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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kid Charlemagne" data-source="post: 4247325" data-attributes="member: 93">Gilladian's points are excellent.  What I do when I'm doing locations (of any kind) is to come up with a fairly simple, hopefully evocative description that the players can kind of hang on to, and then if I want the chance of "random" encounters, I'll try and prep one out that enhances the players understanding of the area.  If the forest is known for dragons, they should in some way come across evidence of the dragon - dead carcasses of beasts attended by vultures, a silhouette flying overhead followed by spooked herds of animals fleeing for their lives, etc.  If the forest is known for dangerous indigenous peoples, then they should feel that they are being shadowed and watched at night, possibly ambushed, or given a chance to interact with the tribes...As for help with descriptions themselves - I do a lot of image searches online (try "primeval forest" for some neat forest pics) to get ideas, or I'll use things that I've seen.  A city might have construction like English Tudor houses, or it could look more like whitewashed Greek Island villages.  It could be all stone, or all wood, depending on the local resources (forest nearby - wood, in the mountains - stone, etc).  A forest could be primeval and untouched, pine or deciduous, lots of undergrowth or clear under the tree canopy.Description is one thing you'll undoubtably get better at as you get more experience DM'ing, but some rudimentary prep along these lines, even if its just a couple of sentences - if you tell your players that the forest is "old-growth forest, with lots of undergrowth around the massive trunks of fallen trees, mostly oaks and maples with a few massive trees the size of sequoias," they'll all go, "Wow!" and really all you did was spend five minutes (at most) and wrote down one sentence in your notes.  And then next time they come back to that forest, you just have to remind them of the description.</blockquote>

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