Adventures in the Wild Woods by Joseph Mohr is a role playing game supplement published by Old School Role Playing for use with OSRIC. As such, it is covered by the Open Game License and some parts are considered to be Open Game Content as a result.
The supplement is available as an 88 page Pay What You Want PDF from DriveThruRPG. Two pages are the front and rear covers, three the front matter and three the Open Game License.
The opening paragraphs explain that this is a remote and untamed area of the realm, and it gives an overview of some locations in the woods and the problems with bandits.
Game Master Notes explains that this is intended to be similar to B2 Keep on the Borderlands, in that it has a safe home base for the characters to resupply and a variety of encounter areas, each being a small dungeon or cave system with low level inhabitants, with the more dangerous locations being further away from home. The adventure should take characters from 1st to 3rd level. Some locations have inhabitants that a 1st level character should run away from. The adventure is intended to be placed in any remote or border area of a realm. There are also tables to determine the season and the weather in that season.
Conventions Used in this Adventure have abbreviations for AD&D books and character classes.
Random Encounters in the Wild Woods is a random encounter table.
Random Encounters on the Road is for the road through the woods.
Other Random Encounters in the Wild Woods explains that specific encounter areas have their own encounter tables.
The Village of Kolmar details the village that will be the home base. It is described, given its own encounter table, a list of rumours, details on the various locations which will provide the services characters need for the adventure. There are also twenty random NPCs, not covered elsewhere, that can be encountered in the village.
The Wild Woods describes the woods themselves. There are 21 different locations, with the first four being the village and bridge, which are described in the village, the river and the road. The remainder are encounters. The majority of these are effectively mini-dungeons, though some are just simple encounters with something.
The final ten pages of content are maps. The Wild Woods has player and GM versions and there are maps of the other locations, including the village.
Adventures in the Wild Woods in Review
The PDF lacks bookmarks and is long enough with enough different sections that they would have been useful. Navigation could be better. The text maintains a single column format and some minor errors were noticed. There are a variety of colour and black and white illustrations. Presentation is okay.
This is as it sets out to be; a collection of different, self-contained encounters for low-level characters with a home base to recuperate at. Though the adventure could be run as-is, it could also be scavenged for parts. The village is useful in and of itself for villages are always useful, and the various different mini-dungeon size encounters are all easily stripped out of the adventure and dropped in elsewhere. Adventures in the Wild Woods is a useful supplement and it can be found by clicking here.
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