On the Origin and Nature of this Blog Name

In honor of having started this blog a bit over six months ago, it’s high time I wrote a post explaining its name. It came from a 5e campaign I GM’d, one of my favorites to date.

The party was traveling through a darkened swamp. The ground sunk beneath their feet. Twisted trees loomed overhead. The sky was overcast and grim, disregarding the time of day. Fans of the “Fable” series can think of Darkwood as an analogous place.

Fable was one of my initial introductions into fantasy gaming. I knew nothing about the game pre-release, so I was protected from a lot of the hype (and subsequent disappointment) that came from the anticipation Peter Molyneux created during development.

Before I continue, it’s important to establish that wilderness travel is very important to me as a GM. I try to include all sorts of significant events to “liven up” wilderness travel. A lot of it involves adding detail to the world, establishing themes or allowing insight into the world’s history. The players can dig deep and investigate if they want, or they could simply pass it by.

For example, a foreign merchant might have some exotic wares for sale, but she doesn’t approach the player characters first – she only engages them if they start the conversation. Perusing the wares and buying something would let the characters learn a bit about lands other than their own. But they also could continue walking and choose to not interact.

At the same time, I also include a lot of insignificant events – purely atmospheric stuff. “You travel for a quiet day, taking note of only two abnormally large flocks of ravens. It might have been two different flocks, or perhaps the same flock has followed you.” Stuff like that.

And, by this point in the campaign, the players have grown sufficiently accustomed to my style of running wilderness travel that they see the potential for significance even in the insignificant encounters. In the scenario above, they might get paranoid and assume the ravens are spying on them or something. Of course, they’re just normal ravens – but the players (and their characters) don’t necessarily know that.

That established, back to the story: after using a table to determine random encounters for the day, the results indicated a result from Raging Swan’s “uneventful days of travel in a swamp.” The dice decided the players encountered a remarkable tree with the face of a man.

I would post a link to the Raging Swan "20 Things" list, but I think it's been shuffled around in Creighton's reorganization of his blog and the Raging Swan website. Regardless, I highly recommend the Wilderness Dressing they have. It's a great source of atmosphere-building random tidbits like the one described here.

I waxed poetic with my description. “You travel for a dull and dreary day through the swamp. In the mid-afternoon, a downed tree obstructs the path. Its roots lie open to the air in a large, exposed mass of dirt. A water-filled hole lies where the tree once stood. You easily step over the tree. As you look back, you see that part of its bark seems to resemble the face of a man. It’s as if the fallen tree is only resting peacefully on the ground.”

Now, we come to an interesting decision point. As a GM, I could have simply said, “but it’s really nothing and you continue for the rest of the day, uneventfully.” Such would have flat-out told them there was nothing important about the tree… or I could pause here and let the players decide whether to interact with the tree or not.

This seems like a catch twenty-two, as pausing here allows the potential for small events like this to become significant. However, there really was nothing significant about the tree. So perhaps I’m just wasting table-time by pausing here and allowing a decision point.

You can weigh in with your opinion, if you’d like. I’m still on the fence about whether I made the right call or not, as I chose to pause at this point and let the players decide what to do. However, I’m rather happy with that choice because it let to the name of this blog – and one of my favorite moments of any game as a GM.

They were a table of mostly new players. And they began talking back and forth with each other, hypothesizing that perhaps they’d found a dead treant or a man trapped in the tree by a witch. I imagined their player characters in the game world, stopping in their tracks and conversing in wonder. It’s important to note that they were talking to each other, not to me. They hardly asked me any questions – and I wasn’t about to butt in to interrupt their conversation.

The party druid had a staff of the woodlands, which allowed him to cast speak with plants. After a bit of debate, the party decided the druid should use his staff to cast speak with plants and try to converse with the tree.

I reiterate, the players decided all of this amongst themselves. They never asked me if it was an actual face in the tree, or if the tree was alive or dead.

Now, I knew the spell wouldn't not work. The tree was dead. And I could have told the player that before they cast the spell. Perhaps I should have. One of my self-imposed rules of GM’ing is that you flat-out tell players when they attempt something impossible. And, truth be told, the player’s character – the druid, in the game world – would have likely known the spell wouldn’t work.

However, I broke this rule of GM’ing because the player used a staff of the woodlands and there was virtually no harm in letting the player try. The staff would simply regain its charges at the end of the day (and the dice had already decided they wouldn’t have any further encounters that day).

So, I narrated the outcome of the druid’s actions. “You take your staff and murmur the magical incantation. The wood at the top of your staff twists, summoning a green light that wisps forth and washes over the tree. The light seems to soak and seep in, saturating the tree. The tree glows for a moment. Then... nothing happens. Because it's dead.”

It's okay, Treebeard - you can just cast speak with plants, right?

Their reaction at the table is hard to describe. It was a bit like the spell itself, actually. There was this moment of eager suspense, listening with attention as I described the druid’s spell.  My description washed over them, and you could watch it seep in. And, like the light, it glowed for a moment and dimmed… and they erupted in laughter.

It was great.

They laughed at themselves, and at me, and just at the general silliness of the whole thing. Here we were, after several minutes of generous description, serious deliberation, and some spellcasting, only to arrive at a dead tree.

It stuck with us for the rest of the campaign. The players asked the druid if he wanted to cast speak with plants on some sticks on the ground, or the dead leaves. The druid got the idea to turn the cleric’s speak with dead spell into a speak with dead plants spell (which I still think is a good idea, though we never got around to it).

But anyway, that remains one of my favorite moments as a GM from any campaign I’ve ran. There are few things that have made me or the players laugh for as long or as hard as that.

And so was the name of this blog born.