playing in the deep dark woods

There's a -- a thread? a theme? a tendency? pick whatever word works, maybe not one of these even -- in the indie/oldschool/etc ttrpg scene for putting adventures in or writing some setting material for what can best be described as The Deep Dark Woods.

Just glancing around me, I can see

Into The Wyrd And Wild

Trophy Dark / Gold / Loom

Cairn (and a bunch of supplements and adventures; I have Tannic close at hand)

to a certain extent They Cried Monster

Dolmenwood (okie, I have printouts of parts of it, the books aren't out yet)

and I haven't bought nearly all of what I've seen. There's a reason for that.

See, I see something in The Deep Dark Woods and I get excited. Like, omg yay yaaaaaaay excited, this stuff calls to me in Ways, folks.

And then I get the thing.

And the thing is generally really good!

Except -- I'm inevitably disappointed even so.

The folks in ttrpg-land want me to be /afraid/ of The Deep Dark Woods.

When they write about The Deep Dark Woods, it's from the point of view of those who feel like

the Forest hates you

the Forest is terrifying and primal and you will lose yourself

... actually I can probably stop there and sum up with "dark", "wild", "primal", etc. The Deep Dark Woods is Nature and Nature is Scary and being surrounded by it all is Scary and nature red in tooth and claw and It Will Change You and so on and so forth.

This is honestly so foreign to my everything I can barely wrap my brain around it.

I practically lived in the Forest. Not oak or apple or whatever either, we're talking endless Forest of balsam fir, with some black spruce and occasional stands of white birch like ghosts, and other trees here and there, thickets of briars where there's breaks or trails, carpets of needles and crackerjack plants and ferns where there isn't. The northern boreal forest was literally outside my door and we followed trails, dabbled in the brook (and fished), gathered berries, made little "clubhouses" under trees by weaving old limbs and branches through living boughs ... Always up there. Or up in the tiny cavelets in the Forest right outside the back of the cabin, reading or listening or writing.

It's not an exaggeration to say it's home.

I keep looking for The Deep Dark Woods in rpg things because it's everything I would like to go back to, but everyone else is afraid of it.

Someone else would probably go off on a tear at this point about the difference in this outlook and something something judgement or preferences or ~disconnection from nature~ or some other nonsense, but it's not going to be me, because I don't buy that. Different lives, different lived experiences, and the ttrpg scene in general just seems really big on Existential Doomer Ennui And Horror these days (for years) so it's not /just/ the Forest, you know?

But it always feels just a little weird. Maybe I'm just the weird one?

Meh.

Look at all those words.

🐈 go back ~!