Through the Wicked Woods - A 5e Traversal Guide Zine

Hi from Ripper Games. Based out of Melbourne Australia, we want to create user friendly gaming content to be dropped into any TTRPG game. 

Through the Wicked Woods is our first project, our first of 3 planned zines to guide your table through overland travel through the woods. As you wander the Wicked Woods, you'll come across eerie premonitions, haunted run-ins, and terrifying skirmishes.

With a focus on building tone and suspense, with little preparation, Through the Wicked Woods is the perfect tool to supplement your group's adventure, and with a pick up and play framework, it's ideal for those sessions when you haven't had time to prep. The encounters have been designed to be used independently, but with suggestions of how to dovetail them together to create a narrative throughline for your adventurers.

This 24 page zine will be your guide to running intriguing, tense, and compelling travel through a woodland setting. Each encounter helps to set the tone that all is not well in the Wicked Woods, creating a foreboding sense of dread in your players' minds, as they become more and more scared of who else may be in the woods with them. 

I believe that travel should be more than just what happens between adventures. It can be used to build out a world, to reveal character motivations, foreshadow future events. This is what Through the Wicked Woods aims to do. It allows you as a DM to turn that forest on the map into something more, into the haunted woods that your players avoid until they are given no choice but to pass through again. It comes with suggestions of how to bring in plot hooks to drive your players forward through your narrative, and what can be used as the tease of a character reveal. 

Split into 3 sections - omens, night watch, and conflict- Through the Wicked Woods give you the tools to set the pace and tone of the journey.

• Omens: Full of disquieting moments and eerie tokens. A crow, beak dripping with blood, that seems to be following your adventurers; a tarnished heirloom that fills the heart of anyone who touches it with unbearable grief; the remnants of an occult ritual gone wrong, or so it would seem. The encounters in this section show your players that it is not only combat that is to be feared in the Wicked Woods
• Night Watch: The moments of rest, where your mind plays tricks on you as exhaustion hits. Seeing faces in the campfire embers; catching glimpses of impossible figures from the corner of your eye; seeing a distant torchlight approach, and then extinguish, revealing that you are not alone. These are chilling reminders that for your adventurers to let their guard down could be their undoing.
• Conflict: This is where your players will encounter the denizens of The Wicked Woods, those who, through malice, disregard, or perhaps fear, would do the adventurers harm. a decrepit old man, searching for the end of his unlife; animals corrupted by dark influences, a lost girl with an unearthly presence.

We're a small team. Very small...it's just me...and my bulldog...But we have aspirations to make something great to enhance your games, and enthrall your players. Committed to working with local talented artists, use environmentally responsible materials, and reject generative AI, Ripper Games wants to make content that you can be proud to support.

As we work through the project we'll finalise our stretch goal targets. More art, more pages, and more encounter are all on the table, along with sneak peaks of the content as we roll through the campaign.

We're excited to get started with our very first project, and hopefully you want to join us as we head Through the Wicked Woods.