.
- Exhausting Bind: Entangles only the living, consuming their vigor. Upon languishing their host they wilt like thirsting flowers.
- Speed of Dark: Creeps in shadow, hastens in dark, completely halted by light's touch: The forest, their refuge and hunting grounds.
- Ritual Fanfare: Chirping trumpets, prattling drums: Make way! Make way! Censers swing, priests chant: make way or their guards'll take you away!
- Royal Favour: With boundless regal benevolence, she grants all favors within her power. Mind your request doesn’t exceed those bounds, tarnished pride makes furious Queens.
- Roaming Trader: Spread throughout the forest soil, Marlo fruits where desperation is highest. Luminous spores enticing customers to browse.
- Costly Desirables: Wellconnected in every sense, Marlo always has exactly what you need in exchange for whatever you currently cannot miss.
- Fervent Recruiter: Marked by dozens of brushes with death, One-armed Baha obsessively enlists all she meets in ‘a great hunt for riches and glory.’
- White Wolves: Everwhite fur, graveled voices, ears and eyes sharp like the teeth that took Baha’s arm. Former hunters, fleeing her maddened madness.
- Damp Drifters: Golden flocks, like winter snow in morning sun, they flutter on the wind, going wherever she carries them.
- Explosive Anger: Short fused, they heat as the discussion does. Narrowing eyes, reddening visage: a final warning before they burst.
- Stealers of Sight: A swarm of nothing, darker than black. They nest in eyes, widening the black, feeding their spawn the light that enters.
- Starved in Darkness: The brighter the world, the more they breed, dimming your eyes as numbers grow. Only total darkness can brighten your sight.
- Underground Operations: Right beneath your feet, tunnels connecting all parts of the forest house, this copse of woody thieves.
- Covetous Pinchers: Enthralled by baubles and trinkets alien to their forest home. Lesser known rubbish, more valued than well known riches.
- Decaying Host: Shrouded in fungal cowl, rotting the body, expelling the mind. They are many yet they are one. Assimilation: one breath away.
- Excruciatingly Curious: When survival is certain, power’s brutish and control’s a bore. The only thing engrossing their many minds: Knowledge.
Reflection:
Time efficiency, Wanderhome, Fairy Tales, Dancing trees and Poetry
The forest was made for Project Social, a game/setting I am still working on though recently it has been mostly in the form of this one location. Specifically I wanted a location that I could use in a little adventure I plan on writing for that setting, about the witch from the Witch's Mill. As I knew that mill would be in a forest and the theme of issue four of In Play is forest, I thought I'd be economic with my time and do both simultaneously, meaning that a way prettier version of this will at some point be published. (Spoiler: I wasn't econmic with my time. More on that later).
I'm pretty sure the next bit of inspiration came from by something Chris McDowall said in the same discord server that produces the In Play zine:
To me the core of this idea is that a place should be described in how it affects the PCs (which in turn implies how the PCs can affect the place). Though the influence of Wanderhome is probably quite impreceptible at this point (there are no explicit 'moves' that the players can take based on the location they are in), I think that the goal of describing a place in how it can affect people was quite succesful.
Currently I am really into fairy tales. I read Grimm's before going to bed almost every single night (often out loud). Fairy tales were always an inspiration for Project Social in general, as I absolutely love their total disregard for story structure (which feels very similar to how a lot of tRPGs play out) as well as their hard objective truths. I also think it is hilarious that things that are completely out of place in the real world are just taken for granted and are presented to the reader as the most normal thing in the world. The Ant Parade entry is I think the most explicit attempt at trying something like that.
Forests feature heavily in a lot of these stories, especially old and dark ones. Because of this I wanted to make this forest an old-growth forest, i.e. a forest that hasn't been (significantly) impacted by human deforestation for as long as it has grown in this place. These woods are old, bio-diverse and multilayered. Ideally I would like to visit one of these sometime soon, so I looked up if there were any in the the Netherlands, the country I live in, expecting there not to be any, as we deforested most of our country and use the lumber as fuel and to build ships with which we desperately needed to exploid and pillage other countries during our 'Golden Age'. Surprisingly, there are some of these 'virgin forests' left in our country, including the best one I have found yet.
Picture of the Speulder- en Sprielderbos (not by me)
The 'Speulder- en Sprielderbos' are some of the oldest woods we have in the Netherlands. The reason given for this is that the trunks of these trees are warped, having very few straight bits on them and are thus not really useful for construction. According to the same source (it is in Dutch, but feel free to check it out) locals call the trees growing here 'dancing trees' because of this, as to them it looks as if these trees are frozen mid dance. This immediately made my mind race, the idea of woods that are literally dancing seemed incredibly fascinating and fantastical to me, especially this idea of them freezing whenever you look at them. Perfect for the sort of tone I would like to convey in Project Social.
The constraints of writing for In Play were interesting as well. I wanted the forest to feel rich and full of weird things to encounter, much like these forests feel when reading fairy tales, but I also knew that the word limit for In Play submissions was 1000 words and I didn't want to cheat by splitting the submission into two seperate submissions. Terseness became the name of the game and I quickly tried to find ways to convey how a place behaves without having to spell out too much. My initial idea, which I think is somewhat succesful, was to make the forest into a character. Inspired by the idea of 'spirit-as-a-place' that Sofinho wrote about, I figured I could try to lean into the idea that the forest has an actual personality and that her personality traits translate into ways in which she acts. Coupled with terseness this became the short description of Ancient, Coy and Obscurant. In my mind the forest is an elderly woman, still youthful in a lot of her mannarisms, but well aware of her seniority. The sort of person that doesn't want to admit their age but can't deny the change in perspective aging brings with it.
Some arbitrary rules (like wanting no bullet in the google doc I worked in to exceed a certain number of lines, irregardless of wordcount) made terseness play a larger and larger role in writing this location and brought about an (intially) unintentional effect: poetic language. I won't pretend to be a poet, let alone a good one, but I found that in trying to be economic with my wordcount and in trying to convey as much information as possible with those words I inadvertently started to try to use words that together imply a tone. The aim wasn't style over content, but style as a means of conveying as much content as possible. My beliefs about how language works were already founded on this idea that style and content weren't as seperate as they are often talked about, but this experience really cemented that idea. More and more I tried to be incredibly deliberate with my language, agonizing over single words to make sure they gave the sort of impression I was going for. Which brings me back to time.
I spend from september second until september twelfth working to turn my sparktable prompts into ideas I was happy with. Ten days. Not full days, but ten days of working on and off again. But how long did I spend on trying to convey those ideas in language I was happy with? From the fifthteenth of september until the fourth of november. Almost two months. On and off again, but still having the idea is one thing but wording it was the really challenging bit. Even now, as I wait for In Play issue four to move into edits (which it won't anytime soon, it is currently still open for submission!), I am expecting that I will probably overhaul a bunch of these, especially once I will get feedback from an editor.
Recently I read somewhere (I think in A room of one's own but I can't for the life of me find the actual quote, so I could be wrong) something along the lines of 'poets spend ages labouring over single lines, yet have to make them appear as if they came about effortlessly.' Though, again, I am anything but a poet, I do think I got some (even if it is just the faintest) understanding of what they tried to express with that paraphrased quote. Most of these entries took over an hour to rewrite into something I was somewhat happy with. Many were revisited on subsequent readthroughs and I assume that the moment I go through the entire thing again I will probably end up editing the whole lot of them again. Once this submission goes to an editor (which will take a while, as In Play issue three is still in layout) I'll probably end up doing it anyway, so for now I'll wait (partially out of fear that I'll be so appalled by what I read that I'll delete the entire draft at once).
So this project, that mostly came about trying to be time efficient turned out to be anything but that. However, I did find out that labouring over individual sentences to make sure they have the desired effect is a ball. I abslotely love it, though find it hard to take it easy whenever I do (which is why this wall of text is a giant mess; if I were to go through it I would probably either delete it all or spend such a long time rewriting it that I won't ever publish the post).
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