The most VITAL Part of Fantasy World Building- Forests

Warning this video has proven to make certain viewers up to 15 percent more likely to touch grass viewer discretion advised forests are one of the most fundamental Staples of Fantasy World building from merckwood in The Hobbit to Pandora in Avatar 2 to all those off-roading Jeep commercials make this the summer you

Never want to come back from I want to delve into the extreme and inspiring Forest that we have here on Earth how to systematically make Forest settings more Dynamic for Dungeons and Dragons and fantasy writing and the common cultural and mythological implications that forest biomes have on human civilizations

So of course forests pop up all over the world map but because they’re all growing in different climates they’re going to grow function and feel very different from each other now if you’ve done some World building before I’m sure you know some of the General stock packages of force that people put on

Their Maps deciduous forests in the temperate regions that have big bushy leaves that turn beautiful colors during the Autumn Taiga forests in the cold far north and on mountains with big pine trees that have little water conserving needles rainforests and the hot lowland tropical areas that have lots of water and monkeys

Savannah’s on the edge of grasslands and deserts and if you’re really in the know maybe the temperate rainforests that sit along the 45 degree latitude line where everything grows huge and mossy and foggy and wet and it’s so so cool if you can’t tell I really love forests on maps

Forests can grow in a majority of places because they’re so diverse and trees can evolve to fill a ton of different ecological niches as long as it’s not a literal desert a dry grassland Stony Mountain tops or ice-capped Tundra then trees have a good chance of springing up

And mass this means that you can kind of put forest anywhere on your map and the more extreme and isolated of a climate that you put them in the funkier and more unique they’ll evolve to be so when putting forests on a map I guess the only specific recommendations I’d give

That a lot of mountain ranges have a lush Forest on one side and deserts on the other due to the rain shadow effect like California’s Central Valley is all a shrub desert but once you move up the Sierra Nevadas it becomes cooler and wetter and you get these big

Sequoia trees additionally along the 45 degree latitude line on the coasts you’ll get strips of these temperate rainforests like I referenced earlier and on the southern tips of the southern continents you don’t end up with massive tiger forests like you do in the northern hemisphere because these areas are more geographically isolated unique

Trees and forests that we’ll look at in just a second have evolved into these cool biomes so yeah you can kind of put forest wherever you want on the map just intersperse them with planes and Meadows swamps valleys all of that stuff at your discretion now in these isolated and extreme

Environments where trees can grow is where I find my best inspiration for World building forests and you know if you really want to be inspired subscribe to my channel and like this video it’ll help me sleep at night and it’s no cost to you now on the mountain slopes of

East Africa you’ll see these Forest patches of giant ground Souls which are literally if you took a little rose plant and told it to become a Tree on tropical saltwater Coast you get these shrubby mangrove trees that can root down into shallow salt water and form their own sheltered ecosystems

These things smell like absolute to walk through but they’re very cool they blur the lines between Martian Forest between land and water the isolated sokotra island in Yemen has these big Baobab trees the southern tip of Chile has these Windswept temperate rainforests Tasmania has giant eucalyptus forests with white and

Rainbow Tree Trunks Auckland Island has its super dense and gnarled trees that Sprout out looking more like fungi than actual trees and Campbell Island nearby every tree in these forests look like a cactus that grew into a bunch of furry leaves and then Chatham Island where the trees stand up straight and then

Scraggle out all hokey pokey-like at the top and lastly let’s look at the giant redwood trees on the Northwest Pacific Coast because I I actually went out there to look at them now the reason these redwoods can get so big is because moisture and water is not as much of a

Problem for them here on the Northwest Pacific Coast is a temperate rainforest biome in the morning and in the evening which we would have been able to get if Ken didn’t need to go to in and out burger this morning And in the evening there’s a lot of fog and Mist that permeates this area from the Pacific Ocean and the fact that it’s so regular and it’s so thick and has a lot of water in it the Redwoods with their little needally leave boys they can absorb a ton of that moisture now

One of the biggest problems for trees is that when they get too big they have a hard time moving moisture and nutrients up from their system well the Redwoods because the fog and mist is all around them in the air and it’s absorbed through the high parts of their leaves

And their needles they don’t have to worry about that nearly as much I know I’ve kind of gushed about how cool all these forests look but seriously I think that if you want to have a unique and fantasy feel to your Force you’ve got to look at this stuff

For inspiration so now if you feel a little inspired now let’s consider two things that you can use to set the vibe for your own world building Forest one what is a big dominant things that are super eye-catching and two what’s the little stuff that’s littered all

Over the place we just looked at a bunch of the big stuff when you go into the Redwoods it’s really hard to not immediately notice the Redwoods but it’s not just the trees themselves like what surrounds these trees are they covered in Spanish moss like the swamps of

Louisiana do they have giant Bunches of berries or mistletoe around them do Vines crisscross them and create a big messy web among all the trees each of these decorations to the big trees can serve a different purpose however you want to do it they could be spider webs

They could be fungi they could even be dead bodies if you’re doing a horror thing this is gonna set a major tone for your forest biome then you gotta think about what would it literally be like to walk through this Forest what is covering the ground I grew up in New

England where the ground is always a mess of thorns and brambles Ferns and decaying wood that makes it pretty hard to walk through unless there’s a path the name of Algonquin tribes that used to live here would purposefully burn all that brush away to open it up for

Animals and traversal it was almost like a park but other places that are wetter and warmer might have a lush forest floor with big ferns broadleaf bushes and frequent streams and puddles all over the place you can play with a lot of things here in my opinion it makes

For more natural DND encounters When the Party’s treading through the brush and they accidentally step into a puddle that’s full of baby ravenous quipper fish or they walk into a badger nest and they step on a baby as opposed to like you know there’s a mama bear and her cub

Plopped down in the middle of the path so hopefully that gets you thinking about the feel of your sexy forest biome but in my opinion even if you are accidentally curb stomping honey badgers forests still have a problem in how they’re presented in fantasy oftentimes it’s like you enter a forest here’s your

Objective in the middle of it and halfway through you have to fight or flee something mean if you do this then the force becomes like any other backdrop until the ranger starts using a tree for cover so I’ve come up with a remedy to make Forest a little bit more

Dynamic while also keeping some realism just think about things laterally and vertically when I say lateral I’m talking about microbiomes wait no uh microclimates if you walk through a forest you’re actually walking through a patchwork of many zones where things have slight environmental differences this can be anything that affects the

Tree and plant growth if there’s water there the elevation the land slope what’s in the soil is it Rocky did it recently have a fire is one plant making the soil more acidic did it get flooded by a river you get the point take take a

Look at this map this is my Coda Lakes World building project I have other videos on it go check them out too where it has a patchwork of many biomes and unique places inside of it now don’t get me wrong this single Forest is my whole world building project and the mini

Biomes I’m talking about here function as the normal scale of biomes for the project so I’m not saying to map out something as detailed as this for every force that you make no just take notice that if you’re walking through a forest you’ll hit a swamp some Rivers Fields

Shrublands Hills gravel pits Cliffs all of that I also like to get fantasy with these microbiomes too so like in the mensed woods here the vines form such a thick knotted web in the Treetops that they grow their own moss and soil on them then you get a whole nother layer

Of ground and plants above you some areas have firestorms from a big gas leak giant buried Crustaceans that get up every few decades you see what I’m getting at don’t treat a forest as just a monolithic thing it’s more interesting if it has a bunch of different areas

Inside of it that you can draw upon and make feel like different mini settings in your world building and secondly forests are an inherently vertical space think about it trees go up and so you can play with that Dimension a lot in real life Vines hanging moss climbable branches and

Fallen trees are all things that can connect to the ground floor of the forest up to its understory and Treetops if you run a DND encounter where a giant evil capybara attacks some players could climb up into the trees using Vines yes the ranger might do that anyways but

Other players won’t be as easily clued in or able to do so without the vines being there or say that there’s a deep stream that’s full of Leaping piranhas and the players need to cross it they can’t just pile stuff up in the river and walk across because a piranha will

Jump up and bite their dick off so maybe there’s a dying tree leaning over the stream and if they cut it down just right it’ll be high enough to bridge without any danger maybe one tree overhead has a bunch of robust seed filled fibers swaying from it and if

They gather them and twist them all together like a rope they’ll be able to swing across hell maybe they can be carried up their by luring a giant bird to carry them or get a nearby geyser to launch them point is by getting them to think about the upward Dimension you’re

Getting them interacting with the environment and letting them be more clever with it which is good for gameplay and making your map feel alive and impactful I wish it were inherently more interesting to world world civilizations in forests but it only leads to a few basic things that you probably already

Know they have access to Wood resources for building crafting and selling they need to spend more time and energy clearing land and if they want to farm there they have to burn the plant materials nutrients back into the soil a woodland civilization usually ends up spreading out and transforming the woods

Into farmland and planes for their own use but some forests are definitely kept around and maintained as their own wood resources these are pretty simple concepts for World building so if you want to get specific with how your forests affect your civilizations again I’d recommend focusing on the specifics

Of the trees and plants and animals and stuff back to the Redwoods the trees naturally break and Splinter into pretty clean and straight planks so the native wyot and yurok tribes would build these big wood houses out of all planks we might be familiar with plant constructions but these look unique

Additionally these tribes did something that many many civilizations do to conserve the the resources around them they respected the trees as sacred if a community agrees that this important kind of tree is sacred then they’ll need to agree on the appropriate time to cut it down and use it otherwise if people

Are logging the tree all over the place you’d be angering the spirit Guardians of the redwood trees and they’d get angry and stop providing an AKA you wouldn’t have any left to use now if your culture believes this way with the big trees being sacred protector Spirits you’re going to have

Some pretty good associations with it and hear people’s stories about the forest aren’t really going to have witches and werewolves and vampires living out there but there’s a lot of different associations that we see with forest in fantasy and mythology there’ll be things like a place of danger testing

The hero in survival this one’s really common you go out there you fight a monster you come back with self-discovery and heroism or there’ll be a place of Exile or being lost and the hero loses a battle and has to Exile themselves to the forest or a place of

Unknown and mystery because you can’t see through a thick forest very far you don’t know what’s going to be out there witches and werewolves and my nephew Justin who cooks meth like a places of natural spirits and natural beauty you can connect with the gods here or a place of timelessness

In ancient beings maybe a forest is someplace we inherently can’t understand because we live and die so quickly compared to them or maybe a forest is a Last Vestige of myth magic and fairy tales it’s Untouched by modern industrial society this is what JRR Tolkien was all about now for an

Interesting example I saw this meme the other day that goes European forests versus American forests foreign And I have an interpretation as to why someone would think this I think it’s because American forests tend to be larger colder and less developed they have more wild animals and the American colonizers haven’t had the thousands of years to ingrain them as a familiar part

Of our culture they represent a lot more darkness harshness and unknown-ness and beyond that in many many mythologies out there there appears the sacred tree Trope these can take on a bunch of different flavors that can fit into your stories primarily a microcosm of the cosmos or an axis Mundy

The center of the world or yigtra silt the metaphorical tree that holds all the Realms together or it could be a ladder to heaven where some shamans climb up a birch tree in order to bring down the spirits into them or the leafing cycle could be about death and Resurrection

With an obvious symbology that attunes to the seasons or maybe there are spirits that dwell among and within the trees like the Greek dryads and those forested nymphs or it could be a tree of life healing the tree’s presence and its fruits make it so that everything around

It is spiritually healed or it could be a person turned into a tree these are pretty frequent because oftentimes we see familiar aspects in trees like this or a sacred tree’s roots could go into the underworld and resurrect dead souls or maybe the inverse of that being

Executed on a sacred tree gives you access to its spirit in a certain way or maybe you have sentient trees or a sentient whole forest or that Forest has Forest Guardians like The Lorax if you take these two together then you get the ants from Lord of the Rings or maybe

This tree is sacred so the wood itself is made of magic and anything you craft from it is going to be magic too or maybe and this one is a particular favorite among World building there’s a giant tree that people have built a city inside of or maybe a bunch of trees

Sprouting up people have built cities around and among hopefully now that these sacred tree tropes are laid out you can mix and match them to create a really good story I personally like to World build for these kinds of mythological stories so let me tell you a short story about the

Mice civilizations from my Kota Lakes World building project In the cold Windswept forests of the Bold lands there immigrated a tribe of mice with a great king named melulov they founded a city-state in the middle of the area where all the native tribes would come and trade their goods and under melulov there was great peace the

City prospered they cultivated lots of Farmland around it and they built many temples to the Gods one of the princesses named anuthiks did her duties as a royal Priestess of the nature and fertility goddess tianti so she went to a sacred site of the boldland’s native tribes a magnificent white tree with

Blue leaves and running veins of blue sap that sat atop one of the Southern Hills in her people’s customary worship of tianti anuthiks and the priestesses cultivated a sacred Garden at the base of the tree but later a sorcerer from the southern tribe who owned this hill

Came to them and he said this is the sacred tree of our land cannot cultivate it for its roots and leaves are of our people and they argued over the land and the source were eventually allowed them to keep the garden that they had already made which covered the northern quarter

Of the tree’s base but in the next days when Anu thinks returned to the sacred tree she found the Sorcerer And His tribe had covered the ground in gravel and salt and all the garden was killed except for a bush with a single little pepper growing on it anuthings ate this

Pepper and it made her feel cold and she received a great vision she saw the tree poisoned and dying and it fell on top of her home and city of watkran which was destroyed and plundered and wrapped in brambles of flaming Thorns so anuthings ran back to the city and told the

Priestesses and her family of her vision but they were all distracted for King melulloth was very sick and he died in the city’s one week of mourning before the prince became the next king the sorcerer attacked with an army from the southern tribe for four days they

Plundered wathran and set it Ablaze on the final day they besieged the temples and anuthiks and three priestesses fled the city together chased by a pack of vicious tribesmen they spread out into the woods and climbed to the Southern Hills Injustice the tribesmen were about to grab and abuse them tianti reached

Down and turned them into the same sacred trees the tribesmen saw this and they fled scared to anger the spirits in the next few weeks melulloth’s son tiavkor was hastily coronated and he led an Army against the southern tribe crushing them in battle and taking their

Land for his own kingdom he assigned the priestesses of tianti to cultivate and maintain gardens around each of the trees and so the Four anuthik’s Hills in the South were taken and properly worshiped by the boldland kingdom this is the story of the conquest and development of the Southern tribe’s Woodlands into the

Sacred Gardens maintained by the priesthood of anwithiks thank you all for watching I hope this helps your world building in the future and gives you some inspiration remember to like And subscribe and have a wonderful day