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Wilderness Dressing: Woodlands $3.75
Average Rating:4.8 / 5
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Wilderness Dressing: Woodlands
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Wilderness Dressing: Woodlands
Publisher: Raging Swan Press
by Aaron T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 04/03/2013 22:28:54

What you get: Two black and white PDFs, each 17 pages long; one is formatted for printing, the other formatted to be viewed (portrait or vertically) on a tablet. Front and Back Cover, Title page, Ads/OGL, and Credits/Table of Contents/Foreword take 7 pages, leaving 10 pages of content. Two tables (one of minor events and one of woodland dressing) are tables of 100 ideas/hooks/environment descriptions. One table has twelve woodland encounters. One page is woodland features.

Artwork: Artwork was black and white and was of good quality. The style hearkens back to the art in old D&D books. The art does not directly correlate to any items in the table, but is all woodland themed and provides an appropriate “flavor” to the subject matter.

Layout and Editing: Layout was two column standard. Editing was very good. Since the tablet version is formatted for portrait or vertical view, and I read on a landscape monitor on a netbook, I am not able to comment on the difference/convenience of the tablet version over the print version, both provided an identical reading experience for me.

Overall Impression: Raging Swan Press’ books are immediately recognizable by their black covers with white text. This book is strictly a GM resource. There is nothing here for players. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the purchase. Within, you’ll find three tables (two of them MASSIVE) and a page of terrain features to make woodland combats more interesting.

The first table is 100 minor events. They range from animal sightings to trees falling on PC’s to adventure hooks, to creepy ghostly meetings. There is not a lot of information given for each one, but each one seems to be designed to get a GM’s creative juices flowing. Players can interact with or ignore the events as they will, but could end up with some fun side quests or at the very least, believable reasons for having a random encounter.

The second table is 100 items of “woodland dressing.” These items are designed to give GM’s material for making campsites or encounter areas a bit more interesting. You’ve got lots of different tree descriptions and geological features to play with. No more boring circles on the battlemat to signify the campsite.

The third table is twelve random encounters ranging from EL 2 to EL 10. Each encounter has a block of text outlining why the PC’s might have this encounter. Rather than having woodland creatures attack for no reason, you have enough background to make these encounters somewhat believable. Your players may just think that they are still on the main quest instead of just getting a random encounter!

Finally, you get one page of woodland features. These are dressing to make encounter areas more interesting. You get different things that PC’s and NPC’s can interact with in the environment during a battle. If your battle site has a fallen tree in it, how can it be used as cover? How do you adjudicate movement through the leafy top of the fallen tree? The rules governing these sorts of situations are outlined on this page. Of the entire document, this is the one page that I will print out when my players are getting into woodlands.

When I started counting up pages, I was surprised at how many of the pages in the document were “non-content” pages. The 10 pages of content were so densely packed with gaming goodness, that this is not a huge detraction from the product, but I did notice it. To be fair, the document IS short, and the number of pages that are non-content (covers, OGL, ads) are no more than what I find in Paizo’s products, the low page count makes the percentage feel high.

When I first glanced over this product, I cringed, thinking, “How am I going to read through a book of tables?” I was pleasantly surprised to find that these tables were interesting to read! I wasn’t bored, rather my mind flew between thinking, “How would my players react to that?” and “Can I find a good way to slip this into my current adventure?”

Final Rating: Five stars. Any product that is essentially 10 pages of tables, that keeps me reading and keeps me thinking, “I want to use that!” deserves a five star rating.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Wilderness Dressing: Woodlands
Publisher: Raging Swan Press
by Thilo G. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 02/11/2013 09:56:33

The first installment of the second spin-off of the Dungeon Dressing-line is 17 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page advertisement, 2 pages editorial, 1 page ToC/foreword, 1 page SRD, 1 page back cover, leaving us with 10 pages of content, more than in most dressing-pdfs, so let's check this out!

Now what to expect? Instead of getting tables that depict individual trees, undergrowth, bushes etc., the supplement opts for a different way: Instead of detailing the forest, we get 100 different minor events that range from butterfly-swarms to hidden caches of bandit loot, painters currently painting nature, abandoned (or are they?) tree-huts, suspension bridges between branches, mad hermits, sleeping opossums and birds that weirdly track them, resulting in a nice, breathing array of beings that make the respective forest come alive as both a location and an eco-system.

Now instead of providing multiple small tables for components of woodland dressings, we instead gain one massive table of dressings that include gnarled trees with humanoid-looking trunks, rivers and ravines intersecting the paths, remains of old battlegrounds, soporific pollen-producing plants (substitute xtabay flowers if particularly sadistic...), streams with rotten tree-bridges, kudzu-like infestations, old houses surrounded by rune-covered trees - you get the idea. Rather than going into explicit detail with regards to multiple components, we get 100 "stages" or hooks, backdrops if you will, to spin encounters from, many of which also feature some short DC, rules-information and the like.

We also get a one-page table that details 12 different random encounters to insert into your game as well as a page of general features of woodland environments that sums up e.g. modifications to stealth and detection range, rules for trails and undergrowth as well as e.g. fallen trees etc. and their effect on you when encountered. Very useful and collected on one page for your convenience.

Conclusion: Editing and formatting are top-notch, as I've come to expect from Raging Swan press - I didn't notice any glitches. Layout adheres to RSP's 2-column b/w-standard and the b/w-artworks included are atmospheric indeed. The pdf comes fully bookmarked and in two versions, one optimized for screen-use and one to be printed out, which is still great and something I'd love all 3pps to adapt, but oh well.

When I read the title of this installment of the Dressing-lines, I thought: How do they want to do this? Author Mike Welham has opted for one of the two approaches: Instead of providing you the tools to customize the forest per se (via percentages of leaf-carrying trees, tables for undergrowth, mosses etc.), we get a more general approach that brings the forest to life by focusing on its eco-system, its inhabitants and weird (or beautiful) locations. Less a cosmetic generator of how a forest looks like/sounds/feels, but rather a pdf depicting what the place holds surprise-wise. If you've been looking for a generator like the one I mentioned, then this pdf will not cater to your needs. What it does, though, is lending a hand with regards to sketched out adventure-hook-worthy ideas/locales to develop and add life to your forest. Especially when used in massive woods or to complement supplements like Kobold Press' "Tales of the Old Margreve", you'll have a whopping 200 descriptions to fall back on and lend credence and believability to your forests and bring back the sense of wonder journeying through the vast woods should entail. That being said, the table of random encounters, while useful, felt like it could have been better used for more details instead, but that's a personal preference. Now, for what it's worth, this pdf is a joy to read (quite a feat with list-pdfs like this) and features some exciting ideas that should spark all but the most dried-up creativity and for what it tries to be, it works. My final verdict will thus be 5 stars + seal of approval. However, I'm still hoping we'll see a sequel themed more on "Dark" woodlands, primal forests (not jungles - that would be a separate one!) where the light of the sun scarcely falls to the forest floor as well as a pdf that allows for customary forest generation - perhaps a "So what's that forest like, anyways?" to supplement this.

Endzeitgeist out.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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