Free Role Playing Game Supplement Review: FA2 – Springwood Forest

FA2 – Springwood Forest is a free role playing game supplement, part of the FA range published by Adventures in Filbar. The FA series covers adventure areas, usually wilderness related, in this case a forest. This supplement is intended for use with either the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons or AD&D 2nd Edition rules, but it should be compatible with most similar systems, especially those in the Old School Revival.

This is an 11 page PDF which lacks bookmarks. The first page is the Adventures in Filbar logo, one page is taken up by a map of the area and two more pages each have two photographs that are used to illustrate specific places in the forest. About half a page is taken up by Player’s Background and slightly more than half by DM’s background. The remainder of the book covers ten different encounter locations in the forest.

The forest itself could be considered to by Sylvan. Most of the encounters are elven, or creatures who could be discovered in the vicinity of elves. The forest itself, like the later supplement FA3 – Darkwood Forest, is close to the Village of Tomore which is covered in its own supplement. Of the ten locations, three of them are essentially identical being elven guard posts. Each of the detailed locations has a general description suitable for reading out to players and some DM notes.

The map is on a hex grid and looks like it was largely hand drawn in graphics software. The four photographs are stock images that are suitable for the areas they are intended to depicts. There are a few mistakes in the text itself, but nothing major.

Two of the ten locations are not really covered. One just has a description and says that further details of the place are available in the separate supplement, Sunken Temple of Bulu, and the other, the elven settlement of Silvantri, just says to refer to the documentation for it, again another supplement.

This is rather less stand alone than some of the range. The lack of details of two of the major encounter areas limits the utility of the supplement without them. This could be used as a base for a sylvan forest in another setting, but it would either need expanding or the other two supplements would need purchasing. It should also be relatively easy to adapt the monster and NPC stats to most similar systems. FA2 – Springwood Forest isn’t a bad start for a forest region, but it really doesn’t work just by itself. Still, it’s free, so click here to get it.