A mega-adventure of primal horrors, mythic witches, and our deepest, most ancient fears that will push characters to their limits and force them to confront truths about themselves, forever changing them. Compatible with all campaigns and RPG systems!
DO NOT LOSE YOURSELF WITHIN THE WOODS' DARKENING DEPTHS
The Darkest Woods is a mega-adventure that takes you into a unique realm of horror. It’s made for the game you’re playing right now, to be integrated into your campaign regardless of the setting or game system. And it's uniquely optimized for a rich, powerful experience that's immersive for the players and easy on the GM.
The Darkest Woods will chill and frighten your players not just through terrifying creatures and challenging situations (though there are plenty of those!) but also by tapping into a deep, primal fear of the wilderness. Along the way, their characters will have experiences that make them deeper, richer, and more powerfully bonded as a party.
Whether you game face-to-face or online, The Darkest Woods makes the GM's job easy with its unique GM-friendly product design, while providing an amazingly immersive experience for the players through an astounding amount of art, maps, and handouts to share with them—all just a click away.
The Darkest Woods is a standalone companion to The Darkest House, the highly praised horror campaign supplement released by Monte Cook Games in 2021. If you’ve never experienced The Darkest House, there are several pledge levels that include it along with The Darkest Woods—a fantastic deal on two incredible horror experiences. (You do not need The Darkest House to use The Darkest Woods.)
Will you creep even deeper into the dusk-dark twisted paths of the Darkest Woods? Do you crave more secrets? More dangers? The Darkest Road is a distinct portion of the Darkest Woods, with its own areas, its own horrors, and its own mysteries to uncover. This section of the woods might seem at first to offer solace—even a path toward freedom—to those wandering lost in forest. But it has its own unique challenges and terrors.
The standard edition, which will be available for general sale in the future, is a complete package with everything you need for a descent into this unique horror experience—but it doesn't include this additional content. The Darkest Woods Expanded Edition includes everything in the standard edition, plus the Darkest Road. This exclusive edition offers substantially more horror, fully integrated into the rest of The Darkest Woods. Backing this campaign is the only way to get it!
That’s not all. If you back for The Darkest Woods Expanded Edition, you also get these additional bonuses:
Monte Cook's secret tour of the Darkest Woods: In the style of a director's commentary track, Monte takes you on a video tour of the woods covering his favorite areas. He delves into their genesis and inspiration, gives you insights into the lore behind them, and talks about how he's used them in his own games.
The Darkest Woods digital art book: The Darkest Woods contains dozens and dozens of illustrations, all as mysterious as they are frightening. The Art of The Darkest Woods presents all of them—including illustrations from The Darkest Road—in beautiful detail. Annotations by Monte and Art Director Bear Weiter accompany many of the illustrations, and several also include details or alternate versions calling out their secrets and hidden features.
The Darkest Woods will give your players an experience they’ll never forget. The Darkest Woods Expanded Edition gives you even more—and it's only available only through this campaign. Don’t miss out!
The Darkest Woods is uniquely designed for easy GMing—and for an immersive player experience. Every area has a map with tags for the GM, and an untagged version to show the players. All of the art—and there’s loads of it, depicting every location and creature encountered—is made to show the players. There are generous quantities of handouts, and even dozens of sound files! And it’s all easily downloadable, so you can share it with the players quickly and without hassle.
We’re making The Darkest Woods in two formats: a conventional RPG book; and a digital equivalent in the form of a unique app optimized for online use. Both include everything you need to play—you don’t need the book to use the app, or the app to use the book. (We’re making the app for Mac and PC; the reward includes both versions.)
All of this is equally true for the The Darkest Woods Expanded Edition. It's just like the standard edition, but with more content (and, for the book, potentially additional deluxe features unlocked as stretch goals).
The Darkest Woods app is a digital product created from the ground up for running and playing online—and built to take maximum advantage of that mode of play. Think of it like an RPG book that’s been completely reimagined for the online environment, with pages formatted for your screen, easily sharable resources, no page-flipping, intuitive navigation, and additional features that not only make online gaming easier—they take advantage of its unique nature to deliver a better RPG experience. Your players may find the Darkest Woods a daunting challenge, but you’ll find it amazingly easy to GM.
The Darkest Woods app works with your preferred online TTRPG platform. You can run it on Zoom or Discord, or a virtual tabletop like Roll20 or Astral, or however you normally run online games. Only the GM needs a copy of The Darkest Woods, just like only the GM needs a copy of a conventional adventure book. The GM needs a desktop or laptop computer (Windows or Mac OS—your purchase includes both versions) to use The Darkest Woods. Here's a brief look at The Darkest House, which pioneered this unique format:
The Darkest Woods book is a hefty hardcover, an amazing production that makes it astonishingly easy to GM this mega-adventure. The thoughtful layout puts info where the GM needs it, with an absolute minimum of page-flipping. And all the handouts, art, player maps, sound files, and other sharable resources for an encounter area are easily downloaded via a shortlink and QR code. The Darkest Road will expand it with another entire region of the Woods. We hope to further upgrade this exclusive book’s production through stretch goals!
You can download an excerpt of The Darkest House (the precursor to The Darkest Woods) to take a look at the thoughtful and innovative format that makes it so immersive and easy.
Both Formats Give You Everything You Need:
All the highly detailed encounter areas in the Darkest Woods—some of which are an elaborate challenge to find, and all are difficult to survive.
Hundreds of journal entries, notes, maps, and other props, handouts, and audio files (dozens of them!) to enhance the narrative plus GM maps, illustrations, and diagrams, all designed to be easily downloaded, copied or otherwise shared with the players.
GM's secrets and lore about the different sections of the woods, the terrifying witches that preside over each section, and all the creatures, ghosts, and other mortals trapped that can be encountered therein.
Conversion information for characters and other information the players need to explore (and perhaps escape) the Darkest Woods.
Character sheets, GM and player reference sheets, and other components to streamline play.
The Darkest Woods is not a place—not a specific place, that is. Rather, it is the harsh, uncaring soul of the wilderness, and it can be encountered wherever the wilds go untamed. Like the relentless tendrils of an invasive vine, the Darkest Woods pushes its way into our world—your world; any world—in the depths of any patch of wilderness shunned, or undiscovered, by civilization. If there are woods you can get lost in, those woods might lead you into the Darkest Woods.
The Darkest Woods includes enough content for many, many sessions of play. It’s a mega-adventure, of a sort, but not a dungeon to be explored and looted; once the PCs find themselves in the Darkest Woods their goal will be survival and escape. That’s not to say there are no treasures to be found—just that this is first and foremost a true horror experience.
You can play The Darkest Woods as its own campaign, creating characters just to run this massive adventure. But you’ll get the most out of it when you slip it into your current campaign. Why? Because the horrors of the woods will draw upon characters' memories and personal fears. They’ll play with the PCs’ notions of morality, family, friendship, love, and truth. They’ll exploit the party’s history, personalities, and shared bonds. The true horrors in the woods aren’t measured in hit points, but in the threat they extend to everything the PCs hold dear.
In facing and surviving these challenges, your characters will emerge from the woods with greater insight into their world, their companions, and most of all themselves. The Darkest Woods was really built to be added to your existing campaign—and by deepening your PCs, it will make that campaign even better!
The House System easily converts characters from the game rules you’re currently using (it takes about five minutes), and then lets you return to your normal character sheets when your PCs emerge from the woods. The House System is a sort of RPG Rosetta Stone, allowing easy translation from any game system—and even letting you bring characters from different games together.
Your regular, ongoing game will be better after you’ve experienced the Darkest Woods. PCs emerge more deeply developed. Parties emerge more cohesively, with stronger bonds. Alternatively, characters from different games and different systems can chance upon each other and become a group onto themselves in these woods.
The Woods watch you as you wander, lost among the trees. The Woods don't care.
The Woods see you isolated, lonely, and in terrible danger. The Woods don't care.
The Woods are ancient (eternal?) and vast (infinite?). You are small and brief. Hardly worth noting—to the Woods.
Can your characters escape the Darkest Woods before they are consumed by them? To do so, they'll need to discover and master ancient, primal secrets and perhaps even fundamental truths... about themselves.
Mythic witches, horrific monsters, hateful spirits, cannibalistic cultists, and other dangers have always called the Darkest Woods home. But even the cruelty of the woods in winter, of a burning forest filled with charred ghosts, of a region haunted by things churned up in a flood, or of the truly twisted inhabitants of the Backwoods will test the mettle of any who find themself lost within the Woods' dusk-dark, twisted paths.
These are not random encounters, though. The Woods has its secrets, and characters who discover and piece together those secrets will find themselves ever closer to understanding the nature of this dire entity—and how to escape it. Scores of handouts and audio files contain clues the PCs will weave together to reveal these secrets.
And the PCs are not on entirely on their own. Most beings they'll encounter are malevolent and dangerous, and the Woods itself is uncaring at best. But there are also mysterious folk who can be helpful, even friendly. Their aid or reward is given form in tokens the PCs can find or gain if they help or befriend the right beings—tokens they can expend to their benefit, if used wisely. Beware, though, as some inhabitants see them as a mark of an enemy and attack the bearers on sight.
The witches are not stereotypical fairy-tale figures. These primal beings are avatars of the Woods, and each oversees a region within. Each region has its own thematic and spiritual essence, and the witches represent that essence and enforce its tenets with severity and dread power. These witches are not wart-nosed women with black hats and brooms, but unique entities (male and female and otherwise) the players will quickly learn to fear—but will eventually discover are at least part of the secret to finally escaping the Darkest Woods.
The Darkest Road (the additional region of the Woods included in the exclusive The Darkest House Expanded Edition), like other areas of the Woods, is home to its own witch that brings its particular brand of terror to that section.
The Darkest Woods is built on the model of The Darkest House, a highly successful horror delve we released in app format in 2021, followed by the book in 2022. Whereas The Darkest Woods is a mega-adventure you’ll likely play through over the course of many successive sessions, The Darkest House is more like a campaign sub-plot; the PCs may have several encounters with it spread out over the course of your campaign’s other events.
The Darkest House hates you; it is a spiteful entity that insinuates itself in infinite worlds, literally stealing places from them to expand its dark, malignant chambers. If you like what you’ve seen here about The Darkest Woods, and might enjoy a haunted-house-like setting, you’ll probably love The Darkest House. We’re offering several pledge levels that include it, in app format, book format, or both. The Dark Lodge pledge level in particular, offers a fantastic deal on both The Darkest Woods and The Darkest House.
Your digital rewards (PDFs) will be delivered using BackerKit’s Digital Distribution feature. When a digital reward is ready for you, you will receive a message via BackerKit with a link to download your digital reward. We will also deliver digital rewards through our online store and on DriveThruRPG, since many backers prefer to maintain their libraries of PDFs on one of those platforms. (You can use any or all of these platforms to download your PDFs; the files will be identical.)
Your physical rewards and add-ons will be delivered through our online store, the MCG Shop. When a physical reward is ready for you, you will receive a message sent through BackerKit with a link that will take you to the MCG Shop to pay for shipping and redeem your reward for free.
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