Wilderness Campaign Help!

[Natural20]

What are the basic Ranger/Outdoor campaign adventure senarios?

I can think of:

>Track down the bad guy/hurt animal/missing person
>Fend off the humanoid raiding party/Bandits/Warg pack, etc.
>Help/communicate with the misunderstood animal/faerie, etc.
>????

What else? Can anyone help?

 

[FrankTrollman]

Wilderness campaigns are the most DM friendly scenario there is. When people are wandering around in the wilderness, there is a tendency for them to not know what is in between them and their destination. And that means.... you don't have to know either.

When they are in the middle of the Forest, which is so vast that it is capitalized, you can have them run into any placed encounters you want. Let's say you have an idea for an encounter with a fairy tree whose Dryad is sickening and has made a pact with darkness in order to touch iron. It's a nice little encounter, and you want to use it. In a wilderness campaign setting, you can. The players will travel North, South, East, or West, and they'll still encounter your little set piece.

Everything in the "wilderness" has a qunatum location. Once people have encountered something, its location is set. But until then it simply exists "somewhere in the wilderness" and will be "found" by the players the next time they are going through the wilderness and it is story appropriate for them to do so.

It's not like civilized areas, where the Evil Grand Vizier is already known to live at the palace, and people can screw things up at any time just by attacking him when they are way too low level to win. Heck no! In the wilderness campaign you can't even find the high level encounters until you are high level yourself.

That being said, episodic location adventures work really well. Have players encounter a cottage overrun by a werewolf pretending to be a kindly old woman. Or the home of a villainous canibalistic witch who has captured a couple of children for the purpose of eating. Or a shepherd's village which is being raided by a dire wolf, with the only witness being the prime suspect of the villagers.

I'm sure you could find a collection of similar adventure ideas somewhere.

-Frank

 

[Natural20]

Yes

I agree that there's a lot of flexibility in a wilderness campaign. The one I'm running now centers around the party tracking down a Malar worshiping Lycanthrope cult. There is a lot of potential for throwing up encounters as they travel. I'm looking for ideas for those encounters, like the canabal witch that FrankTrollman mentioned (which was good, and I will use it, thanks!).

Anyone have any more?

 

[Nifft]

Great things about the wilderness:

1: Unexpected foes.
2: Unexpected help from the current enemy's unexpected foes.
3: Funky terrain.
4: Fights on funky terrain.
5: Chase scenes.
6: Chase scenes involving fighting on funky terrain with various forces of unknown allegiance.
7: Random Fey messing up everyone's plans.
8: Random Dragons flying overhead ... stick to the trees, boys!

-- N

 

[Hand of Evil]

Some I have used.
* Trail Blazing - Someone wants to find a shortcut to point C to build a road, rangers are hired.

* Trade Deals - Some hard to get items can make someone a lot of money, bad news is the 'people' who have it live in the wildlands.

* Police - Forest are resources, the shear amount of wood for homes, ships, and fires could empty a forest. Rangers are in place to prevent illegal cutting and dumping.

 

[Emirikol]

You're all welcome to come over and join us on yahoogroups for these kinds of discussions on the barbarian campaign discussions.
www.yahoogroups.com/group/d20conan

Personally I love wilderness encounters way better than dungeons. Players are typically out of their elements so all characters can be challenged equally. You can also find it a lot easier to use things such as terrain, cover and concealment, and missile fire. Even PLAINS terrain can be done right wit a couple of boulders, hills, or tall stands of grass (think the REAL prairie, not this shortgrass you see in the movies).

jh

 

[heirodule]

1. Cartography or (higher tech level) ordinance survey

2. Lewis and Clark: vast unexplored continent. Get to the other side because the king wants to know how great his holdings are.

3. Travel to the edge of the world (Voyage of the Dawn Treader). An oversea adventure, with wilderness stuff on the various islands.

4. Teleport gone wrong. Where are you?

5. Find the rare plant needed for medicine.

 

[MarauderX]

I love running the occassional wilderness campaign, as it makes any ranger or druid players feel 'in their element'. I always like to throw in the survival plot, especially around Halloween, where the PCs and some random caravan/would-be bandits/lone tracker band together to foil a stalker that kills in broad daylight and at night, leaving a horrible scene akin to Predator. Use a high CR monster that would flatten most PCs of their level, then weaken them up a bit to fit the encounter. Have some NPCs see glimpses of it so the players think there is just one nasty out there but include 3 or 4 in the final battle and you will scare the wits out of them again. The players will freak out (the main idea, i suppose) if they recognize it, and if they set up a trap or try to set up a good defensive position have them attacked before they can complete any plans they have, eliminating more NPCs and give one of the players that happens to be furthest away from the group a good silloette of it.

Their whole quest is to make it out of the forest alive, and once they lead "it" to a town, only more deaths ensue and the PCs are commissioned to deal with the problem. If you have done a half-way decent job, the players should be pretty scared of whatever it is they now have to hunt down. You can lead them back out to the woods to track it down by saying that the inner town is relatively safe, but some of the outlying homes have been attacked, or have them track it down within the town if you want to switch it to a city setting. I have run this with howlers for a starting party and displacer beasts with a few extras for a higher level party, and it works great for inspiring fear and giving the players the hope of not giving up, just not willing to put their PCs on the line for something they have grown scared of.

 

[Hunter]

Very true.

Hunter

 

[Lord Zardoz]

It is difficult to generate advice with so little information to start from. However, there is one approach that you can try to adopt.

You can treat your forest as a loosely organized dungeon. Instead of rooms, you have specific terrain features, and the game trails that lead from one locale to another. The forest locations have alot of flexiblity. Each 'room' in a forest dungeon can be a simple terrain feature, a single building, or a cluster of buildings.

Examples:

Terrain features:
The Large Boulder
The Ravine
The Cave
The pond
The Clearing
The Fire Scar

Buildings / Structures:
Abandoned Cabin
The old tower
The totem
Old camp site
The Watch Tower

Clusters of Buildings:
An Elven Villaige
An orc encampment
An abandoned town
A castle
A city

If you can give me more information on what you want, I can give you more detail. Do you want specific encounters, adventure ideas, or a whole campaign?

END COMMUNICATION