Thief and Thieves

I've been thinking about Thief recently. Not the class, but the 1998 game. It, and it's sequel, Thief 2: The Metal Age, are the games that I believe get closest to making you feel like a thief. It got me thinking about thieves (the class this time), or as they would later come to be called the rogue (a name I find better, but I digress).

Thieves suck. Thieves have sucked in every edition of DnD except for 4th. From their inception thieves have always been the worst class, or at least near the worst, and I don't think it's just a numbers game. You could make the B/X thief better numerically and I think it would still suck.

The Thief.

Let's start at the beginning. What's a thief? Someone who steals. In DnD terms, they handle the lock picking and scouting and the assassinating. The thief (in OSE) has two major defining characteristics: sneak attack (or backstab, if you prefer) and thief skills. 

Sneak attack is bad. In theory, sneak attack makes up for the thief's lack of combat skill, being that they have a d4 hit die, leather armor, and no shield, but sneak attack is such a limited effect in B/X. It exists exclusively to allow the thief to slit necks, except it is still very easy for the thief to fail at doing that, either by missing or just not hitting hard enough. Later editions would codify sneak attack into a bit more of a central piece of the thief toolkit. In contrast to fighters, thieves are about one really big hit. Frankly this just makes missing feel worse.

Thief skills are equally bad. Hide in shadows is the thing you'd expect thieves to do the most. They sneak, that's what they do. Hide in shadows has a 10% chance to work at level 1. By level 8 that is up to 55%. At that level a mage can let someone fly. Twice. You might say "well the thief can do it infinite times a day" and to that I'd argue that it only takes the thief failing once to end up a corpse.

This is beating a dead horse. I haven't said anything that hasn't been said a thousand times before. We all know thieves suck, and if you didn't you would sooner rather than later. Let's open a new can of worms then.

Why is the Thief One of the Big 4?

The big 4 is my personal name for the fighter, mage, cleric, and rogue, the four main archetypes in DnD classes. You might notice a small difference between the first three and the thief.

Fighters are hard(er) to kill, with an emphasis on weapon combat. They hit stuff good. 

Mages are people who do arcane magic. They have access to a wide variety of spells that do dozens of unique and useful things.

Clerics are worshipers of gods that are given divine power and can be mediocre at hitting stuff.

Those three archetypes are varied. A lot of different ideas can fit under them. A fighter can be a fighter, or a fighter can be a barbarian. A mage can be a mage, or a mage can be an illusionist.

Let me ask again. What's a thief? Someone who steals. Thieves live in this magical place where what they are is so strict. A thief is a thief. There are no other options. You might argue that a dexterous archer is a thief, but no that's more of a ranger, which is definitely more of a fighter than a thief. An assassin is a thief, I suppose, but it's still someone who steals and sneaks, it's just a thief with greater emphasis on slitting throats.

I think thieves make the game worse. There's an argument for older DnD that goes "the lack of special abilities on character sheets implies you can do whatever you want". I think this argument is dumb, partially because it's false. Thieves have special abilities that only they can do. It makes no sense that only thieves can pick locks. I can pick locks and I am most assuredly not a thief. I can put my ear to a door and hear behind it. Anyone can do that. There's an argument, and a good one, that thief skills are just adventurer skills. Go tomb robbing enough and you'll learn how to lock pick.

So where does that leave us? Obviously removing the thief is silly. Thieves are baked into the fantasy genre at this point and I think there is merit to having a big 4 rather than a big 3. The question is if everything the thief does is bad, what is it a thief should do?

A thief never plays fair.

Now we loop back to Thief (the game). Something I love about the Thief games is that you are weak. You will lose in a fair fight 90 times out of a hundred. So you never take a fair fight. You cut the lights with water arrows, make new paths with rope arrows, and when all else fails you clobber someone with a blackjack. Hard to catch a thief when you're asleep.

There's an expectation in the OSR that the players should never fight fair. A fair battle is a lost battle. Thieves should take that a step further. A thief isn't just tilting the odds in their favor. A thief is changing out the machine that weighs the odds.

Adventuring equipment is a part of DnD that's been there from the early days. You wouldn't know this if you started with 5e, because the stuff is treated with an obscene lack of improtance. It's often little more than a checklist, a bit of tedium before the fun of dungeon crawling. I think we can change that. Think about a fighter for me. Anyone can use a weapon in DnD. A fighter is simply the best at it. Do that with items and thieves. Sure, you can use a 10-foot pole to poke for traps. Anyone can. The thief can just also use it to pole vault over the enemies and fire a net from their crossbow once they land. A thief never plays fair.

Thieves are masters of all sorts of mechanical and alchemical items. Anyone can use normal poison, but a thief knows how to use and where to get special poisons with unique effects. A fighter could use a normal arrow. A thief could use an arrow that explodes into a pool of oil to set up for their mage's fireball. A fighter wouldn't know what to do with a grenade. The thief knows exactly what to do with it.

While fighters are masters of weapons and combat, and mages and clerics are masters of their respective types of magic, thieves should be masters of items. Their tools and the environment itself are the weapons of a thief.

The Fallacy of Freedom

There's this wonderful 2017 GDC talk that I think applies heavily to the world of TTRPGs. Allow me to summarize: freedom and autonomy are not the same thing. Freedom is the ability to do what you want and autonomy is the desire to want to do things. Equating them is the Freedom Fallacy, the idea that simply giving the players options will make them want to do stuff. 

Let's put this in more TTRPG terms. Freedom represents the players options in what content they can engage with, be it linear or open. There's nothing wrong with either option. A linear game is not inherently worse than an open game. On the other hand, Autonomy represents the players self-motivation to engage with these options. There must be things the players want to do. A lack of autonomy is a bad thing.

Players don't want freedom. They want autonomy. There's a reason a lot of narrative linear games have lasted a long time: the players are autonomous even if they lack freedom. More freedom is, often, not better. Players don't necessarily want infinite options: they want their choices to matter.

Moral of the story: You can't just throw a cool world at your players, they have to have a reason to interact with it.

This is a mistake I am guilty of. I, in the past, though putting a cool map in front of the players was all it would take to get them excited.Instead, it left them confused and disinterested. There has to be a reason to engage.

Though I dislike it, gold for XP has a reason to exist: it's a reason to interact with the world. This is, I think, one of the greatest failings of modern TTRPG design, milestone leveling, is bad. It actively encourages a lack of autonomy. You are rewarded for the bare minimum. Even when you are free to do whatever you want, there's no reason to do anything.

The solution is simple: create reasons for players to interact and do stuff. Create interesting plot hooks, cool rewards and magic items, sources of XP that aren't rewarded for doing nothing. This is some of the best advice I can give for a new GM. Do not fall into the fallacy of freedom.

You Enter the Forest Deep Part 3: Denizens of the Deep

This is part three of You Enter the Forest Deep. You can find part 1 here and part 2 here.

These are the 10 factions within the Forest Deep. Each has goals, virtues, and resources. These are all conflicting, which brings these factions into conflict. I have a post on factions and conflict that you can read here.

The Wolves.

Like wolves, but larger and more primal. The platonic ideal of a wolf. They can speak. They prefer their own tongue, but can snarl out human words if demanded. They actually dislike the name wolf, as it is a reminder of their less civilized kin. They prefer to be called Protectors or Guardians.

They are noble and proud. Take a medieval knight and remove any possible angle of corruption. Those are the Wolves, the pure essence of chivalry and nobility. They are the Forest Deep's charged protectors, something they do with pride and grace and joy. In return, the Forest gives them all that they could ask for. A Wolf in good standing never goes hungry.

They are wise, and far smarter than the average human. They build societies, family-clans where the eldest leads, thought they lack the ability to construct homes or tools. They would make fabulous allies, friends of the Forest as they are, but they are slow to trust and impossible to bribe.

Goals: To protect the Forest Deep no matter the cost.

Virtues: Nobility, chivalry, and kindness. They act on an invisible moral code.

Resources: The protection of the Forest Deep. The Wolves and their allies have no fear of the Forest's more dangerous aspects.

To use the Wolves in combat, take a dire wolf and add a hit die. Then, roll a d4 to determine which of these once per battle abilities the Wolf gets:

1. Howl - All enemies that can hear it save or are demoralized (-1 to hit)
2. Rabid Bite - Wolf bites, enemy saves or takes additional damage equal d6's times the Wolves hit die.
3. Go For the Throat - Wolf bites, enemy must save or be pulled prone
4. Skirmish - Wolf bites then leaps back its movement. Another Wolf can move for free.

For elder wolves, add 2 more hit die (adjust other stats as necessary) and roll for abilities twice. 

The Ants.

A perfect working order guided by chemical trails and instinct. They are ants, giant ants. Workers the size of horses and soldiers the size of elephants. They act like normal ants, a perfect biological machine transporting materials back to the hive. The hive must grow. The hive must always grove. Such is the Queen's demand.

They can't communicate with you, not unless you can understand their chemical trails. The only way to communicate with the hive is to follow them back to the their hive. The princesses (and the Queen) can talk. Well, they can communicate through psionic telepathy. They're psions, all of the intelligent Ants. The Ants survive day to day with chemicals, but they can all be ordered instantly through telepathic messages in the chemicals.

They don't understand you. They're Ants. They think of you as female. You'll have to explain things to them. The princesses only know what the other Ants see through the chemical trails. They can learn, and will inscribe this knowledge in the chemical trail. Then, all Ants will know it. They've been all over the Forest. They can find anything, given time.

Goals: The hive must survive. That means more resources, more food, always.

Virtues: Subservience and endless work.

Resources: Manpower. The Ants number in the thousands. You think you've seen a lot when you see them harvesting food. This is nothing compared to the Ants in the hive. Connecting yourself with the chemical network would give you control over the lesser Ants.

Ants come in 5 varieties. Workers are the size of horse. Stat them the same, but give them a low chance of capturing an enemy in their pincers (Around 20%). Soldiers are huge. Stat them like elephants. Princesses are like workers, but with psionic powers of a level equal to their hit die. Male ants are a rarity. They are like workers but winged. The Queen is immense, the size of a castle. She has too many hit die to count.

The Ettercaps.

A thousand thousand years ago a human city sunk into the earth. They worshiped the Eight Eyed Mother. They continued to worship her in their home in the dark world below. She protected them in exchange for secrets. One day they came back up, changed. They had eight eyes, skin like chitin, and could speak to spiders. They were no longer human. They were ettercap.

Ettercaps are a religious cult dedicated to the Eight Eyed Mother, but you wouldn't know this by looking at them. Most are shepherds and hunters, tending to flocks of giant spiders. This itself is an act of worship, a collective secret of their species. They are thieves and assassins and bandits. No one likes them.

The ettercaps do not deal in coin. They deal in secrets. They can trade you many things for a secret, the more horrid the better. The Eight Eyed Mother prefers things unspeakable by a normal voice. They deliver these secrets to their temples in the dark world below. Woah befall you should you stumble into one of their temples.

Goals: To gather secrets for the Eight Eyed Mother.

Virtues: Spiders, for one. The collection of unspeakable knowledge, for another.

Resources: Secrets. Lots of them. They will trade them. Spiders and their products as well. Silk is rare and valuable and the ettercaps have it in droves.

I imagine your game already has stats for ettercaps and giant spiders. They will never fight fair. They prefer to assassinate quietly, with garrotes made of spider silk. Priests can cast spells like a cleric of at least 5th level.

The Aes Sidhe.

The fair folk of the Fair Court. Those that rule the other, more fair, world. These are the Aes Sidhe. These are the fae.

They feed on entertainment. For the fae, to be bored is to starve. They find no entertainment more sweet than that of mortals. It is why they play at mortal ideologies, kings and queens and courts and nobles. They have no need for this, for a fae's place in the court is an objective truth. Titania and Oberon must always rule.

There are many kinds of fae. Spriggans and faeries and sprites and brownies and boggarts. These are all lesser fae, the servants of the Fair Court. They spend much of their time in the mortal world, causing minor problems and annoyances for mortals to feed on their delightful reaction. The true sidhe would remind you of elves. Pale and impossible fair with hair like that of copper wire. They dress like nobles, in flowing silks and linens, and wield needles, fanciful rapiers of enchanted steel. This is not their form, not truly, but is a costume they wear in their eternal play. They rarely step into our world, and when they do it is most often in the Forest Deep.

The Aes Sidhe will never lie. Warp and twist the truth, yes, but the fae will never lie. They are incapable of doing so. At the same time, the fae take every comment as a promise. Any offer, no matter how small or non-genuine, is a full and complete contract that can never be broken.

Goals: To feed on mortal reaction to their pranks.

Virtues: Anything fun! Of course, a fae idea of fun is not a mortal idea of fun. The fae cause chaos. They consider this good.

Resources: Gifts from a more fair world. All cursed for mortals of course. You'll never get a fair deal with the 

Use whatever lesser fae stats you think are fun. For the fae nobles, they have 5 hit die and fight using needles. Needles sap your emotions (consider something like charisma damage). They also have random illusion spells. Whatever sounds funny. They aren't here to kill you, just to feed on your reactions.

The Eoten Moot.

In the Forest Deep, some trees are more than just trees. They are sapient and can move and speak. They were once confused with giants, thus their name.

The lowest of their kind are the dryads, like humans but with skin the color of bark and moss. They are shy, but find humans and their ilk fascinating. Next are the bark ogres, immense golem-like entities made of logs. They walk like gorillas and are impressively dumb. The greatest are the eoten themselves, immense walking trees.

They want peace and quiet for the most part. To relax and pretend to be a plant for decades on end. Every century, they meet in a grand moot to discuss the coming years and cycle places of rest. They do this so that one eoten does not hog the quietest part of the Forest to themself.

Goals: To relax in peace and harmony in a Forest that is healthy.

Virtues: They value friendship and knowledge. Though they wish to relax, they will gladly make a new friend.

Resources: They don't have much other than stories. They spend 90% of their time resting. 

Stat dryads like, well, dryads, and eoten like treants or walking trees or whatever works. Bark ogres are like ogres but resistant to slashing weapons and extra weak to fire.

The Wealden Court.

The druids. It might come as a surprise to know that the Forest Deep dislikes the druids. Many think of the druids as anti-civilization and pro-nature. This is wrong. Druids are pro-civilization and pro-nature. They are priests of nature who believe in harmony between the two halves, and that both are better for the other. There are anti-civilization druids out there, but they are extremists. You may make the Wealden Court anti-civilization. I do not.

The druids of the Deep.are there on behalf of civilization. They hope to find common ground with the Deep. They believe there are places within the Deep that require mortal hands to grow stronger and better. The Deep disagrees. It would rid itself of them if it could, but they are like an infection. The druids and the Wolves are natural enemies. It is no wonder the most common shapeshift of a druid is the bear.

You can hear them singing, if you listen. The great verses of all the druidic knowledge. It is the only way for them to spread their teachings. Druidic knowledge cannot be learned by reading.

Goals: Find common ground with the Forest Deep. Allow civilization to prosper within its bounds.

Virtues: Combining nature and civilization is good. Taking from nature without giving back is bad, as is wasting part of what nature gives.

Resources: Druidic magic. They can heal or resurrect the dead. They are also some of the best at finding their way through the Deep, second only the Wolves.

They are druids. They have the powers of the druid class, be that magic or shapeshifting or summoning or whatever. Pick what you want. Druids are versatile. They travel in small groups, never staying in one place for too long.

The Bolemen.

Yellowed eyes, frantically darting from one shadow to the next. An axe with a handle of gnarled wood and a head stained with blood and sap. A quiet life where all involved have no trust in each other. These are the bolemen. 

The bolemen lost their minds. They are owned by the Forest Deep now. It ignores them, perhaps amused by their state. They are paranoid. Fearful of each rustling leaf and skittering insect. They live in small communities, steadings carved from the Forest Deep. They don't trust outsiders (they don't trust anyone or anything) but can be bargained with. They're still people deep down.

Bolemen logic makes no sense. A family of bolemen could be loving and sweet one day and the next the daughter has murdered her parents because she believed that they were going to turn her into soup. Paranoia is a deadly virus. Their paranoia often represents itself as superstition. The bolemen will believe anything if they think it will protect them. Their homes are covered in trinkets said to ward darkness. They salt their doors and windows at night. To understand the bolemen, find a list of various superstitions. The bolemen believe in all of them.

At times, larger groups of bolemen will form villages. With guidance, they can work together and do great things. An elder boleman, or at times an elf or Wolf or eoten or druid can get them to cooperate, to lay aside their fears. The second this figure of peace is gone, they will rip each other apart. Such is the curse of the bole.

Goals: Survive.

Virtues: Whatever normal humans find virtuous. They're still humans just, a little lost.

Resources: What you'd expect from a homesteader. Food, wood, pelts. Superstitious trinkets designed to ward away evil.

Stat bolemen like bandits, but give them lumberaxes (like a battleaxe or greataxe). An elder gets an extra hit die or two. There are bolemen clerics and wizards, but they only appear in larger boleman villages.

The Elves.

They are the elves of the wood. The elves of the high canopy, haughty and proud, have long since abandoned these woods, and the elves of the roots below, jealous and cruel, have long since descended to the dark world below. Only the wood elves remain. 

Most think them xenophobes. This isn't necessarily true. The wood elves fear outsiders like they fear the Forest. Outsiders are a threat to their guise. The elves are not welcome within the Deep. They survive by hiding from its eyes, sitting at the peripheries of its vision, like blurs on a camera. Outsiders risk this. Outsiders know not of their ways of hiding and sneaking. This is a danger.

Elves build villages and roads through the Deep much like any other species, but they do so in a way that denies their existence. Their homes only appear like homes if you know what you're looking for. Their villages are mirages, their roads an easily denied falsehood. If something made by the elves is obvious then it was made like that on purpose, as a trap. It is not uncommon to walk through an elf village with no idea you were ever in one.

Goals: To stay hidden and stay safe. To tend to their families.

Virtues: Elves love those that are good at stealth (especially their kind) and good hunters.

Resources: Their stealth. Bow and arrows designed to wind through the trees. Ample supplies. Elves have some of the only healing magic in the Deep.

For every 25 elves (a normal village size) there will be 12-14 hunters. They use longbow and spear and have 2 hit die. Another 8-10 will be trappers, who use glaives and traps and also have 2 hit die. Another 2-3 will be shrouds, masters of the elf-illusion that are impossible to find and uses as scouts and spies. They have 5 hit die, use dual short swords, and carry potent poisons  The elf village will be led by a mage (they are equally adept at arcane and divine magic) of 7 hit die, and a swordsmaster elder using an enchanted greatsword of 9 hit die. Some elves train elk to ride, though this is more common in larger villages. The elves do not have young in their villages, for they have not reproduced in any known age.

The Sporelings.

Where there is fungus there are sporelings. They are dumb and slow and short-lived, with stumpy bodies made of fungal chitin. Each sporeling is unique, like a pastiche of a mushroom.  They have eyes, but they barely work. Most navigate via the subtle disturbances in the air as things move. They don't live long. A week at most. When they uproot, they loose their connection to the mycelia network that feeds them. They slowly starve. They're a mobile propagation method. A way of spreading the fungus. They don't know this. They'd hate the knowledge.

Due to their short lives, sporelings learn fast. They can become masters in days what would take others years. Sometimes they fail. They die and their body is absorbed by the fungal network that originally created them. The network absorbs their knowledge, and the next cycle of sporelings is better. This repeats forever. Eventually the fungus could know everything. instict fights this. The sporelings desire to leave their host far behind.

Yet, there are sporelings out there with a grasp on complex topics. Complex language, kingdoms, cities, culture. They are all born of a single fungal super-network: The Ur-Fungus. Every mushroom is an offshoot of the Ur-Fungus. In the end, every mushroom will once again be a part of the Ur-Fungus.

Goals: Grow. Survive. Eat. Propagate.

Virtues: There is no time for morality when you live a week. All is fair in the eyes of the fungus.

Resources: You can eat them. They store things, valuable things, deep in the mycelia. They will trade it for food. Only food. They don't keep knowledge that isn't useful for survival. It's a waste.

The earliest form of the sporeling was the spore pod, a floating ball of toxic spores. They have 1 hit point and explode when hit, and all nearby creatures must save or take light poison damage. This explosion explodes all nearby pods too. When they appear, roll a d6 for how many appear. This dice explodes. It keeps exploding. Let them grow into the thousands. For normal sporelings, use whatever stats your game has for mushroom people. 25% of all sporelings are born of the Ur-Fungus. They are intelligent, use human language, and can have armor and tools and tactics. If you encounter Ur-Fungus sporelings again, they will remember you.

The Owls.

You've seen owls, perched on high branches, ever vigilant in the dark hours of the night. They aren't real. Sure, they have flesh and blood and eat, but they're a lie. They are but scouts and messengers for the Owls.

Take a barn owl. Make it the height of a human with a wingspan to match. They speak in our tongue (they learned it from their lesser ilk). They watch and wait for things to die, so that they might carry them to their next life. You believe Death to be a skeleton? No, death is an Owl, with bone white face and dark wings draped over it like a cloak and claws like a harvesting scythe.

The Owls worship death. The concept of it. They believe that death is pure and blessed and that is a great honor that all are destined to it. This does not mean that they go out of their way to seek death. All things have their time and place. It is, however, a blasphemy to run from it. The entire Canopy is their cathedral, decorated with bones and offerings. Every moment of their lives is worship. Think of the most strict cult possible. Make it stricter. That is the life of the Owl.

Goals: To maintain death.

Virtues: Accepting death is good. Necromancy and prolonging life are horrid sins to be purged.

Resources: Bones. Lots of them. They are master diviners. They keep the magic items of the fallen. They will trade these things for death.

Take the stats of a giant bird. That's an Owl. They can use weapons in their talons, but why would they, they have talons. 50% of Owls can cast spells as a cleric of a level equal to their hit die. When in danger, they will fly into the air, and if necessary pelt those below them with stones and magic and only swoop in for the kill. Some Owls are bishops. They have 7 hit die, are clerics, and use a staff made of entwined wicker. The staff can turn undead 3 times a day.

You Enter the Forest Deep Part 2: The Rootways and The Canopy

This is part two of You Enter the Forest Deep. Part 1 is here.

If the Forest Deep is a dungeon then you might be inclined to think of the rootways and canopy as other layers of the dungeon, but this is wrong. They are tunnels, secret paths, better represented as dungeons of their own. In many ways, they are worse than the forest floor, but they are the fastest way to traverse past the worst parts of the Deep.

In the Deep, traversal is relatively easy as long as you stick to the path. This is not true of the rootways and the canopy. They are hostile environments not designed for life. They let you trade safety for time. You can cross 30 miles of forest in 2 days using the rootways or the canopy, but it'll be far more dangerous that sticking to the Forest floor.

The Rootways.

Where there were once roots there are now caverns. Winding tunnels who's walls are wood and earth. The tunnels are surprisingly large. The trees of the Forest Deep are immense, and they have carved a network of human-sized tunnels. The air is damp, and smells of death and wood, and the tunnels are filled with the sounds of the beating heart of the forest and the groaning of shifting oaks. Sometimes, the smaller roots of great trees will try to grab you. They are easily broken, but it is a permanent reminder of how the Forest thinks of you. 

The rootways are the domain of the fungus, a fungal wonderland in the decaying depths. The dark elves used to inhabit these tunnels, but they've been driven deeper. Now, mycelia coats the walls and spores hang heavy in the air. If the damp air doesn't mold your longs, the spores will.

Traversing the Rootways.

The rootways will take you to where you want to go. Like the Forest floor, you can traverse two piths a day, but there are fewer piths and they are further apart. You can move far in the tunnels.

There are two dangers to traversing the tunnels. One, it is pitch black. You need light. Lanterns are best. The Forest Deep isn't outraged by them as it is by torches. The second is that the air is literally toxic, so choked with fungal spores as it is. Every hour in the rootways you take 1d4 stacking damage from poison. By three hours, that's 3d4 damage. Necessary precautions (breathing masks or poison resistance) can protect you from this damage. Die to this poison and you become a breeding ground for sporelings.

The Canopy.

The canopy is surprisingly walk-able. Like walking on thin mud. Your feet sink deep, but if you keep moving you won't fall through the leaves and to your death. Pools of water have formed up here. Wide, but no deeper than than knee. It drips down to the Forest floor like rain. The wind up here is bitter and sharp and constant, a shrill song like needles on a chalkboard. You will fight it with every step. Pray that it doesn't not turn victorious. Little lives up here. It is a harsh land.

The canopy is the domain of the Owls, a grant cathedral to their macabre belief. The great boughs of the trees are often decorated with bones. They nest upon the roof of the Forest Deep, their elaborate homes made of twigs and branches and bones.

Traversing the Canopy. 

The canopy will take you where you want to go. Like the Forest floor, you can traverse two piths a day, but there are fewer piths and they are further apart. You can move far upon the tops of the trees.

There are two dangers to traversing the canopy. The first is the bitter wind. Without proper protection, it will chill you to your bone and cut you like a thousand knives. If not clothed and protected, the wind strikes you for 1 damage every minute. The second is the omnipresent threat of falling. At normal movement, it is easy to check that the ground ahead is solid enough to walk, but if you do not then moving has a 5% chance per foot to send you tumbling to the Forest floor. One can negate this by moving slowly and carefully. Or by flying.

Creating the Rootways and the Canopy.

They work the same mechanically. Any entrance to the rootways links up with every other entrance eventually. Same with the canopy and its entrances. These are piths in their respective area. There can be more, but far less than the Deep itself. I'd recomend that, other than entrances, there is one pith in the rootways in the canopy per 10 piths in the Deep. Add more if you'd like. There's no harm in it.

There's no need to roll for appearances. There is always a landmark in non-entrance piths. You could have a Forest floor faction rule a pith in the rootways or the canopy, but I would discourage that. These piths are ruled by the sporelings and the Owls respectively. Other than that, they work the same.

Locations in the Rootways.

Roll (1d8)	Location
1	The entrance to a near vertical stone cavern. It goes down to the dark world below.
2	A ruin, swallowed by roots and sunken into the earth.
3	A tunnel where the root-walls have fallen victim to rot and decay.
4	A sporeling village. A large cave, dense with spores.
5	The tunnels of an actual cave.
6	The glowing taproot of an immense redwood. It is covered in moss, the Forest Deep's secret reservoir of forbidden knowledge.
7	The remains of a village of dark elves. Like the elf villages above, hidden and easy to miss.
8	Sporeling breeding ground. So much fungus.

Locations in the Canopy.

Roll (1d8)	Location
1	An Owl village. 2d6+1 homes of the Owls built around a central worship site.
2	The nest of a roc.
3	An isle of floating stone a hundred feet above the canopy.
4	A fortress raised into the sky as the Forest Deep grew beneath it. Long ruined.
5	A forest who's roots reached into the treetops below.
6	An immense redwood, far taller than the other trees. Its pine cones can predict the future.
7	A sprawling network of spiderwebs. Sticky, but easier to walk on than the canopy.
8	An Owl cathedral, an immense complex of bones and prayer.

You Enter the Forest Deep Part 1: A System for Generating Intersting and Scary Fantasy Forests

You've been walking along the rough dirt road for hours. At first, you barely noticed the sea of trees surrounding you. It was peaceful here. Birdsong and the gentle rustling of leaves in the wind kept you company. It is only now that you realize you haven't felt the sun in hours. The trees have grown larger and closer, leering over you like starving wolves. Shapes move in the shadows, eyes close the second you turn to the see them. You feel a bitter wind down the back of your spine, like the breath of the forest that now acknowledges you inside it.

You have entered the Forest Deep.

This is the start of a new series I'm creating called You Enter the Forest Deep (YEtFD). Forests are the most common type of biome in fantasy (or at worst second most common) yet they are generally relegated to "area in which trees grow". Forests are far more interesting than that. That's what YEtFD is about: creating a more interesting fantasy forest. One that are dark and deep and dangerous.

The Forest Deep.

You've been to the outer edge of the Forest Deep before. It's a calm place of plants and animals and fungi. Gentle and calm, the sun still regularly blesses the forest's floor. The Forest Deep is something more primordial and ancient. The trees grow larger and thicker, light grows dimmer, and all that remains is the creaking of trees older than kingdoms and the songs of beasts humanity wished to forget. You are welcomed within the forest. You are a trespasser within the Forest Deep.

The Forest Deep is a single living organism. The forest is a cyclical form of life, where one thing feeds another in a grand loop, but this is far more obvious in the Forest Deep. All things are connected. Roots tangle together and the trees share their thoughts which grow as moss, devoured by the elk who feed the Wolves. From the Wolves, all know of the Forest's thoughts and wishes.

The Forest Deep abhors order. It accepts the presence of civilization at its edges, offers them lumber and game as a peace offering, but those who delve into the Forest Deep are signing an invisible deceleration of war. To build a settlement within requires an offering of peace, something the Forest wants but cannot have. Perhaps revenge, or maybe the return of a treasure stolen. The Wolves provide protection. The elves survive by staying hidden from the Forest Deeps thousand watchful eyes.

The Three Truths.

1. The Forest Deep is one living thing, a vast macroorganism connected by roots and mycelia networks. Its thoughts are encoded in moss.
   
2. You are always being watched in the Forest Deep. 
3. The Forest Deep is hard to navigate. Landmarks are rare and impossible to see from the forest floor.
   

Exploring the Forest Deep.

The Forest Deep is not traversable like a normal forest. Think of it instead like caverns connected by tunnels, the few pathways between parts of the forest that link together in a vast maze. It is safe, relatively speaking, on these paths, but lose the path and you lose your way. The trees are too similar to the eyes of mortals to make good landmarks, and the Forest itself tries to trick you and turn you around. If you must walk the Deep, stick to the paths.

All are slow to traverse the Deep, unless you are a friend of it. You can manage about 6 miles in the Forest Deep, but this translates to two piths a day. Friends of the Forest Deep are aided by it, and can move twice as fast.

One rarely needs rations within the Deep. The Forest is rich with food and even a barely trained forager can find enough to feed 10 while traveling in the Deep. The berries and fruits within the Deep grow larger than usual. An apple could be the size of your head.

The Enmity of the Forest. 

The Forest Deep is willing to accept your presence as long as you play by its rules. Performing any action the Deep finds distasteful draws its enmity, and you do not want the enmity of the Forest Deep. Harming a tree or lighting a torch are minor annoyances to the Deep. They increase enmity by 1. Starting a campfire, feling a tree, or building a permanent structure of stone anger the Forest. They increase enmity by 5. Starting a wildfire or eating the moss send the Deep into a blind rage. They increase enmity by 20. Elves and druids do not draw the Forest Deep's enmity for minor infractions.

The enmity of the Forest decreases by 1 each day you spend outside of the Deep or hidden from its view. The Deep can forget minor transgressions over time. You might also lower your enmity by making a deal with the Forest.

The Wolves. 

Every morning, roll a d20 and add your enmity. If the result is 21 or greater, the Wolves are on the hunt. If you have yet to anger the forest, there is no need to roll. The Wolves are not so ignoble as to hunt the kind.

The Wolves are the princes of the Forest, it's stewards and tenders. They are noble and gentle and can be full of love just as they are full of the Forest's rage. Whenever you encounter the Wolves, subtract your enmity from any opinion roll. Whenever the Wolves are on the hunt, they are automatically hostile. Killing a Wolf doubles your enmity. The Forest will not forget such a trespass lightly.

Paranoia and Light.

The Forest Deep breeds paranoia. You are always being watched. The shadows are always following you. It is natural to be afraid.

Sum your intelligence and wisdom scores. This is a measure of how much paranoia you can take.Traveling in the dark builds paranoia. For each day you travel without keeping torches or lanterns lit, you gain a paranoia. For each night you sleep without a fire, you gain 1d4 paranoia. While lost, paranoia gains are doubled. While below 10 paranoia, you begin to see and hear things. Your paranoia gains are doubled. If you are also lost, paranoia gains are quadrupled.

If your paranoia hits 0, you succumb to the Forest Deep's maddening influence and become one of the bolemen. This is equivalent to dying.

You've Lost the Path.

It is inevitable that you will lose the path. Take a d20 and place it on 20. This measures how long before you find freedom. For every action you take to escape, subtract a d6. Wandering a day, climbing into the canopy, starting a fire (the smoke always flows to the edge), getting the assistance of an animal, or eating the moss count as actions to escape.

Once the d20 reaches 0, roll a d6. On a 1 or 2 you walk out of the edge of the Forest Deep. On a 3-6, you find a random pith. Your path might be impossible. This is fine.

The Moss.

The Forest Deep communicates via moss. It takes time, but the Forest Deep can speak through the plant. Things grow faster than usual within the Deep, but the moss can still take days to get fully formed thoughts. The moss near the center of the Forest holds its ancient memories. Nothing eats of this moss.

You may eat the moss to hear the words of the Forest Deep. It speaks in concepts and vague emotional ideas. You'd be a fool to think the thoughts of a giant woodland super organism would be anything other than alien. Still, the Forest Deep knows things ancient and sacred and the deep moss can answer questions lost to time.

But beware, prodding at the moss of the Forest Deep is like something prodding at your own mind. It is obvious and infuriating. The Forest will not forgive it easily.

Generating the Forest Deep.

If you were to look at the Forest Deep on a hexmap, it would be a massive sea of trees. On a 6 mile hex, the outer most hexes are normal forest. The next layer has a 50% per hex of being the Forest Deep, then 75% for the third. Any layers deeper are always the Forest Deep If an outer later is the Forest Deep, the inner layers are also part of the Forest Deep.

Places within the Forest Deep are called piths. Piths are individual landmarks and locations that represent the forest around them. They're connected by pathways, and sometimes by the canopy or the rootways. The Forest Deep is essentially a giant pointcrawl. A macrodungeon.

Creating the Maze.

Start with entrance piths. As many as you want. If you'd like to determine it randomly, a d4 for a small Deep, a d6 or d8 for a medium sized one, or a d12 for a massive one. If there's a road through the deep, have it connect some of the entrances. It is ruined and cracked and the stones that once formed it are home to roots now, but it is still a road.

For each pith, roll 2d6. One d6 controls how thick the canopy is, and the other how dense with foliage and roots the floor is. For each pith roll another d6. On a 4-6, there's a landmark. If not, the pith is simple Forest and paths. Landmarks are common in piths. The paths are often formed between them.

Roll (1d6)	Floor Density	Canopy Density
1	Bare stone, moss, and dirt	Large, common patches open to sky
2	Grasses and small bushes	Rare patches open to sky
3	Thick bush coverage with tall grasses	Shaded, with rare sunbeams
4	Bushes and roots	Covered but still bright beneath, like shade
5	Roots choking out bushes	Covered, like a moonless night
6	Thick tangle of roots. No other plants	Completely covered. Pitch black.

Pathways. 

For each pith, roll 1d4. It has that many pathways. For each path, roll a d6 to determine the path type using the table below. Paths can be drawn to new piths or old piths, but a pith should never have more than 4 paths. If either the floor or canopy density of the pith is a 1, subtract 1 from the roll, and if either the floor or canopy density of the pith is a 6, add 1 to the roll.

Roll (1d6)	Pathway
0	Beast Highway
1	Beast Path
2	A Stream or River
3	A Road Not Yet Destroyed
4	Elf Road
5	Destroyed Road
6	Root Path
7	Dryad Tunnels

Beast paths are thin paths of packed dirt, the roads used by animals big and small. Beast highways are like beast paths, but wider. These are the roads of the Wolves. Elf roads are made of plants, wound together in a path. The Forest does not recognize them as roads. Root paths are made by roots growing in strange patterns, like a wooden road. Dryad tunnels are paths through trees and foliage created by gently coaxing the Forest Deep to grow that way.

Entrances to the Canopy and the Rootways. 

On floor density 4-6, roll another d6. On 4-6, there's an entrance to the rootways. On canopy desnity 4-6, roll another d6. On a 4-6, there's an entrance to the canopy. More information on the rootways and the canopy to come.

Who Rules These Woods.

Few live in the Forest Deep. As the Deep hates law, such institutions as civilization struggle to take root within her boughs. That has not stopped some from finding their home within the Forest.

For any pith of the Forest Deep, there's a 20% chance it is ruled by someone. You could up that to 50% for a more lively Forest Deep. If a part of the forest is ruled, roll a d8 and consult the chart below to see who rules it. If a faction rules a pith, there should probably be a location in that pith related to that faction. More information on these factions to come.

Roll (1d8)	Faction
1	The Wolves
2	The Ants
3	The Ettercaps
4	The Aes Sidhe
5	The Eoten Moot
6	The Wealden Court
7	The Bolemen
8	The Elves

There is also the option to allow the factions to control large portions of the Forest Deep. To do this, for each pith that is the home of a faction, each adjacent pith has a 50% chance to be owned by the faction, and each pith adjacent to those has a 25% chance. If you do this, only use each faction once in the Forest Deep.

d66 Places Within the Forest Deep. 

Here is a list of place one might find within the Forest Deep. Feel free to add others as well. Parenthesis show what faction might relate to the location.

Roll (d66)	Location
1	A mage's tower, long overgrown and abandoned. It's top peaks out of the canopy. (Any)
2	An elf village, nestled in a difficult to spot grove. (The Elves)
3	The mouth of a cavern. (The Wolves, The Ettercaps)
4	A patch of burnt forest. (The Ants, The Entin Moot)
5	A dryad grove. (The Entin Moot)
6	A roaring waterfall. (Any)
11	A large outcropping of rock, like a miniature mountain. (The Wolves)
12	Giant mushrooms. Lots of them. (Any)
13	An abandoned religious site. A cemetery thick with growth. (The Wealden Court)
14	A small steading carved out of the Forest. (The Bolemen)
15	A circle of stones. (The Wealden Court, The Entin Moot)
16	A giant ant mound. (The Ants).
21	A great tree, held aloft by its roots. A grove grows between them. (The Wealden Court)
22	Spiderwebs. Hundreds of them. Connecting every tree. (The Ettercaps)
23	A bridge, crumbled to ruin. (Any)
24	A giant insect hive. Perhaps wasps. Perhaps stirges. (Any)
25	A village, claimed by the Forest Deep. (The Bolemen)
26	A faerie ring. (The Aes Sidge)
31	A clearing. A rare bit of respite from the Forest Deep. No paranoia gains while sleeping here. (Any)
32	A pond or lake, run over by pond scum. (Any)
33	A fortress or castle swallowed by plants. (Any)
34	A hollow tree, a village built in its inside. (The Elves)
35	A creek or river or pond, dry and dusty. (Any)
36	A patch of the forest overcome by blight, rotting and dying. (Any)
41	A collection of carved human-sized wooden dolls. (The Aes Sidhe)
42	Six great stump seats. (The Entin Moot)
43	A fortress of upturned earth and carved trees. (The Ants)
44	The great hole of a giant trapdoor spider. (The Ettercaps)
45	A patch of the forest where the trees have thorns and are drawn to blood. (Any)
46	A part of the forest flooded with knee-deep water and inhabited by mangroves. (Any)
51	The workshop of a hermit alchemist. (Any)
52	The cavern home of an elven oracle. (The Elves)
53	A failing logging operation. (The Bolemen)
54	A patch of the Forest Deep that has died. The trees are malformed. (Any)
55	A part of the forest so rich with flowers the air is near solid with pollen. (The Ants)
56	A lich's mage tower, still in use. (Any)
61	A trader's cart, pierced and held aloft by roots. (Any)
62	The corpse of a great stag, still struggling to live on. (The Wolves, The Elves, The Wealden Court)
63	A charnel house, surprisingly unclaimed by the Forest Deep. (The Bolemen)
64	The remains of a battle. (Either The Ants and The Ettercaps, or The Wolves and The Elves)
65	A crystalline growth, glowing and humming with energy. (The Elves, The Wealden Court)
66	The Moss Library. The center of the Forest Deep. It is here ancient memories are stored in moss. (The Wolves)