Nope! Both items are standalone products; you don't need one to use the other. We talk a lot about The Darkest House in this campaign because A. If you already have The Darkest House, it's useful to know how this is similar and how it's different; and B. If you don't already have it, and you like what you see here about The Darkest Woods, you'll probably also really like The Darkest House.

The short answer: Very easily. The House System isn't very crunchy; it's designed to represent your character's abilities faithfully, but in a simplified manner that keeps the emphasis on what your character is experiencing rather than the stats. If you can quantify a character ability, you can easily convert it to your House System version of your character. (And if you can't, it's probably even easier. If you can climb walls in your normal game system, well, that ability just lets you climb walls in the house as well.) The Darkest Woods will give you much more detailed and specific instructions, of course, but the upshot is that it's a universal conversion system, not a series of conversion rules for individual game systems. It goes quickly, it's easy, and it works with virtually every RPG system in existence. The Woods plays by its own rules, and you'll have everything you need to play with it.

We mean more developed, more interesting, more deeply bonded, and so on. The conflicts faced within the Darkest Woods frequently derive from the characters' fears, loves, bonds, and ideals. (And, spoiler alert: facing these things is key to escaping the Woods. Just don't tell your players that right away.) As they face these dangerous challenges, the players will have to call upon—or build—details of their characters' psyche, motivations, and backstory. Even the player who just hits things with their axe is going to come away having thought about their character more, and having developed just a smidge of backstory, simply by exploring this house.

The short answer is yes: No matter how you play online, if your platform allows you to share resources such as maps, images, and handouts, you'll be able to use The Darkest Woods. It makes it easy to grab those items and upload them to the platform of your choice. Every platform has different specifics, of course. But The Darkest Woods gives you resources that are pretty universal in their specs, and easy to share, making it compatible with pretty much any system for gaming online.

The Darkest Woods relies on a server, and you need an internet connection to use it. (Of course, you need an internet connection for online gaming in general.) About half of the overall content of The Darkest Woods is server based. Without access to the server, you cannot use The Darkest Woods. This server-based approach has many advantages, such as improving the sharability of images and other elements and limiting the size of the download when you initially purchase it. The most important advantage is that it allows us to maintain, improve, or even expand the woods, with those changes automatically populating your app the next time you open it. Does that mean you lose your product if Monte Cook Games decides, some day, to stop maintaining the server? Possibly. But we have a proven track record as a strong business and a complete commitment to keeping The Darkest Woods going. (And The Darkest House has been faithfully maintained for three and a half years.) Should that ever change, we would ensure that everyone who owns The Darkest Woods receives a version that includes all content, so they won't be in danger of losing full use of their investment.

The Darkest Woods works on all modern versions of MacOS and Windows. Support for other operating systems (such as Chrome OS or Linux) isn't out of the question, but we don't have any immediate plans for it, so it's not something we can promise at this time.