Traveler's Guide to the Darkwood

The Traveler’s Guide to the Darkwood is a ‘zine-size 5e supplement full of new ancestries, classes, transformations, nine new backgrounds that give you cool stuff to spend your hit dice on, and dozens of new monsters forming five new factions locked in a struggle for control of the titular Darkwood.

Play as the new greenfolk ancestry, little plant people with some natural druidic magic and a tremorsense as they root into the earth nearby, or use natural symbiosis to transform a character of any ancestry into a wood woad, a shambling mound, or ultimately, a mighty treant. Play as the new Spore Bomber class, an artillery focused class with tons of poison, psychic, and piercing damage, and which can seize control of both the living and the dead with parasitic fungus. Basically, imagine if the Circle of Spores Druid got rid of all the standard Druid stuff to instead be all fungal artillery, all the time.

It wouldn’t be much of a guide to the Darkwood without a guide to the actual Darkwood, with six different sub-regions each with their own conflicts between a grand total of five or seven or nine different factions, depending on exactly how you count them. The core six factions have been given a complete stat block overhaul, with new action-oriented bosses, like the aarakocra’s arcane archer and shaman, the fomorian troll, bigger and nastier than the average, and the dark druid Thornhearts’ sinister archdruid leader, Grandfather Kierath.

The monsters, sub-regions, and entire region of the Darkwood itself are designed with an eye of the grand GMing tradition of stripping the setting for parts to use in your own homebrew, and also plug into the greater Weskven setting that this series will be building and donating to the Creative Commons so that every third party publisher doesn’t have to make their own new setting from scratch. We also donate the art to the Creative Commons after a while.

Seven of those factions also get new backgrounds, allowing you to emulate the devastating abilities of those bosses by spending hit dice, and the Outlander and Folk Hero also get a rewrite to the new system, with new powers unlocked at levels 5, 9, 13, and 17. You can use the new background to give yourself a soft multiclass, for example, taking Outlander to grant yourself some Ranger or Druid features even if otherwise you’re a Rogue or Sorcerer or whatever, or you can use them to reinforce your class, using the Outlander to extend your Ranger or Druid powers by using hit dice to cast when you’ve run out of spell slots. And these backgrounds remain fully compatible with other first party backgrounds, which use all of their hit dice for healing on a short rest, which is less fun, but still a perfectly effective thing to spend your hit dice on.

In addition to the standard forty or fifty pages of new content I’ve been producing every month for a year now, this book also contains some reprinted stuff from Chamomile’s Guide to Everything, to ensure that new supporters have everything they need to play the Darkwood, with no other books necessary, including playable werewolves, dryads, and myconids from Celawyn and Kessler, the Summoner, Shapeshifter, and Healer classes from Celawyn and Thaemin, the Beast Friend Ranger and Beast Whisperer Barbarian from Celawyn and Cora, and the Injuries system from Ozaka.

Of course, while I’ve included everything necessary to playing the Darkwood in the Darkwood book, lots of things which aren’t strictly necessary but still very cool have been left out in order to keep the formatting, printing, and shipping costs under control, and also because it would be kind of dickish to my returning supporters if I gave away all or even most of the content they paid for last year. So, y’know, there’s tons more content waiting in the other books of the series, which are available as add-ons. Just saying.

And that’s only scratching the surface! There’s more content in this book than this intro has room for, so there’ll be more updates along the way going into more detail, and all of it crammed into the pages of the Traveler’s Guide to the Darkwood!