The Rare Mana Woods are Miraculous and Guarded by Sentinels
/The worlds of Dungeons and Dragons are suffused with magic, mystery, and madness. Our adventuring party members all find them selves in the wildest and most curious locations in your adventure setting.
When they're not taking down time in the big cities, the adventures can come across creatures of terrifying might. But whoever said all things were truly bad?
The Mana Wood Grove and its Sentinels
Natural spaces, the oldest and most gnarled forests in the worlds of Dungeons and Dragons are where you may find a Mana Wood, and where a creature like this may dwell.
There are few wooded places this ancient and unknown, and even fewer that the Elves and Gnomes dare not tread. Truly ancient places are where these Sentinels roam. The magical energy suffused into a place like it is palpable to the senses, feeling like static, giving off a strong tingling. Places like this are usually created on leylines – in areas where immense magical energy are at their strongest.
The Sentinel and a druid looking over an elemental bloom - ‘God Willow Seedling’ by Kudos Productions
These spaces between different states of magical energy are their most dangerous. Orders of Rangers and Druids have dedicated generations to looking over these fragile spots in the world. The efforts of mortals is not usually enough sometimes, but the overflowing natural elemental energy is enough to draw the ire and interest for certain entities from across the worlds.
A Mana Wood is a place of endless arcane power, hence the need for its close guardianship. Those able to siphon off the magical energy can use it to create an arcane focus, infusing a magic item, or even filling up spell bomb bottles. What few realise is that it's not an infinite source of magical energy.
A quirk of the Mana Wood is its unique, but harmless effect on the wilderness that lives there. Beasts that would be common in a forest like this will take on some very interesting magical adaptations. Some squirrels may sprout immense, glassy wings to soar from treetop to treetop. Some birds may grow a great sharpness to their beaks, broadening their ability to feast on the magically enhanced prey of the Mana Wood. Fuya Birds, those that sing the thoughts of people caught in their swarms are often found in their fledgling states in a Mana Wood. Elemental Blooms of all varieties grow in great clearings here in the Mana Wood. For your own games, any Beast or Plant may be found here, except it's creature type is now Fey, cannot be Charmed, and it has a resistance to psychic damage.
Mana Wood is in a balance of certain kinds of energy, poised in a specific way. Taking too much of one kind of essence can curse the land, turning it into a murky land that fills the countryside with roaming undead. Too much of another removed can blast the land, taking all the life from the once lush forest, into a dry and blasted land. Or even if there's a build up of such energy without a natural way to extract raw magic can make the forest of the Mana Wood. The trees would twist together up into a horrific shadowed canopy, drawing monsters that thrive in the dark spaces of the world while twisted copies of normal life. Siphoning the safest amount of the right magical energy is the safest way to keep a Mana Wood healthy and safe.
A Sentinel's Duty
A Mana Wood always draws attracts a Grove Sentinel, a rare creature from the realm of the faerie. The fae being is usually very shy and reserved in it's native fae wilds; resembling a fox, only larger and able to speak the languages a Sentinel knows.
When a Mana Wood forms in the material world, or land of faeries and shadows, the fledgling Sentinel makes its way there, using the magic it can sense across the worlds as a catalyst to create door ways and portals.
Once the Sentinel makes it to a Mana Wood, it takes a long rest there. During this rest, it safely siphons off the top layer of magical energy in this wood. While it rests, the magic of the wood protects it. A thirty foot radius sphere extends over the sleeping Sentinel, which prevents any creature from entering or it being the target of spells or abilities. This protective barrier can look very different dependent on the attitude and personality of the Sentinel.
Once this rest period is over, the Sentinel has grown to many times its original size. The magical energy that permeates the entire enchanted forest fills the entire creature, and grants the Sentinel a deep connection to it. The Sentinel will spend the rest of its century long life at the Mana Wood.
A sentinel on their endless watch - Vulpine goliath by Adam Paquette
During its life, the guardian regularly patrols the perimeter of the Mana Wood to watch and deter interlopers who would extract magical essence from the Wood. At the same time, a Sentinel must pay close attention to the Gaps, each place in the forest where the magical energy is at its strongest, and seeping out into the world. Each Mana Wood's build up of energy is different, so each requires careful attention. A Gap that bleeds Evocation energy may cause spontaneous bursts of fire and lightning that must be carefully dispersed. A Necromantic Gap may bleed dark energy animated the bodies of lost wanderers and magical beasts that have long since passed, causing their hunger for the living endless as the wood itself.
The rarest form of Gap is a Divination gap. The air swirls with a thick mist of flickering colours. It's relatively harmless compared to the Abjuration Gaps that lock travelers behind a shield or a Conjuration Gap that shunts them to different places in the Wood. Breathing in too much of these magical fumes gives a person a near perfect vision of the future. This can range from a strange woman you've never met finding a misplaced sock or the fate of a nation in the middle of a bitter war, losing the struggle without a dark secret. The only way to accurately disperse this fog, something a guarding Sentinel can do, is to ensure the fulfilment of the prophecies the mists bring. This jaunt is one of the only reasons a Sentinel may leave their wood. They do so out of their duty, confident that if they were away too long, another Sentinel will take up the mantle of an unwatched Mana Wood and defend it well. A wandering Sentinel is extremely rare, thus making the prophecies they speak of the most grave or banal importance.
A Sentinel's Methods
Mana Wood Sentinel Stats generated with homebrewery
The Sentinel resembles an immense fox. Each Sentinel is as unique as their Mana Wood. Some can have fur that's deep red or bright orange. Some can have the a single tail or multiple. A common feature some have is a wreath, crown, or set of antlers that have a strong magical glow, where some of the energy they harvest from the Mana Wood collects.
Their strength and mastery of magic makes them a truly formidable in their Mana Wood. The crushing paws and scraping claws, while their jaws can bite through steel. They channel magical effects to truly devastating effects based on their own will power and imagination.
There are few tactics that a Sentinel will not employ to defend their homes. Their mastery of magic will make some into vicious tricksters. Some stand stalwart and motionless, using their immense size and strength to bring the earth down or immense pain through their bites and scratches.
Despite the ferocity with which they fight, and despite their own willingness to fight to the death to defend their Mana Wood, they themselves will never kill an interloper. Against an opponent that would drop to zero hit points. They will instead choose to let them fall unconscious from their wounds, but their mastery and understanding of the forest will shelter the beings, channelling healing magic into them so that they're incapacitated but not in any mortal danger.
For the few creatures that defeat a Sentinel in their Mana Wood, they will retreat back to the heart of the wood to use the same healing magic that would heal the intruders, but to heal itself. It will keep the area around the heart, the biggest gap in the Mana Wood defended with the same unbreakable shield that it uses as it rests. It will speak kindly, and entreat the interlopers from a safe distance, doing what it can to send them off or appease them. An adventuring party may receive a quest to investigate somewhere in the Mana Wood or bring some kind of arcane implement to help safely siphon excess magical power.
Now we want to hear from you. Where would a Mana Wood appear in the settings you Game Master? Are the Sentinels that watch it kindly and lilting, or fierce and territorial? Let us know in our discord server or in the comments below.
Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com, they write about card gaming and PC gaming to a corner of the internet he carved out themselves. On Youtube, they can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes, or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere. Find where they dwell by climbing their Linktree.
