Swamps and Wetlands | Adventuring Environments | D&D | Web DM 

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somehow "ad-mire" is the one that really got me

"Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was stamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a stamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It stuck onto the stamp. So, I built a second one. That stuck onto the stamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then stuck onto the stamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands."

Even Pruitt couldn't handle his pun proficiency!

Pruitt, those puns have a Jim Davis stamp of approval.

"What are you doing on my stamp?!"

Pruitt's opening puns are gold. Had me laughing till I couldn't take any moor.

I had an idea for a Guild Artisan Ranger who reflavored Swamp to Sewer and was basically a member of Waterdeep's Pest Control.

I can't wait to collect all the stamps in my game!

Imagine Leeches the size of Snakes. Wading through the water, you feel a sharp pain on your leg, you lift up your leg to find a Leech coiled around it from your thigh to your ankle.

"It's a pain in the ass to get around in" *laughs in Fromsoft*

Ah yes. Stamps. My favorite adventuring environment. Got that free 2-day travel time with Arcanazon.

I got turned on to you guys during possibly the most trying time of my life, and when I couldn’t work, I was on my buddy’s couch, and I would binge watch your channel as a form of necessary escapism. Every time I hear Pruitt intro followed by the drums, I feel relief and gratitude wash over me. It’s silly but I don’t think we’re in charge of how our bodies remember or respond to things. Thanks y’all, from Ca.

I was always fascinated with the hound of the baskervilles and Sherlock traveling across the moor, very dark and gothic environment.

Yay!!! My favorite terrain to use in DnD. Such a great selection of biodiversity and amazing monsters! So glad to hear y’all’s thoughts!

Inb4 the STAMPede of stamp jokes

Stamps! My favourite terrain!

I missed the outtakes. Thanks for the video! Now I want to run an encounter with a dire fish named Big Billy Bass

I want to highly recommend the OSR Module Fever Swamp. Full of great monsters and adventuring scenarios.

Don't forget that there are coastal wetlands other than mangrove forests. Make your characters have to navigate a salt marsh and not only do they need to get through grass that can be over their head while trudging through dense mud but they need to contend with a water level that changes with the tide.

Its Wednesday! Another Web DM episode to put a smile on my face. :)

I like stamps:). Love you guys! Im sure this will be a fantastic video!

Ah yes, time for the campaign where the monsters defend their swamp from humans.

Love this video. My whole campaign takes place in a massive swamp/wetland that is populated by the various Dragonborn groups. and it is all on the ruins of an ancient Yuan-ti empire that dots the region itself. It has been fun thinking of travel - there are no beasts of burden in the classical sense instead it has a very venice like feeling with boats of all sizes being the form of travel almost exclusively. It has been a great challenge as a DM to do away with all the classical fantasy tropes in this case..

Great episode guys! Jim I love the idea of making the natural wildlife monstrous!

One of the things that comes to mind for me is treants. Almost every treant I've seen in a game was in your stereotypical temperate forest. But trees grow in a lot of other environments, so you could have a type of treant in swamp. I think one of the most memorable of these is when, in the Skull & Shackles AP, the party encountered a Palm Tree treant (Palm Treant? ;D ). That campaign was years ago but I still recall that moment because it was different than your bog-standard (pun intended) treant.

Your episodes about exploration are always my favorite. They always have tons of solid info on how to bring these places to life.

That thumbnail got me.

People will be so confused with these comments after they fix the title

This is the most actionable goddamn terrain content I have come across since I read Stormwrack in 3.5e. Great job, WebDM crew!!!!!

Aight the "Bayou-self" line made me laugh, not gonna lie

Allll the stamps!!

One of my favorite adventure locations was a little goblin village built on a series of floating islands in a swamp. The islands weren't stable enough to support a medium creature but could hold a goblin pretty reliably. They laid some planks to create little walkways for visiting medium creatures, but the walkways also funneled creatures into kill zones so they could be peppered with arrows if they caused trouble.

Oh f*! I hadn't considered changing water level due to things like tides! Really, I think a good mark of you running wetlands right is players detouring around them and/or being visibly relieved to be out of them and very much appriciate the ideas to help make my wetlands into appropriately difficult locations.

Call me Stamp Thing

Am here for the stamps!

In the world I’m making now there’s a large area in the middle of the game world known as the “Misty Deep” it’s technically both a swamp and marsh depending on where you are in it. The reason this place is so scary and designed to be avoided is that the mist in the swamp is so thick that along with the trees it makes the swamp so dark and humid that creatures from the deep sea often migrate into it, giving a great opportunity to incorporate the most dangerous deep sea creatures into terrestrial gameplay, I think it will be interesting. (Plus I have loads of lore around the place to be found)

This video was released at a perfect time. I was just brainstorming an adventure location and I thought "What if a whole country was a sluice box?"

Me after listening to the Swamp puns intro... I sinker and think "For peat's sake" ;) I couldn't help myself. But a game I'm currently playing in a friends home brew, with a lot of swampish terrain, near a coast. Great timing Web DM. You guys made my day

i love that part in fury road too, especially since it was just a few seconds. i definitely want to more about that community

This is awesome, thanks!

This came out just in time, taking some new players onto a swamp on Monday! Awesome advice as always

Great vid guys!!! SO MANY IDEAS!

Woooah nice to see you guys advertising grim hollow. Big fan of their work.

Thank you guys so much for making this video it’s helped me tremendously with the island “aka Half sized Australia” I’m building

While most think of the warm swamps, a cold fen is one of the nastiest hazards that can be thrown at some players if you add in the cold rules as well

“Bayou self.” That one took work. Well done.

Swamps are probably great for agriculture. Especially given all that peat. Peat burns pretty good too.

As a DM I have run the giant pelican encounter for my table. Was one of the most memorable encounters of our campaign that just ended :)

That prologue :D I cracked as well

A video so good that I had to hit re-peet.

On a note for the giant animal bit, Titanic heirons which hide their bodies in the canopies while you can pass through their legs on a boat in a swamp, anything really shiny gets targeted first with an iron like beak that hurdles from 50ft or so up and lifts the poor shy thing up before trying to get it. And while it does so it attacks with what the party thought were trees.

Im running a campaign right now where a Black dragon was killed by a group of Paladins. Once the fight was over, only 2 Paladins limped out. Now there are Necromancers slinking into the swamp to find the body to make a dracolich and the party is tasked to destroy the dragons rotting corpse. Can you say dragon zombie?!?!? No breath weapon but still highly dangerous. I just was looking for some answers on how to travel in the swamp or some other ideas. You won my sub. Thank you guys!!!

A black dragon in a bog would make things so damn acidic within five miles. Imagine the venting steam. Just the smell and color would alert seasoned monster hunters, though, so it would make sense for the black dragons to adapt and tone it down depending on the season and surroundings. One thing that worked for me was starting a two-shot game with seven players, each playing seven dwarves, and having them create key members of a dwarf colony in a salt marsh. It was just off to the side of a river delta. The players did make key members of that colony’s upper management, and they were instrumental in holding the stone causeway at the gate of the coal mine. They also mined for iron and copper, and traded their many resources for tin and aid from the capital city of Brindeszreen, where Moradin himself was said to rule in person. Anyway turned out “Moradin” was a hill giant soaking up demigod powers from all the worship. But a cleric of Moradin among the players, having seen some of the world and the goodness in others, was contacted by the imprisoned Moradin somewhere else. And the real Moradin acted as that player’s Stand, while the players accidentally unleashed an awakened chunk of Arambar in the city of the Poser!Moradin... but that’s all another story for another time. Good time though.

Time to make a mimic that is a boat beached along a sodden swamp road.

Click the bell icon if you want to see more of their upload spelling mistakes in the future

I'm an avid stamp collector, despite how fetid and monster filled they get

hey. hey pruitt? yeah, that intro should be illegal. That was an egregious correct misuse of puns. Im proud of the monster you created.

Thanks again my dudes! Happy wednesday :p

Bayou self. I see what you did there. Good stuff.

I live in the bayou region. I did some boat tours and I can't possibly imagine how uncanny it would be to march in, or canoe in, at night, with no GPS, and no sun screen, and no bug spray. The Bayou has been grounds for some amazingly innovative tactics from old IRL wars as well. Demolition of vital bridges to cut supply routes, or circumventing enemy forces by naval insertions. it's a daunting thought to consider dredging thru with no other options to go around. Quite a demoralizing terrain to break the player's spirit.

Planning on doing an Egyptian themed campaign soon, so definitely will draw on this for some river adventures. Also I'd be really interested in listening to a desert episode.

I saw some wetlands and swamps on the fringes of the jungles of Panama when I was in the military in the early 90s. The black saltwater swamps near the coasts were the things of nightmares (or a good movement challenge. If you want something to look up for a terrain hazard, google "Black Palm." It has long thorns, and loves growing on muddy slopes (right were DEX checks are most necessary).

Swamps, bogs, and wetlands oh my. The smells of the swamp from sweet to sewage. 110% humidity you can see the tiny drops of water in the air. Predators like to hunt water holes. Hangman's tree is not evil just hungry. That's why my druidic groove is in a swamp. On the north of a ridge it drops to a karst area off a bluff. Down in the swamp the ferns grow over 6 feet tall. You wouldn't know till a creature is 30 feet away. Lots of trees that have fallen over make odd scary shapes at distance. Thimble berries grow in the lowland swamp. My swamp wasn't cut and is still old growth. My druidic groove is based on real area Seney Wildlife refuge. With mammoth and dire bear.

Ha! I literally had dire beavers in my last adventure 3weeks ago. Beavers are written 'Biber' in german. So the leader had to be called Justin.

Talking about the giant crane encounter... It was definitely a terrifying encounter in Pikmin!

As someone who lived in Florida swamps are one of my least favorite places to be both IRL and D&D but one of my favorite to run when DMing

Ironically, I just read a minecraft Nintendo blurb about swamps on the Switch news. Swamps must be trending.

How dare you put Artax and atreyu in the thumbnail. I can't cry anymore today.

Pruitt mentioned how creepy real world swamplands etc can be, but then again transferring this environment to the fantasy realm suddenly alligators are not the scariest things you can run into. You mentioned potentially oozes and mummies - and I also think one of the chromatic dragons actually favors swamplands as is habitat (can't remember if its the black or the green dragon, but I think its one of the two) and so if you have a random encounter in a swamp you might be praying to run into something like an alligator, given the alternatives. I live in GA, in the southeast US and in the southeast of our state we have the Okefenokee Swamp park that you can visit and they have these things called "swamp tromps" or something along those lines, and its going out with a ranger guide walking through the swamp. Ostensibly on a "trail," but you're climbing over roots and depending on the most recent precipitation you can be walking in water up to your shins in places - and again, like Pruitt said, that can be unnerving enough - but just imagining what all from the D&D world could be crawling/stalking around out there means you could really make this type of environment a major challenge for a party of even experienced PCs from a psychological point of view (giving exhaustion out if they characters don't have optimal forms of transportation or they just don't have a choice and just have to slog it). This could even tie in to the Ravenloft-esque horror focused stuff that D&D is releasing soon - seems like a perfect setting for adventures set beyond the mists. Great topic again guys - keep up the good work!

Ugh, literally a week late. Already ran my swamp session. Well, good thing they're still in it so maybe I can add some stuff for their way out of it.

So I guess the next videos will be Plains, Islands, and Mountains now. 😛

pun power, in that intro XD

Had a few sessions in a swampy marshland a few months ago and my players were expecting the usual monster fare but boy were they surprised when the giant crocodile they thought they were going to battle got snatched up by my giant re-skinned Roc, Whooping Crane.

That intro was righteous..

18:40 TIDBITS

This terrain type series actually ties in with a homebrew fix for ranger I've been working on. Basically the ranger gives up hunters mark, favored foe, favored enemy, and natural explorer. In return they get to pick one of six Mana "colors" at levels 1, 6, and 14. The five colors of MtG, with just about every terrain, creature type, and background / class tied to the color of mana you'd find on a magic card version of that creature or land. Plus colorless for constructs, massive cities, elder evils, great old ones, monks, archmages, and astral dreadnoughts. While in terrain tied to their mana colors they get all the ribbon benefits of natural explorer, they get their int mod worth of languages spoken by creatures of each of their mana colors, when traversing the terrains or dealing with creatures tied to their colors they have advantage on dex, wis, and int ability checks, and they deal 1d6 extra damage on one attack every turn against creatures of their mana colors. It alleviates the "you picked wrong" issues of the phb ranger by giving 6 broad catagories to pick from instead of a dozen minor categories you'll only ever get 2 or 3 of. Also, it frees up concentration and bonus actions for rangers by killing hunters mark and making a baseline equivalent.

I LIKE THIS STAMP

The bog hag in Legend, Bog of Eternal Stench in Labyrinth

DM's have an odd obsession with gross locales. I've never once played in a campaign where we didnt go into the sewers or the swamp (or stamp) at least twice.

Funny, but horrifying idea: a goose-hydra. The hissing, the weird serrated tongue, the poop...

I've got a post apocalyptic game planned where the world experienced a magic nuclear winter, and I cant wait to have my players trudge through a frozen, radiation laced, swamp

Fen-tastic video.

In before Stamps get Swamped.

Just in case you have a player like me... Marshes are different from bogs and fens, as the latter are fed by precipitation and groundwater, resulting in a completely different plant assemblage.

Thanks.

I just had a terrible Idea. Put a Trapper under the surface of a swamp, make the party attracted to it's gold and boom. Instant panic.

You should do a jungle vid at some point if you have not already!

I say make one about how "tamed" the land is and how that affects other parts of the setting.

Stamping out a comment for the algorithm.

Were-crocodiles!!!

Loved this video and the forests video!! Any plans for an Ocean/beneath the waves type video? I'm planning on running a nautical/aquatic campaign soon for my dnd group and would love some more ideas! Also is there anything on the web dm patreon that can help me out??

Check out Barrowmaze for a dungeon crawl set in Wetlands

Quicksand. Alligators, snakes. Non-aggressive birds, insects, what else?

We only have saltwater crocs here. Everything else is a gator

One concept that so rarely gets play is Swamp Merfolk. Why shouldn't mermaids and mermen inhabit fresh water? In my homebrew setting, an undead warlord walked across the sea with an entire army of undead, killing everything he encountered. It got so bad, an entire undersea empire collapsed, and loads of refugees scattered to the four tides. A bunch of them swam upstream into the river systems of this one island nation (fantasy Britain). So wherever there's water, you'll find pockets of merfolk hanging out, doing their own thing and mingling with land-dwellers. A bunch of them live in the swamps, marshes, bogs, and fens. Simply because it's a large, wet place to live with loads of food. I imagine even freshwater merfolk consider the swamp merfolk to be a little weird. Whereas the saltwater merfolk back out in the sea consider all freshwater merfolk to be terribly uncultured. The yokels living in _literal_ backwater communities, who wallow in mud and know nothing of the great oceanic empires of old.

14:30 Nice idea but you can't see down into a bog.

It's dangerous to go *bayou self* , take this:

Great video could video on summoning on why it’s hated by dms and other players , player who lives summoning and I feel like it gets no love from dms and the game

Bayou self A+/10