A long while ago, shortly after I started taking this blog seriously, I wrote a post about making your forest environments more exciting during battles. It was the first of my Spicing Up the Battlemat series of posts, which is a series I’ve always found both fun and useful. Along with that post, I made a pdf file to help generate forest battlefields. I don’t know if anyone else has ever downloaded it, but I’ve certainly gotten a lot of use out of it myself. However, having now used it for several months, I’ve noticed more than a few problems. Not only are there several typos, but some options (most notably insects) came up far too often.
I recently took the time to revisit that chart, and I’ve updated a number of things. The layout is more clear, I’ve removed some useless information, added some cool new options, and altered some of the probabilities. I’ve also changed the rules about undergrowth, which I had taken directly from page 427 of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook. As it turns out, however, people who design tabletop role playing games might not be nature experts. I happen to have one such expert in my group, and they recently pointed out that when there’s high tree density, sunlight doesn’t penetrate to the forest floor, and thus there is less undergrowth, not more.
For my own purposes, I use this chart in almost every game, and I fully believe it has enriched our group’s experience. So, if you’re interested, here’s the PDF. An image of the file is also available below.
Random Forest Battlefield Generator v2
Wow~! Cool! (^0^)b Modify it a bit, and i can use it for generating not only forest, but also desert/wasteland, lake/sea, mountain/hills and even cave/dungeon. hehehehe~ What a useful resources. This is great.
Cool, this will come in very useful for random encounters generated on overland treks. Even if I don’t stick to it absolutely, a few rolls will generate enough interesting ideas that I don’t think my player’s will be able to tell that the encounter is random (which in my game are usually distinguishable by a scribbled road or path surrounded by a few uninteresting, haphazardly placed trees).
Also, from my experience, your friend is right – old growth forests are a lot easier to move through than younger woods or scrub. The abundance of leaf litter on the ground can conceal deadfalls and wasp nests though! (when we were kids my brother learned that second one the hard way)