Hey Veeky Forums what does make a wilderness and unique biotope really shine...

Hey Veeky Forums what does make a wilderness and unique biotope really shine? What in nature does make you want to explore it? what doesn't?

As somebody who grew up in the country side, my best recommendation for exploring and interacting with nature is to stay the heck away from it.

sounds pretty cool, why is that so?

Not him but the area I grew up in had packs of wild dogs which will attack you if you are by yourself. Also fuck pit bulls.

We got a boar problem and recently wolves joined them.
So it isn't really a place you want your kids explore.

Also the idea of exploring untamed nature for funsies is a rather modern one and most forests you see are everything else but untouched nature with the removal of dead wood, overtaking undergrowth and usually creation of paths for people.
A untouched first is a bitch to get through and most animals will either run away or try to kill you.
Exploring the wild used to be the domain is people with too much money and free time for dick measuring competition.
Rightfully so

but there is something appealing about the wilderness, and even if its unrealistic, I'd like to capture that feeling

That depends on what you are trying to do and that can be multiple things at once. Unique bioms can set up unique situations from a combat perspectve (fighting in a swamp would be vastly different than fighting in a frozen hellscape like the poles)

I'm not aiming particularly for combat, more for "feel".
the feeling that you have entered a mysterious region, uncharted, unknown, dangerous and interesting.

There being something unusual and extraordinary about it that piques my curiosity. But mostly, it's mystery that triggers my wanderlust - my desire to getting to know the secrets of the place.
Wilderness for the sake of wilderness doesn't really interest me that much, but add some out of place feature in the middle of it and I'll want to get right around to exploring it.

For example, you could have the most thought-provoking and flashy flora possible in your fantasy woods, and I'd just think "Mhm, looks pretty!" but the moment you throw in a mysterious ruined castle in the middle of it?
Ooh no, now I *need* to go there and see what secrets it hides!

So yes, in Made in Abyss, the most captivating thing about the abyss for me is my desire to know what lies in the bottom. Sure, the place has interesting animals and vegetation, but those wouldn't drive me to explore it.

The best way of doing this is to hype the region up in advance. You should build a reputation for it being mysterious and dangerous before the players ever set foot there.

Everything should have a logical place in the ecology, and you should make an effort to showcase that. A giant carnivorous monster should have prey that is more common by an order of magnitude. That prey should have a presence in the world that the players can witness, rather than just being a backstory. If your forest has wolves, then it should also have lots of deer. The players should see deer before they fight the wolves.

Resource pressure and time pressure can often create interesting wilderness encounters. For example:
>The players are out of water. There is a watering hole nearby, but it is patrolled by dangerous predators. If they decide to look for other water sources, they may start losing health to dehydration.
>The players are in a forest and it is only hours away from dusk, when predators come out. There is a town nearby, but to get there in time, they will have to wade through a field of hallucinogenic nettles. It will take much longer to go around the field, and they will have to navigate in the dark while avoiding ambush.

If the players are hunting a specific creature, give them a lot of opportunities to research that creature. Don't just say "it's very rare and mysterious, so you can't find any info" or "you didn't roll well enough to know that info". The game will be much more interesting if the players get the chance to learn detailed info about the creature. Tell them about what it eats, where it nests, what time of day it hunts/forages, what kind of markings/dropings/scales/fur it leaves. Give your players a chance to prepare, to track, bait, trap, etc.

Hide mysteries in your wilderness, but give the players tons of rumors. A mystery that the players don't know about is a mystery that might as well not exist. If you want something too feel more mysterious, don't withhold information: instead, give them excess info mixed with red herrings.

also an old threat for the more untamed parts of the wilderness is the kind of people you find who go there specifically because its untamed. You would be surprised that the fantasy interpretation of "Bandits fucking everywhere" is not that fantastical. Though oftentimes the bandits were people from the local villages moonlighting to pad their pockets and gaming on no one missing traveling merchants.

Why didn't they get culled?

>the feeling that you have entered a mysterious region, uncharted, unknown, dangerous and interesting.
Don't explain everything. Always have some further region that isn't well understood and has new shit in it. Look at the example of Made in Abyss - the shallower areas are rpetty well understood but every layer has new and dangerous shit in it. It's a recipe for endless wonder.

For a TTRPG, consider drawing a map with terra incognita on it. Here be dragons, that kind of shit. Most players are curious and will naturally begin to fantasize about the unknown. Especially if it's a pre-modern setting, one of the biggest mistakes you can do is to give a full, complete, accurate, and detailed map at the start. Even a well-traveled adventurer might only know landmarks and their relation to one another, anything even slightly off a trade route or road may as well be unknown territory.

In my game, the party's going to wash up in a strange new world after the end of the intro arc, and I intend to only give them shitty MS paint sketches of their immediate surroundings to start. I have made an entire complete map of the entire continent, but I'll only use it as a guide and hand-sketch partial maps of single regions to start. If the party wants a real map, they're gonna have to find one IC or seek out a cartographer, and even then they'll only get maps of the region they're in. Since it's set long before the age of sail, I feel like completely accurate maps would be a very rare thing one would have to go to some kind of Library of Alexandria expy to seek.

One thing I hope they figure out to do is save the various pieces of map they find along their adventures and, towards the end of the game when they've been everywhere, be able to piece them together into a more or less complete map. That would be really cool.

Well I'm running a Hexcrawl, so there's enough points of interest every 6 miles, but I need some kind of inspiration to tie the wilderness together.
The setting is some uncharted island in the new world, where some adventurers salvaged some mad loot, yo. The Isle has an inner sea with an isle inside, in which a boring and save city lies, mining rare metals. The players heard of 4 weird regions, a scary swamp, a trippy mushroom forest, a crystalline mudflat and the sulfur covered volcano. There more. But my problem is ..how do I make these biomes appealing? like how do I evoke that feeling of "hell yes this is magical, here are mysteries and strange folk, magic items, gold, fallen civilisations, maurauding barbarians, monstrous races, deadly apex predators, weird animals"

Learn to climb on threes. I've survived encounters with boars, wild dogs (fucking pansies as soon as you got a stick or a stone), and poisonous snakes. Even bears.
The worst hazard is falling and breaking something.

How else are you going to grind XP?

>tfw city-living eco hippies tried to get wolves to live around here
>they started to wander around people's yards, snatch unguarded livestock & pets and generally being a massive nuisance
>the only response from hippies was "ur will just have to live with it"
>wolves start to get poached by local reindeer herders and within couple years most of them were either killed or realized that it is too dangerous for them around here and fucked off

You make it nothing like real nature is which is actually pretty boring and too hostile to enjoy.

Then you are not looking hard enough.
The moment you realise that there is a species of lesbian lizards out there, you kind of realise how weird nature is.
That and that God does not exist.

Nah, you just think that because you are looking at nature in a sort of tunnel vision mode in which you selectively put the most interesting stuff on the spotlight, try actually finding interesting stuff by yourself and experience how boring it actualy is

Do naturally occurring magic mushrooms in nearby woods count as interesting? Heard that you can experience pretty interesting stuff if you do them.