Read Through: The Darkest Woods

NOTE: no books or monetary compensation were provided in exchange for this review.

Monte Cook Games released The Darkest Woods adventure and setting in April, 2026. It’s something of a sequel to The Darkest House, an adventure and setting released in 2021. Both are available in print and as an app for the Mac and Windows OSs. 

Background

The Darkest House was designed during the Covid lockdown as an app that could be used to play the adventure online. The adventure was presented in this way including not just rules, maps and character sheets, but additional images and audio to enhance the effect. It’s a dark horror adventure (it ticks a lot of boxes on a lines and veils checklist) with its own game system. The story of the House is simple; The House hates you. Player characters are trapped in this house of many rooms, with 3-5 images for every room: the overhead map, images of what the characters see on entering the room, and a portrait of each adversary. In the app the doors and exits of each room are linked to the next room to make running the game easier.
The Darkest House was so successful as an app that Monte Cook Games released it as a 296 page hardcover a couple of years later.

The Darkest Woods—Intro

The Darkest Woods is a sequel to The Darkest House thematically, but the two are unrelated in their story. You don’t need to play one to successfully play the other. Both are not just adventures and setting, but complete game systems. Monte Cook Games is known for games that use their Cypher Systems, but these books are their own system. Characters are very simple compared to most d20 or d% systems, but the books use a unique conversion system allowing any characters from any TTRPG system to be imported into the Darkest/House system. (Note that in The Darkest House the system was referred to as “the House” system, but with the release of The Darkest Woods, the system is now referred to as “the Darkest” system.) This allows GMs to use The Darkest Woods in a campaign of any system. Characters are converted to the darkest system on entering the woods based on the highest level limit of the system the characters were created in. The darkest system uses a simple d6 resolution mechanic. It’s possible—even encouraged—for players to bring characters from lots of different game systems into the same game, so you could have a party of characters from D&D, Traveller and Pirate Borg all exploring the woods together. 

Unlike The Darkest House, The Darkest Woods doesn’t hate you, it doesn’t care about you at all. This sounds comforting at first, but it really means the woods have no mercy, which the characters find out quickly. The Darkest Woods is an enormous 400 page tome, and because the pages all use a black background, the pages are a thick glossy stock to keep the images bright and the text legible. Each two page spread contains amazingly creepy full color illustrations. The book is nearly 1.75” thick, the size of a large city’s phone book—for those old enough to remember what a phone book is.
Besides the game mechanics and introduction the book has advice on running this game and running horror in general, which are very useful for GMs running any horror game.

The Darkest Woods—Adventure

Of the 400 pages in The Darkest Woods book, nearly 300 pages detail scenes, with most scenes taking up a 2 pages spread. Each of the seven sections of the woods is overseen by a witch, but these are not all witches as they are typically depicted. The book explains at length that these “witches” have little in common with the witches of fairy tales and horror stories and even less in common with humans who practice Wicca. The first section called The Lost is controlled by a witch that takes the form of a pack of wolves called The Isolating Pack. The pack doesn’t look like a real pack of wolves, but an exaggeration of true wolves, since the witch is really the spirit of what humans have historically feared about wolves. This witch is essentially primal and fierce. The term witch here is so different from the common understanding of the word that I’m not sure what purpose using that term serves. It seems like it will mostly cause confusion for little benefit.

The seven sections of the woods are The Lost, The Dismal, The Ravages of Flame, The Keepers, The Flood, Winter’s Mercy, The Backwoods, and another area known as the Road.

The adventure begins in a place called the Abandoned Campsite, but from there the players’ choices drive the story path. The Woods are presented as a maze, and while the players’ goal is to simply escape, the longer they are in the woods the less likely that seems. 

Each scene has an overhead map noting exits, creatures and important features. Each of these features is described in a paragraph or two. The format of these scenes is piecemeal, so that it’s up to the GM to determine when each feature comes into play. It reminds me a bit of the way Mike Shea suggests preparing game sessions in Sly Flourish’s Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. There are then a couple of QR codes (or you can type a URL into a browser) to access illustrations of the area or creatures and some sound effects. There’s an appendix of “relics”—props to use in the game. That includes a custom tarot deck and other handouts. 

There’s one way out of the woods. Adventuring in the woods will seem like an endless maze, and if the GM runs the adventure exactly by the book it could be an exceedingly long adventure. This feeling of hopelessness is part of the threat of The Darkest Woods.

Conclusion

The Darkest Woods is a truly horrific adventure. It’s important to make sure your players are up for this deep and dark game. The book can be used in other ways. It could be used as a setting for any TTRPG system, although the Darkest system is so easy to implement that I’d suggest using that method. If a GM would rather have the adventure wrap up in a session or two, they could choose a selection of scenes and change the way they work with each other. I’ve done this with The Darkest House so I could run it as a one shot, which works particularly well around Halloween. 

Let us know what you think! Do you enjoy very dark horror?

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