The High Forest
About half the Greenmantle: redwood-scale trunks stretching a thousand feet up, with a floor in permanent shadow and a different ecosystem at every height. The Dryads live within the trees rather than under them, and are extremely difficult to see doing it.
The Land
Vertical. The High Forest is best understood as a stack of countries — root, trunk, branch, canopy — each with its own population, weather and politics, connected by routes only Nymphs are told about. The root level is dim, damp and continuous with the Roots below; the trunk is cliff country where each bark fissure is a valley with its own moss forest; the branch level is the inhabited one, a road network of living wood with nothing at all beneath it; and the canopy stands above the weather in blistering sun, where the leaves close at night and the temperature drops forty degrees.
Cloud forms inside the crowns. There is real rain up there, falling on people two thousand feet above the forest floor, and real lightning, and nothing to hold on to.
The forest runs east to the Hedges and north into the Twilight Forest, which is the same forest under a different sky. On its western flank the ground rises into the Roan.
The Dryads
Masters of camouflage, to the point that the question of how many Dryads there are has never been satisfactorily answered and the Dryads decline to help. They blend into bark and foliage by a magic so habitual that many do it while asleep.
Every Dryad child learns to fall — to catch air on leaf-wings well enough to be injured rather than killed — before learning to write. Nothing in the High Forest kills as many people as the drop. Their military doctrine is squirrel cavalry, for the straightforward reason that unmounted travel in the branch country does not work in numbers.
Encounters
Roll d100. Four countries stacked vertically. Roll the table, then decide which level the party is on — the fall does the rest. CR is scaled to Faerie size — see Challenge by Size.
| d100 | Encounter | CR |
|---|---|---|
| 01–09 | 1d6 Dryads you did not see until they spoke, and would not have otherwise | — |
| 10–16 | 1 squirrel cavalry patrol of 1d4 riders on the branch roads | 9 |
| 17–23 | 2d6 sapwell tappers working a hot spring tap two thousand feet up | — |
| 24–30 | a fall from the branch level, which kills more here than everything else combined | — |
| 31–36 | 2d8 bark-moss villagers in a trunk fissure, who have never been down | — |
| 37–42 | canopy weather: real rain, real lightning, and nothing at all to hold on to | — |
| 43–48 | 1d4 jumping spiders on the bark cliffs, angles already computed | 1 |
| 49–54 | 1d3 ground beetles in the root-level dark | 2 |
| 55–60 | 2d4 wolf spiders on the forest floor, which is in permanent shadow | 3 |
| 61–66 | 1 atlas moth on the night air-carriage run between crowns | 5 |
| 67–71 | 1d2 mantis nymphs on the branch roads | 4 |
| 72–76 | 1d2 tarantulas in a bark fissure moss forest | 7 |
| 77–81 | 1 praying mantis on a branch road, blocking it, and opening politely | 8 |
| 82–86 | 1 huntsman spider running the trunk at speed | 9 |
| 87–90 | 1d2 bats in the canopy after dark | 10 |
| 91–93 | 1 greater centipede in the root galleries | 10 |
| 94–95 | 1 songbird in the mid-canopy, and the branch road has no cover at all | 11 |
| 96–97 | 1d2 jays in the crown, mimicking a voice from your own party | 13 |
| 98 | 1 hedgehog at the root level, whose entire diet is people your size | 13 |
| 99 | 1 woodpecker on the trunk, opening a Dryad hold like a nutshell, methodically | 15 |
| 00 | 1 hawk through the crowns at full speed, touching nothing | 20 |