Nature and You: Adventures in the Forest
Hello everyone and welcome back to Grave Plots, your place for new adventure ideas and plot hooks each and every week. This time on our quest for a good adventure, let me take you to one of the staples of fantasy settings: the forest. Forests make for great settings for adventure since they evoke strong feelings of wild nature—as well as an almost mystical sense of foreboding—in your average city-dweller. Below are just a few short adventure hooks for your players’ next trip into your game’s fantastic forests.
The Ingredient
The ingredient hook makes for an excellent low-level adventure and will send PCs on a hunt though the forest in order to find some rare herb or mushroom. There are a few good ways to set up this hook. You could have a local healer send the PCs out to find a specific plant to save the life of a loved one; you could have a local alchemist hire PCs out to retrieve a rare reagent found only in the deep forest; or perhaps a savage tribe requires the PCs to find an obscure and useless piece of fungi to prove their worth. Any way you set it up the PCs have a pretty straightforward adventure ahead of them: retrieve an item they have a description of, deal with forest monsters along the way, and bring the item back to the quest-giver.
This adventure should feature a few things to help separate it from simply wandering in the woods going from place to place. Depending on the set-up perhaps nature savvy PCs quickly discover some ingredient that works just as well for the purpose they were sent out for, or groups looking to save the life of a loved one misidentify the plant in question and learn a hard lesson about respecting nature. Perhaps the ingredient in question has a specific and powerful guardian that none but the mightiest heroes could deal with, or a group or druids (or fey) can no longer stand to see the desecration of their forestlands and make every attempt to stop the PCs. All in all it’s still a pretty simple hook and a great way to throw some just mind-numbing combat into a game where the PCs have spent the last eight weeks without a single encounter.
The Druid
One day while the PCs are traveling the woods they happen upon a wounded animal in an obviously abandoned snare. The animal isn’t hurt badly, but if it isn’t freed it will surely die of starvation. Should the PCs stop to help the animal, it polymorphs into a venerable man with graying hair and deep brown eyes. He thanks the PCs and explains that he needs heroes like them to help him with a matter critical to the survival of these woods. He explains that a lumber camp has settled on the wood’s edge and logging operations are already in motion. The camp has hired a number of mercenaries to defend it and he is not capable of dealing with them all on his own. He tells them that if they care about the forest at all, they will join him in a crusade to rid it of these invaders. Should the PCs refuse his request, the druid (who isn’t quite right in the head) instead attacks, fighting to the death and decrying the PCs as betrayers of the forest. Similarly, if the PCs leave the animal to its fate, the druid polymorphs out of the trap and attacks. Should the PCs accept his request they must infiltrate or assault the nearby lumber camp, which possesses a number of skilled mercenaries. Conversely, the lumber camp hires the PCs to kill a local druid who’s been causing problems for them. They are warned he’s a shape shifter and they may have difficulty tracking him down; once they do locate the druid he fights to the death.
Lost in the Woods
Another fairly simple adventure, this one involves the PCs chasing someone or something into a deep forest only to find that their quarry has eluded them and they are hopelessly lost. The development for this one is pretty simple: put some potentially interesting occurrences in the woods; perhaps they stumble upon the remains of a hidden shrine to a nature god now long forgotten, or encounter some mystical beast of fearsome power. Then they meet a guide (actually their quarry in disguise) who offers to guide them out but instead only leads them into further peril before abandoning them once more. Next, the PCs should meet someone who will legitimately guide them out of the woods, but this guide should be a little suspicious (perhaps he was a bandit on the run from the law or some such), and the PCs may refuse his offer or even attack him based on their last experience with guides in this wood. Assuming they don’t accept help from the new guide, they finally earn a confrontation with their original quarry who, once beaten, offers guidance out of the woods in exchange for his life. If the PCs kill him instead they just stumble on to the main road again.