Friday Fantasy: Willow

Willow lies far up a river, on the shores of its source, the Lake of Tears, deep within a vast forest. The lake is famed for the weeping willow trees which line its shores, their branches hanging low into the water. Willow once flourished as a settlement where good folk could find refuge from the outside world and its demands, far from the greed and demand of other men. It built up a fishing industry on the lake, the catches being transported down river and in return, grain and other goods being ferried back up. Of late, however, the backwater town has fallen on bad times and the mood of its inhabitants has turned despondent. Ferries have been attacked on the river and trade has stopped. Food supplies are dwindling, not just due to there being ferries delivering goods, but also because something has been eating them. Strange noises echo and emanate from the strange tunnel accessed by a set of steps that stands behind the Blue Brew Inn, though nobody in the town talks about either the noises or the tunnel. This, combined with the mood of the townsfolk is enough to drive any visitor away, staying no more than a single night, and this is what would have happened, were it not for the fact that none of the ferries are running. Whether they stumble into Willow by accident, come to investigate the loss of trade, or perhaps because one of them wants to become an apprentice for the reclusive wizards who live outside of the town, what do the Player Characters do? Do they investigate the attacks on the ferries, look into why the grain is going missing, or go in search of rare plants?’

Willow: A Grim Micro Setting is a mini-sandcrawl, published following a successful Kickstarter campaign, from the same author as The Toxic Wood, The Haunted Hamlet & other hexes, and Woodfal. Although written for the Old School Renaissance, it is not written for any specific retroclone. Similarly, there is no suggestion as to what Level the Player Characters should be to play Willow, but it is likely to be between low and medium Level. That said, there are some incredibly powerful threats lurking out in the woods surrounding Willow that will take more than brute force to defeat. The supplement details a surprisingly small region, focused on the town of Willow, the NPCs within the settlement, various factions that have an interest in its future, and numerous monsters and plants. The advice suggests that Willow be somewhere that the Player Characters find themselves stuck in for a while, perhaps whilst on a longer journey elsewhere. What they find is a dreary place caught under grey skies and constant rain, with many of the town’s inhabitants and those unable to leave wearily suffering their situation, either in silence or complaining to whomever will listen.

Although the various places in and around Willow are described, the emphasis in the book is upon the NPCs and the factions and their relationships with each other. Places within the town include the Blue Brew Inn, run by Troubled Tina, and currently home to a number of stranded guests slowly running out of money as the proprietress is raising her prices due to the growing food scarcity; Haggard Henge, the stone circle outside the town which is said to be cursed and definitely not the containment field for a dragon’s egg; the mill where the grain stores have been stolen from nightly; and the Tree House, where the town’s children gather to discuss what exciting things they might do in the face of their boring lives in the town. Beyond its confines in the surrounding woods stands an ancient, but ruined fortress, in which stands a Dragonwood tree, famed for the suitability of its wood for the use in wand construction; the Wizard Tower, whose occupants live in bibliographic isolation, their only interests being books and alchemy; pack Rat Folk and tribes of Crow Folk warring against each other; and more…

The primary NPCs in the town include its leader, Morose Morgan, a witch-hermit who rarely leaves her island home except for the annual land fertility ceremony, to adjudicate problems and disputes (settling them by gutting a fish and reading its entrails, no less), and to visit the Seaweed Shrine behind the Blue Brew Inn; the River Ranger, an incredibly lazy man who has been appointed by a council of druids to protect the river; several merchants and smugglers stranded in Willow; and Sania, the daughter of one of the river merchants who unlike the rest of the townsfolk, always has a positive outlook and hatching some exciting scheme or plot to add some excitement to her life. All of these NPCs are given decent descriptions accompanied by handy bullet points of what each wants and what they might be doing at any one moment. Their connections and relationships are neatly plotted between the main NPCs in the town, between Troubled Tina and her guests at the Blue Brew Inn, and moving out to summarise those between Willow and the various factions outside of the town, and then between those factions. All together this builds a network of connections that the Player Characters can follow, pick apart, or strengthen through their actions.

The major adventure site in Willow is the Seaweed Shrine, the dungeon behind the Blue Brew Inn. Its entrance is obvious, but only Morose Morgan is allowed to enter. However, that will not bother some of the adventuresome inhabitants of the town as events in Willow play out. It is relatively short, but a tough adventure, especially in its final few rooms. The dungeon lies below the Lake of Tears and was once the home of a tribe of Aquatic Elves, forced to turn to dark magic to keep themselves from truly dying when they were struck down by a fatal sickness. Now they only exist in a half state, repeating actions from their former lives in desperation… The dungeon is clearly mapped, with locations of important items and wandering monster routes marked, and it is nicely thematic, strewn with coral and seaweed, and even seaweed-based monsters. One issue perhaps is that the Player Character actions can lead to the dungeon being flooded, thus preventing their eventual exploration, which may become necessary if some of the NPCs decide to explore it.

Beyond the confines of the town, various locations and factions are detailed. These include the book-obsessed wizards in their tower, the Crow Folk distrusted by the townsfolk, but at war with the Rat Folk whom nobody in the town knows about. Several packs of these lurk in tunnels beneath the forest. Lurking out in the forest is its corrupted guardian, spreading the poison of an ancient artefact. Several monsters are included, including the Ashen Dryad, which the guardian uses to spread its foulness throughout the forest.

Willow is primarily a player-driven adventure, alongside the descriptions and details are tables that enable the Game Master to respond to their actions. The biggest is the ‘Willow Town Cause and Effect List’, which lists how the townsfolk will respond to the Player Characters’ actions. Many of these will actually result in the townsfolk exiling the Player Characters, so they have to be careful about their actions. This is not the only ‘Cause and Effect List’, there is one each for the Crow Folk and the Rat Folk, but the other big table is the ‘Timeline of Possible Events’. These start off fairly mundane, but grow increasingly ominous and dangerous as time goes on. There is time here for the Player Characters to deal with everything, but they will need to be careful about their timekeeping and they do need to be lucky in finding some of the items that will help them.

Physically, Willow is a fairly busy book, but everything is neatly organised and for the most part, easy to use when the Game Master needs it. The artwork is excellent and so is the writing. Although it does have an introduction, it does not explain what is fully going on until a fair way into the scenario. It does need an edit in places and the author is not clear whether Willow is a town or village.

Willow feels far more constrained and much tighter than the other scenarios from the author. Consequently, it is both easier to place in a Game Master’s campaign, but it still needs a little pulling apart by the Game Master to understand how it works. Some advice on running it would not have been amiss, especially when it comes to defeating the more dangerous threats to the town and a possible suggestion as to possible Player Character Level would have helped too. Even an overview might have been useful. Willow also feels divided between small problems and big threats with nothing really in between and the means to deal with the big threats hidden away with no hint as to their existence, which contributes to the feeling that the Player Characters are often going to have no idea quite what to do or where to go. Consequently, Willow is underwhelming in terms of how it handles the big plots and threats. On the other hand, it really shines in terms of the NPCs and the factions and the connections and relationships between them. If perhaps the Game Master can seed the NPCs with more information that the Player Characters can then learn and decide how they want to use, then there is the potential to overcome the issues in terms of plot between the big threats and the small problems. Ultimately, Willow: A Grim Micro Setting is a toolkit which gives the Game Master everything she needs to run the setting and bring it alive, but she will need to work a bit harder to engage the players and their characters with its bigger plots.

Friday Fantasy: The Toxic Wood

The Toxic Wood is a descent into a poisoned world, a forest whose verdancy has been darkened by a noxious, even baleful, baneful influence has twisted and transformed a whole landscape. At its heart lies the village of Mugwort, trapped, but protected from the noxiousness surrounding them, and desperate for rescue. Fortunately, a secretive council of wizards has heard the arcane distress call sent out by the wizard residing in the village and hires a group of adventurers to mount a rescue mission. The poisonous nature of the wood includes the air and so the employing wizards have fashioned a magical orb which ensure that there is a bubble of safe for them as they journey to Mugwort. It will require power, whether of lifeforce or magic, but it will keep the adventurers safe. Exposure to the toxic air will corrode metal and mutate those who breathe it in, but it is not the only danger that the adventurers will face. There are plants so twisted that they curse magical items or cause them to explode, that spy on the adventurers are they proceed through the forest, shoot parasitical needles that want feeding more than the victim, and worse… Druids corrupted into accepting the toxic nature of the wood as the new norm, half-ghosts lost between this world and the next, trapped by the mutating growths which keep their bodies from decomposing, corrupted fairies that swarm in search of flesh, and other terrible things. There are terrible things that want spread the toxicity, terrible things that take advantage of it, and terrible things that want to rid it from the wood—and not all of them are telling the truth…

The Toxic Wood: A Corrosive Hexcrawl Adventure written by the Lazy Litch and was published following a successful Kickstarter campaign as part of Zine Month 2022. As with the publisher’s other titles—The Haunted Hamlet & other hexes, Woodfall, and Willow—The Toxic Wood is written or use with Old School Essentials, Necrotic Gnome’s very accessible update of the Moldvey/Cook and Marsh version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons, which means that not only is it mechanically accessible, it is also easily adapted to the retroclone of the Game Master’s choice. However, it is not clearly stated what Level the adventure is designed for, but from the relative Hit Dice of the various monsters in The Toxic Wood, it feels roughly suitable for Player Characters of Third, Fourth, and Fifth Level. Beyond the introduction, there is a some advice as to the adventure's play style, which is standard to all of the scenarios published by the Lazy Litch. This limits Experience Point gain to finding treasure, making discoveries, and achieving objectives rather than kill monsters; monsters are intentionally unbalanced; game is deadly and Player Character death a possibility; and an emphasis is placed upon resource management. In addition, The Toxic Wood includes a number of optional backgrounds and objectives that be assigned to the Player Characters or rolled for, which set up conflicting agendas between them. The conflict between them exacerbated by the fact that the Player Characters are forced to travel together within the safety of the magical orb and the clean air it generates, forcing them more obviously to both work together and negotiate where they will go and what they will do. As well as the information provided by their background, each Player Character will also begin the scenario with a rumour about the area detailed in The Toxic Wood.

The toxicity of the scenario’s title is infused into every aspect of it, from the strange nature of the plants and inhabitants of the woods and the mutations that the Player Characters can suffer if exposed to it for too long to the vileness of the various factions to be found in the woods and the weirdness of their various aims. Although there are several monsters given, it is these plants which play a major role in the scenario and are the most obvious evidence of the transformation that the wood has undergone. There are Energy Consuming Flowers that absorb spells, which can be carried as a form of protection, but which ill implode if too many are absorbed; Fungi Outposts that act as the ears and eyes of one for the factions in the wood; and Rune Fruit, marked with dark arcane runes, which can be eaten, but have side effects that are deleterious upon the consumer’s mental health.

Although there are hints as to the true nature of the plots swirling and around the Toxic Wood in the various backgrounds and rumours, the Player Characters will only discover more details by visiting the various locations dotted throughout the woods. This starts with Mugwort, a village trapped in its own bubble, its inhabitants desperate and divided, on the edge of the collapse if the Player Characters do not intervene. The others include a dragon atop a plateau building his own cult as a defence against ongoing events in the wood; rival twin sisters, long since transformed into insectoid creatures spinning and feuding for control of a mycelial network that runs throughout the wood; and an abandoned tower from whose roof grows a pair of trees and whose lowest level is filled with a green gelatinous thing filled with eyeballs that refuse to look at anyone who enters the tower—though the orb supplying the Player Characters their life-preserving air will actually speak before they do and warn them not to enter! The Toxic Wood is full of little details and fantastic writing like this which brings its combination of weirdness and dark whimsy to life.

The lack of indication as to what Level it is designed for, is not the only issue with The Toxic Wood. The other is the hexcrawl map used in the scenario. It is an attractive piece that uses a lot of icon-like pieces of art to fill its hexes, The majority of the symbols or icons used are all very similar, which has two important consequences. The first is that the icons used for specific locations do not stand out, and the second is that it is difficult to track the progress of the Player Characters across the map.

Then there is the fact that hexcrawl are of The Toxic Wood is too large for ease of play. It has an area of fifteen by twenty hexes, but there is no scale to the map. The only hint the Game Master is given is that in a single day, the Player Characters can either explore a single hex or they can travel across a total of three. (That said, there are a lot of hexes where nothing much will happen except the occasional random encounter.) It will take a minimum of three days’ travel to get to Mugwort from the edge of the map and then the other locations on the map are a similar distance away from the village. So play is going consist of a lot of dice rolls for encounters in the poisoned forest and the Player Characters scavenging for fuel to power the air-generating orb they need to maintain in order to survive. This is only going to worse if the Player Characters get lost. Resource management is a part of the play of The Toxic Wood, but the size of its play area means that the scenario over emphasises it. Ultimately, v could have been smaller without any loss of play and a smaller size would have made it easier to slot into a Game Master’s own campaign.

Physically, The Toxic Wood is a fairly busy book, but everything is neatly organised and for the most part, easy to use when the Game Master needs it. The artwork is excellent and so is the writing. Although it does have an introduction, it does not explain what is fully going on until a fair way into the scenario.

The Toxic Wood is a fantastically noxious and nasty scenario, a combination of Stephen King’s Under the Dome meets Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation crossed with The Fantasic Voyage and Tron. Which reads like a thoroughly odd mixture, but there is a strand of Science Fiction which underpins the scenario, with the orb that the Player Characters must take with them to breathe being almost like a submersible and the Emergency Bubbles they are given which enable them to operate away from the orb, being like aqualungs, and the twin sisters’ mycelial network a cross between an information network and a surveillance network.

Ultimately, The Toxic Wood may be slightly too odd and slightly too large for some campaigns, with the Game Master needing to work a lot of its details into her own setting to effectively work. If the Game Master can do that, then The Toxic Wood is a poisonously fantastic scenario.