I am starting to run book 4 of the Jade Regent AP, and looking ahead to the Forest of Spirits, I am a little unsure of unsure how to convey just how unique and mystical the place is, as well as how to tie together the various encounters that are just listed in thebook one after the other.
the only descriptive text provided in the book is:
The Forest of Spirits is a vast subarctic pine forest separating Minkai from mainland Tian Xia. It is a dense forest with massive trees and virtually no undergrowth, almost continuously shrouded in snow. Beyond the outer fringes, there is a scarcity of human and other civilized life in the forest, though it teems with animals and the spirits that give the wood its name.
A narrow dirt path disappears into the dark edge of the forest ahead. The boughs of the trees hang heavy with fallen snow, and an almost preternatural silence reigns over the area. Ahead, a small stone pillar engraved with strange symbols has fallen across the path, blocking the way forward.
and, after a month of traveling through the forest, there is this:
The trees part to reveal a twilit clearing, the thick leaves blocking most of the sunlight from the sky above. A giant, wooden torii gate, unpainted and unvarnished, stands before the entrance to the clearing.
but in between these texts, the adventurers are supposed to be traveling for a month through the forest - encountering 6 different ghost-like spirits, 3 stone giants, and an insane dire tiger...
I'm just not good at coming up with setting fluff to keep the players engaged. does anyone have any recommendations or ways to describe the landscape in varying ways to set the scene for a spirit to then manifest?
I was thinking of just showing a series of photos, like these:
http://www.lovethesepics.com/2012/10/when-the-woods-are-scary-enchanted-for ests-like-brothers-grimm-broken-fairytales/
I was thinking of just showing a series of photos, like these:...
If your players are anything like me, and chances are that they aren't, they'll go »aaargh, why are you showing us these modern, industrial forests!? I thought we were in deeply uncivilised territory?«. Not all, but several of those pictures are of monoculture, planted forests. Predominantly spruce, but there's pine and birch variants there too. Anyway, that was my ecology training kicking in and giving a rant. To the actually issue!
My first thought was that forest hiking for an entire month is rather tedious and boring. Most days are going be very similar to each-other. But then I noticed the adventure got - what - ten different encounters planned for that time. That's one every third day! Hardly a drag. Though, I suppose several of those spirits and/or giants are encountered in groups.
When describing landscape, I've got two tricks. First, don't forget senses. Hardly revolutionising, you've probably been taught that in school when writing fiction. Holds true in roleplaying too. Sights and sounds are sometimes all we remember. Smell should be no problem working in, and probably not how things feel too. Also, as a subheader to this trick, vary description level. Describe whole swats of forest, the general impression of the landscape, as well as the individual stone around which the party gathers for lunch.
Second, portion out descriptions. This is requires a bit of training. Gamemasters, or at least I, often want to describe a whole scene before moving on to the action. The worst offender is reading flavour text from the adventure. You'll quickly loose the players interest, none can pay attention to a long one or two minute description of a clearing in the forest and what's in it. But if you keep it short, you don't get that rich vivid feel you're after. Unless you portion it out later.
Start with the giving the broad strokes, the necessities needed for the players to act. There's a glade and a forest spirit, looking elusive. Give the players a moment. If they don't act, add an additional detail. The wind rustles both the spirits flowing hair as well as the aspens lining the glade. Every time the PCs give your NPC the word in an conversation, you've got an opportunity to fist describe something before 'talking'. The spirit looks at you with deep, green eyes as it speaks.
These tips holds true pretty much always, doesn’t have to be in the forest.
As for portraying the forest, unfortunately Pathfinder and the Survival skill does an abyssal job. You'd have to turn to Mouse Guard or something if you'd actually wanted help from the game. Nevertheless, there are some things to do.
Portraying tedious situations, times of waiting etc. is always hard in roleplaying. To some degree, you just can't. RPGs are action - not in the sense of explosions but of moving the story steadily forward. Face it, summarize the PCs boredom and move on.
If you don't want too, try and set up »camp fire scenes«. That's a term of mine, don't know if anyone else uses it. The PCs are for a lot of time your only roles, work with them. It takes a whole lot of cooperation from the players, so you'll want to prepare them in advance. But a scene where two or more PCs sit down and have a conversation, reflect on what's been and what's to come or something, can be truly rewarding. And it can frame that sense of non-action, for the first time the characters actually have a lot of time on there hands, with no monsters to fight.
The players probably think that their characters will be walking for 30 days strait. But the won't. They'll make and strike camp, they'll eat. They'll probably need to settle down for extend periods of time, to repair and make supplies, gather food etc. I'm not suggesting you should force a mention of ever one of those instances, but they're better backdrops for camp fire scenes than when the PCs actually are walking.
One last trick is to confuse in-game time with out-game-time. A 30 day hike can be summarized in a single sentence and it'll feel like it took no time at all. But if you actually spent the entire session, or several sessions on it, it'll feel like it took longer in-game too. Yet, again, you don't want to describe every little detail that happens, especially since those details are 'nothing happens'. So you do other stuff, just vaguely or simply not related to the actual hike.
A simple thing to do is to ask you're players to describe what their characters look like, when hiking. Ask what they do each morning, what they're looking out for. Ask what they're thinking. Obviously, you can't spend hours doing that, but a few such questions fills up the time before you move on to the next spirit encounter.
A more complex thing is flashbacks or similar narrative tools. So the forest hike is uneventful. Playing out a flashback or having the players playing secondary characters in a single or a few scenes both moves the spotlight to the action, important in RPGs, and reinforces the idea that the hike took a long time.