Quote Originally Posted by Yora View Post
For my weird forest sandbox I want to split the forest up into several different zones with distinctive types of forest landscape. Any suggestions on how to give different regions a different character, with varying degrees of weirdness?
There are a couple of ways. Varying densities of forest, mixed with different terrains. Heavily forested area full of gullies and canyons, a light forest spread over rolling hills. Atmospherics are another variable to add. Make that heavily forested canyon zone perpetually foggy, with rushing rapids at the bottoms of many of those gullies.

Also, wildlife, both encounter-worthy and not. The fog canyons might be home to hives of giant spiders. The barren uplands might be picked over by a colony of harpies in the cliffs that overlook them. The light forests of the valley floor might make the best grazing land for deer and elk, thus also attracting hunters like centaurs, and fey with affinity for such animals like satyrs. A certain craggy peak might be both a memorable landmark for pathfinding, and the nesting grounds for a family of griffons that hunt in several adjacent territories.

Finally, you'll need to sell the culture surrounding the place. Have a few zones where people live, either as hermits or in small villages, and make sure they have good names and stories about any of these places. Test out the mouth-feel of these names before committing to them. "The Low Breaches." "The Greenfell." "Carter's Bog." "Drymoor." It's even better if some of these names don't have clear relations to what the place is, because if you play it right, the players will subconsciously assume that there's a rich story behind it - maybe even a mystery to draw them in.

This is a neat thread to find, becuase I'm in the midst of running MY fey-tinged sandbox game, "The Wild March". Part of what I'm going for for this is to make it an actual settler's frontier, where the players use downtime to expand the town's resources, cut trails, et cetera, and most of the landmarks they find don't have names yet. They can either pick a name themselves, or hand it off to me so that I have the npc settlers name it. It's fun, because oftentimes it'll get named after the circumstances where they found it. A random encounter with a gold-hided boar led them to name the place "Bristle-Back Hill."

Good luck!