Friday Fantasy: Bloodwood

The Bloodwood Forest is a dense, semi-tropical forest that lies down the length of the Severed Valley, bisected by the river Sunder. The Bloodwood Forest is inhabited by Fey, who slip into the world from the Unseelie Court and prey on unwary travellers… There is a guaranteed safe path through the forest, the Fey Road, mostly unmarked and purported to be haunted by ghosts. The impenetrable forest is said to be full of riches, including rare woods and plants, seams of gemstones, and animals to trap for their pelts. Rarest of all are the Blood Trees, whose resin can be bled and collected for its magical value. Two towns stand at opposite sides of the forest, one of which is Redstone. Once a sleepy little village, in recent years it has been transformed into a bustling town following investment by Lord Julian Vasco. He even attempted to build a road through the Bloodwood Forest, but it was barely half built when its sponsor disappeared and it has fallen into disrepair since… Worse the Bloodwood Forest suddenly expanded rapidly and encroached on the town, the trees and plants piercing buildings and forcing people out. With what were once beautiful buildings in ruins, the inhabitants of Redstone were driven out or fled, and the boom town was reduced to a shadow of what it was before the arrival of Lord Julian Vasco.

This is the set-up for Bloodwood, a scenario for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition for a party of Sixth Level Player Characters. Published by Crow & Crown, best known for Herbarium: A Botanical 5th Edition Supplement, it is nominally set in the Forgotten Realms, between Lushpool and Sheirtalar, on the shore of the Shining Sea. Alternatives are suggested, but Bloodwood need not be set in Faerûn at all and can be easily slotted in a Dungeon Master’s campaign. Several reasons are suggested as to why the Player Characters might travel to Redstone, including a simple matter of being hired as caravan guards and a thief answering the call of his thief’s guild to aid a fellow thief in the former town. There are rumours abroad that suggest that Lord Vasco was orchestrating bandit attacks on the merchant caravans to sell the stolen goods and that he possessed a magical amulet which enabled him to ward off the forest fey. Both hooks are prosaic, and the situation does lend itself to others. Perhaps there are families wanting to find relatives gone missing in the Bloodwood Forest, Lord Vasco has creditors who want his disappearance confirmed, or even Lord Vasco’s family want to know where he is? Once the Player Characters get to Redstone, the options and motivations open up. NPCs will want the Player Characters to enter the Bloodwood Forest to obtain some resin from the Blood Train, locate the rare treasures that he was said to possess, and so on.

Investigating Lord Vasco begins at his estate, which apart from a single room, is as overgrown with the Bloodwood Forest as Redstone is. This is his office, which the Player Characters will have relatively access to and thus be able to search for possible clues as to his whereabouts. In a nice touch, these are easily found and point towards some of his activities and contacts made in the fey forest which has overtaken his home. The clues—consisting of pages from his journal—also point to his being a highly ambitious and manipulative man. Also here is the atrium, the centrepiece of Lord Vasco’s villa, once open to the sky to let the sun in, but now under a wild canopy of trees and plants. At its centre in the floor is a giant stone slab, said to hide the entrance to his treasure vault. Following the clues given in Lord Vasco’s journal, the Player Characters will make their way into Bloodwood Forest, following the Fey Road into depths, hoping that they do not get lost. The best time to do it is at night, when the Fey Road can be best seen by the ghosts that walk upon it, though the Player Character be careful lest fear drives them back out of the forest. With the treasures gathered, typically after facing some nasty denizens of the Unseelie Court, the Player Characters can return to Lord Vasco’s estate and potentially discover what secrets he was hiding.

On the surface, what the Player Characters have to do in Bloodwood is far from complex—discovering the clues at Lord Vasco’s estate, recovering the treasures he has hoarded in the Bloodwood Forest, and returning to discover his real secrets. There is more to the scenario than just this. The players and their characters do have choices to make in terms of which potential employer they decide to take up with since as they will quickly learn not all of them are moral, upstanding characters. Further, they are bound to discover hints that Lord Vasco was not quite as rich as he was supposed to be and that he was manipulating affairs deep into the forest. Unfortunately, the full extent of this manipulation is not revealed until after the climax of the scenario and the Player Characters have no chance to interact with the victims until then. At that point, the Player Characters do have some interesting choices to make and the Dungeon Master should prepare for what should be a good roleplaying scene.

Beyond its plot, Bloodwood is supported with an appendix that takes up a quarter of its length. This contains a wide range of new monsters and treasures. The treasures include the Cloak of Many Fashions, which can change its appearance to appear like any cloak; the Carrion Ring, which summons a swarm of beetles to aid the wearer’s attacks for one minute, though it leaves them smelling of rotting meat for an hour(!); and Dragon’s Blood Ink, made from the resin of the blood tree, which is used to enhance the effects of Glyph of Warding and other spells which need to be drawn for their effects. The new monsters include the Alraune, a homunculus grown from the roots of the mandrake plant which has a deafening scream and a taste for meat; the Gravebird, undead corvids possessed by wandering spirits that can mimic sounds and which likes to steal small shiny items from those it attacks; and the Tikbalang, an elongated, bony creature with a horse’s head that serves as a guardian for gates to the spirit world, that sometimes leads travellers astray or returns them to the path they were on, no matter how they have got. Several of the creatures given are taken from folklore. For example, the Alraune comes from German folklore, whilst the Tikbalang is taken from Philippine folklore.

Physically, Bloodwood is incredibly well presented. The writing is dense in places, even slightly overwritten, but the Dungeon Master is presented with a wealth of detail to bring the setting to life. The two maps are very nicely done, though more, including maps of the Severed Valley and Redstone would have been useful. The artwork consists of a mixture of the specially commissioned pieces and the creative commons, of which the latter is a problem. It is not that any of the creative commons selected artwork is bad. It is not. Rather that despite the text in Bloodwood describing the Severed Valley and the Bloodwood Forest as being semi-tropical, the artwork does not reflect that. Instead, it has a northern European feel, of a faded bucolic pastoralism that gives it an appropriate sense of fading decline that contrasts nicely with the sharpness of the Unseelie fey abroad in the region.

For the most part, the issues with Bloodwood—the density of the text and the partial lack of engagement with the actual backstory until the very—do not negate from what is actually an atmospheric and decently supported adventure. Bloodwood is a very likeable scenario that deserves a sequel to explore both the setting and the repercussions of its events further.