Image by Bessi from Pixabay

Whew! Finished at last!! This is a long one, folks – more than 16 thousand words, or about four normal Campaign Mastery articles. Heck, that’s approaching game supplement levels… Needless to say, I had no idea it would be anything like that long when I started. I Hope it’s worth the wait!

Awakened Trees

Most of the time, when you hit “Publish” on a post, you stop thinking about it, and start thinking about the next one. Sometimes, though, ideas linger and connect with other thoughts and inspire what is, either directly or indirectly, a sequel to the original article.

This article is an indirect sequel to Creating a Campaign Physics, or more specifically, to the example used at the conclusion of that discussion, but you don’t have to have read that article first to get the good juices out of this one.

You see, I kept thinking about the “Awakening” of the trees, and realized that these would not be available for lumber and for all the other uses to which we put wood, and how these would impact the cultural, social, agricultural, and economic landscape. And the more I thought about it, the more significant those impacts became.

Including these thoughts in the original article wasn’t an option – it had already been out there for several days, and it didn’t take much contemplation to realize that this discussion would quickly consume the article. Further, it was important enough to merit an article in its own right.

So, here we are.

Groves, Stands & Pockets

It’s unreasonable to think that Elves would have gone around waking up every tree. It seems more likely that they would have awoken those with interesting stories to tell – the isolated birch in a pine forest, the oak overlooking a broad valley, the kind of elm that they had never seen before, and so on.

As land was cleared for other uses, or for the timber to be consumed – presumably a predominantly human activity – they would quickly have learned not to disturb these isolated examples of Awakened Trees. First, because the trees could defend themselves; second, because monsters could enter into symbiotic relations with these trees, providing mutual defense in return for shelter; third, because the Elves would have been angered; fourth, because the Druids would have been angered; and fifth, because the common folk, being closer to nature, would have both resisted any such action, and been angered.

It’s an unwritten rule of all monarchies: Thou shalt not mess with the consent of the governed. Doing so sparks rebellions and revolutions. You can get away with murder the rest of the time if you obey this one simple rule; as soon as you set foot down this path, you begin to slide into dictatorship and oppression, forcing your rule and your rules on the populace. Banditry and sedition are inevitable consequences, forcing still more acts of oppression, a slippery slope that knows only one end: a change of ruler, if not of entire governmental structure.

Laws in a medieval time-frame are intended to protect the powerful and their privileges, first and foremost, and this sort of thing is exactly what there would be laws about.

A more enlightened government might have overt different motivations and arguments, but would be just as likely to promulgate laws protecting such trees.

Either way, you would end up with such trees, and a small space of land around them, being inviolate and protected. This would enable other trees to spring up around the protected tree (if there weren’t any there already), and the inevitable result is a number of small groves or pockets of trees dotting the landscape.

A Druidic Connection

The resulting increase in suitable habitations dovetails nicely with the game world developed in the previous article, which made a big deal about the greater presence and influence of Druids.

I don’t know about anyone else but to me, the connection between Druids and their Groves is an iconic part of the heritage of D&D. I even wrote most of a game supplement The Druid’s Grove on the subject (50,000 words and counting).

For the curious, where it ran aground was when I got into the original spells – I had the ideas but found actually creating the spells to be quite tedious.

And then the campaign, and the Druid within it, went away, and with it, my enthusiasm for the project.

But I’ve kept it on ice – I intended to broaden it and recycle it for the second sequel to Assassin’s Amulet, and even used parts of it as a template for the still-unfinished second part, dealing with Paladins – which is why it’s never been released, even as an unfinished work. One of these days, I’ll come across someone who LIKES creating spells and has a similar philosophy toward them..

In the meantime, I’ll drop one hint: it’s built around Fibonacci Sequences, inspired by the fact that they exist all over the place in biological / natural settings “such as branching in trees, arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruitlets of a pineapple, the flowering of artichoke, an uncurling fern and the arrangement of a pine cone, and the family tree of honeybees” (to quote the Wikipedia article linked to, above. I could also add blades of grass, wheat stalks, growth patterns of tree clumps, and seeds on a sunflower… so using it for patterns within a Druid’s Grove seemed like a natural.

So it’s obvious that there would be some impact on the use of wood in such a world. of course, any number of other factors could cause an equivalent impact without this particular game world concept at all, so this is where I leave that past article behind and begin looking at the more general form of the questions raised.

I think the place to start looking at the consequences is by contemplating wood – it’s types, finishes, all the things that we used to use it for (many of which we still use it for!), historical record, etc. Lots of this material will be familiar to most readers, so I won’t belabor the point (besides, there are too many items to get through to go into too much detail!)

Once we’re all on the same page regarding the nature and usage of wood, we’ll have the context necessary to examine the history of wood usage using Britain as a base model. And the combination in turn will let us assess a number of different models for the impact of some sort of restriction on the availability of timber and timber products.

And then, I have a twist in store for everyone. So fasten your seat belts, don your clogs, and let’s carve our initials in the tree of wood!

Image by Peter H from Pixabay

Properties Of Wood

Wood is a structural tissue found in the stems and roots of trees and other “woody” plants that is both porous and fibrous.

It’s a natural composite of cellulose fibers that are strong in tension and embedded in a structure of lignin (a class of organic polymers) that resists compression.

Those facts give woods their structural properties, and the term “wood” is generally applied to both timber and to other plant materials with analogous properties, like bamboo (which is actually a grass).

Tree Rings

To a lot of people, one of the defining characteristics of wood is the grain, which is the result of slicing through the growth rings of a tree. These rings consist of a light portion and a dark portion, and arise because new growth occurs between the existing tree and its bark. Climatic and environmental circumstances are reflected in the thickness of each band. In most (but not all) species of tree, rings become more closely spaced around the outside of an old tree than at its heart, indicating that growth doesn’t increase growth rate sufficiently to offset the increased radius of the trunk.

In regions of marked seasonal disparity, growth occurs in a discrete seasonal pattern, resulting in more pronounced growth rings; in environments where this seasonality are less prominent, such as Singapore, growth rings are indistinct or completely absent.

The light part of a tree ring is known as earlywood or springwood. The outer, darker, portion is known as latewood or summerwood.



This image (and the enlargement provided below it) displays many of the properties of wood that are discussed. Image by Marisa04 from Pixabay

Knots

As trees grow, lower side branches and buds often die, and their bases become overgrown and enclosed by the trunk, creating a knot in the wood. the dead branch may not be attached to the tree except at it’s base, and knots can sometimes drop out when the wood is sawed into boards. Knots weaken the timber and increase the tendency for splitting along the grain.

Heartwood & Sapwood

Genetic programming naturally subjects inner layers of a tree-trunk to chemical processes that make it darker, stronger, and more resistant to decay than the outer rings. This is called “heartwood” because it is found at the ‘heart’ of the tree. There has been considerable debate over whether or not the wood actually dies in the process, because while the material can still react chemically (to decay organisms, for example), it can only do so once. Perhaps the most accurate description is to say that it is suspended at the moment of death; it can be awoken from this suspension at need, but will inevitably die for good afterwards.

The fact that trees can exist with the heartwood completely decayed away shows that it is not essential to the biological processes of the tree, though it confers strength, resilience, and the ability to resist winds to the tree while present.

In some species, heartwood is obvious, such as Yew; in others, like pine, it may not be distinct at all.

From Wikipedia: “It is remarkable that the inner heartwood of old trees remains as sound as it usually does, since in many cases it is hundreds, and in a few instances thousands, of years old. Every broken limb or root, or deep wound from fire, insects, or falling timber, may afford an entrance for decay, which, once started, may penetrate to all parts of the trunk. The larvae of many insects bore into the trees and their tunnels remain indefinitely as sources of weakness.”

The living part of a growing tree is the ring around the heartwood, also known as the sapwood (because this is where the sap of the tree is found). Sapwood has two main biological functions: it conveys water and dissolved nutrients to the leaves when the tree is growing, and conveys reserves stored in the leaves back to the cells of the tree when it is not.

Wikipedia: “The more leaves a tree bears and the more vigorous its growth, the larger the volume of sapwood required. Hence trees making rapid growth in the open have thicker sapwood for their size than trees of the same species growing in dense forests. Sometimes trees (of species that do form heartwood) grown in the open may become of considerable size, 30 cm (12 in) or more in diameter, before any heartwood begins to form, for example, in second-growth hickory, or open-grown pines.”

Hardwood & Softwood

It’s very common to classify wood as either hardwood or softwood. As a general rule, the wood from conifers like Pine is called a softwood, while the wood from dicotyledons (usually broad leaved trees like oak) is called a hardwood.

These terns are often misleading to the layman, as hardwoods are not necessarily hard, and softwoods are not necessarily soft. Balsa, for example, is a hardwood but is actually softer than any commercial softwood, while Yew – a softwood – is actually harder than most hardwoods. Mahogany is a medium-dense hardwood that is often preferred for strong furniture. One of the densest known woods is Black Ironwood, which is so dense that it sinks in water; it is hard to work and is especially abrasion-resistant, making it suitable for carving and decorative items.

The actual differences between the two relate to subtle details about the structure and growth of the tree. In Coniferous or ‘softwood’ species the wood cells are more uniform in structure and principally of one kind, tracheids. The structure of hardwoods is more complex, with dedicated vessels or pores to conduct water; in some cases, these are visible to the naked eye, while in others, they are too small to be seen without some kind of magnification. Examples include some varieties of Oak and Ash trees.

In some hardwood species, known as ring-porous, the larger pores are concentrated in the portions of a tree ring that are formed in spring, and the cells of summerwood can be markedly different in size (smaller) and structure, and contain a great deal more wood fibers, giving the tree strength despite the induced weakness of the pores. Well-known ring-porous species are Oak, Ash, and Chestnut (visible pores) and Buckeye, Poplar, and Willow (invisible pores). Others are Black Locust, Catalpa, Elm, Hickory, and Mulberry.

Hardwood species that do not exhibit this behavior are known as diffuse-porous species. Pores are more evenly distributed throughout the growth ring. Alder, Basswood, Birch, some varieties of Buckeye, Maple, Willow, Aspen, Cottonwood, and Poplar.

And there are some species, like Walnut and Cherry, that straddle the two groups, and form an intermediate category of subspecies..

Latewood in Softwoods

The combination of properties means that the more latewood a species possesses, the stronger the tree species and the harder the timber that results. This fact is used to grade pine, for example, for stiffness and strength, and hence for suitability as a structural building material. The number of rings is not as important as the relative proportion of earlywood and latewood.

The grades of pine are generally grouped into two categories, ‘Heavy’ (stronger) and ‘Light’ (weaker). White Pine is an example of a ‘Light’ Pine; rings are indistinct and there is very little difference between earlywood and latewood. As a result, the wood is very uniform and easy to work with, but not as strong as heavy pine.

Balsa

Balsa is a large tree that can grow up to 30 m tall. Balsa wood is a very lightweight material, even though the Balsa is actually a hardwood. Ecuador supplies 95% or more of commercial balsa, but it is native from southern Mexico to southern Brazil, and can now be found in many other countries (Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Thailand, Solomon Islands).

It is a pioneer plant, which establishes itself in clearings in forests, either man-made or where trees have fallen, or in abandoned agricultural fields. It grows extremely rapidly, up to 27 m in 10–15 years. The speed of growth accounts for the lightness of the wood, which has a lower density than cork. Trees generally do not live beyond 30 to 40 years.

Balsa wood is the softest natural wood ever measured, a consequence of the rapid growth rate. Surprisingly, the structure of the wood makes it not much lighter than water and barely able to float.

For commercial use, the wood has to be dried in a kiln for about two weeks, which results in a timber with a light weight and a high strength-to-weight ratio. While the natural wood rots quickly, the dried wood is fairly resistant to decay. These properties have made it popular for bridge design tests using models, model buildings, and model aircraft, but the wood is strong enough that it was used for the wings of the real de Havilland Mosquito in World War II.

It is also popular as a core material in composites; the blades of many turbines and propeller aircraft are partially balsa. It is also used for boat decks, for the core of table-tennis bats, and for surfboards (often laminated with fiberglass).



Magnificent bamboo! Image by mdrosenkrans from Pixabay

Bamboo & Palm Trees

Plants that produce structural materials that resemble woods are often also called “Wood”, creating the category of “Monocot Wood”.

Bamboo is technically a member of the grass family, and include some of the fastest-growing plants in the world. Some species can grow 910mm (36 inches) in a day – an inch every 40 minutes.

Giant Bamboos are the largest plants within the grass family.

Bamboo’s strength-to-weight is similar to that of timber, and comparable to the stronger woods, at that. This has made it a popular building material throughout southeast Asia.

It is also used for everything from fuel to writing implements to textiles to paper. Bamboo has been used for staves, swords, bows, and primitive firearms. But this category doesn’t end there.

Palm Trees are one of the most cultivated plants on earth. Other members of the same botanical family are climbers, shrubs, and stemless plants – truly a diverse collection of structures! All told, there are about 2600 species known.

Human use of palms dates back to the Middle Eastern cultures of 5000 year ago and Mesopotamia, where date wood, pits for the storage of the fruit, and other remains of the Date Palm have been found by archaeologists. They are mentioned more than 30 times in the Bible and more than 22 times in the Qoran, a measure of their cultural significance.

Products from palm trees include coconut, oils, fruit, nuts, wax, rattan, and of course, palm wood, also known as coconut timber or a number of variations on that term. Coconut trees stop delivering fruit at roughly 70 years of age and then have to be cut down to make room for new trees in a coconut plantation. Until recently, the timber was a waste product of this necessary practice.

Since the mid-1980s, people have begun to explore this byproduct’s commercial potential, leading to a range of different products including flooring, posts, and furniture. In these applications, the product has been seem to be equal, if not better than, conventional hardwoods – good news given that a number of hardwood species are now at or approaching endangered species status.

The wood is similar in appearance to Mahogany, but lacks that timber’s iridescence. Color tones and hues range from golden to near ebony with dark brown flecks. These correlate with the strength and density of the timber: the palest colors are the lightest, the darkest the hardest. They also directly correlate with the density of the timber, which provides a ready objective classification: 200-400 kg per cubic meter is soft/medium (low-density timber); 400-600 kg per cubic meter is medium/hard; and 600-900kg per cubic meter is hard (high density timber).

Petrified Wood

Petrified wood is a specific type of fossilized remains of vegetation which results when trees or tree-like plants have most or all of their organic structures replaced with mineral precipitates, producing a three-dimensional representation of the original organic material.

To become petrified, the wood must be buried in water-saturated sediment or volcanic ash. The water reduces the available oxygen which inhibits decomposition by bacteria and fungi. The hollow spaces within the cells are filled first, and as the cell walls slowly degrade, they are replaced by further minerals being deposited in the resulting hollow space surrounding the initial deposits.

Decay rates need to be balanced with the rate of mineral templating for cellular detail to be preserved properly.

Petrified wood was discovered during the Great Depression when people flocked to mountains or deserts hoping to discover any sort of rock, gem, or stone that could be used for jewelry as a source of income. Petrified trees in large number have since been found in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, South America, and of course, North America.

Cork

Cork is actually produced from the bark of a Cork Tree, principally composed of suberin, which is a hydrophobic substance – making cork impermeable, buoyant, elastic, and fire retardant. These properties have led to its use in a wide variety of products, from shoes to musical instruments. It has also been used as a substitute for leather in handbags and wallets, and as bricks for home construction, amongst other applications.



Harevsting Latex from a Rubber Tree. Image by Abhilash Jacob from Pixabay

Rubber

A lot of people forget that rubber originally came from the treated sap of a tree. These days, artificial rubber is made from petrochemicals, but natural rubber is still in use too. Besides the obvious automotive applications, it is used in glues, cements, adhesive, insulation, and friction tapes, insulating blankets, footwear, hoses, machinery mountings, rain-wear, diving equipment, gloves (medical, household, and industrial), waterproof matting and flooring, rubber bands, elastic, and erasers – just to name a few.

Yes, people got by without rubber (at least until the auto was invented) – there are other glues, for example – but that’s nevertheless an impressive list. If the material were available in medieval times, I can well imaging it being used to cushion the metal panels in plate mail, for example.

Leaves

Leaves have been used for all sorts of purposes, mostly relating to food and pharmacology, for millennia. This includes some tree-leaves, but it’s very difficult trying to restrict research to just that variety of leaf and to exclude herbs and the like.

Palm leaves have been used as plates and bowls, as have banana leaves. Food can also be cooked in them. The usage of maple leaves is fairly obvious! Many tree oils derive from leaves, which are used for all sorts of purposes – from polishing furniture to being the basis of many perfumes (Sandalwood oil). Eucalyptus oil, amongst many remedial uses, is sometimes used to dye leather (a dark Tan coloration). And some leaves have ceremonial applications – Mango Tree leaves are hung at weddings in Indian culture, for example. And of course, there are fig-leaves – I think I need say no more about that! Which reminds me – I have seen clothing in which the cloth was made from pulped mulberry leaves offered for sale at least once – and have seen disposable coffee cups made from mulberry leaf pulp, too….

Fruit, Berries, & Nuts

There are around 2000 types of fruit, of which the Western world uses only about 10%. There are about 400 species of berry, and about 17 species of edible nut. The uses in cuisine are obvious.

But, on top of that, there are uses in everything from face masks to skin care to hair, fabric, and leather dyes. Leftover peels have another long list of usages, mostly revolving around scents and perfumes, but also including cleaning and polishing. Some can reportedly be used to remove rust from iron surfaces.

Many of these usages are traditional, but most are new, resulting from the movement toward recycling and all-of-plant usage.

On top of that, there’s been a lot of botanical re-examination underway over the last couple of decades. If something is inedible to humans, for example, there’s a good chance that it will be inedible to other mammals and perhaps beyond – so boiling such plants to extract and concentrate their essence can produce a liquid repellent for the protection of plants and orchards! And, being organic, it may be less environmentally-damaging than alternatives. Again, some such uses are traditional (and may have even been discarded), others are new ideas. Not all of them will ‘stick’ – but some will.

Image by siala from Pixabay

Wood Finishes

Having glanced over the long list of plant components and discovered that all of them are used for things (at least these days), let’s take a moment to consider how the appearance of wood can traditionally be enhanced or manipulated.

Raw

Raw timber is considered rustic these days, but every process that you can remove from the manufacturing process makes a product more affordable by the lower social echelons. Such timber is more likely to break, rot, or decay, but some varieties of wood naturally resist such problems.

And, in an emergency, raw furniture can usually be used for firewood; other finishes not only impact on the flammability but increase the likelihood of unwanted / undesirable byproducts.

Raw-timber products were disposable before the concept of disposable products were invented.

It should be noted that not all raw-timber applications have gone away, though many have been adapted to technology that wasn’t available in a pre-industrial era – sometimes, because the product itself hadn’t been thought of, yet. For example, I have a number of bookshelves made of chipboard. This transforms the shavings and sawdust left over from the construction of wood panels and boards into something useful. Because its’ recycling what would otherwise be waste product, these tend to be relatively cheap. Therein lies a trap however: they can become so profitable that useful timber is rendered down to feed the particle board industry, and demand always drives prices up – and the combination generally means that demand spikes periodically and then falls.

Some such boards have a veneer attached – it could be vinyl or some other compound – to look more up-market. IKEA have made a fortune (and become a household name) doing this and selling ready-to-assemble furniture.

Painting

In decorative applications, wood with knots and wood-grain may be desirable – this is especially true in more modern times. But there was a time when it was considered undesirable. There are two techniques for hiding unwanted marks on the timber, one expensive and one cheap: staining, or lacquering extremely dark colors, or painting.

When wood is painted, such as for skirting boards, fascia, door-frames, and furniture, resins within the timber may continue to ‘bleed’ to the surface of a knot for months or even years after manufacture, producing a yellowish or brownish stain. A knot primer or solution, correctly applied in advance of painting, may alleviate the problem but it is difficult to eliminate completely, especially when using mass-produced timber stock.

For this reason, timber without knots is often preferred for such applications, and may even be set aside for this purpose by a timber yard – with a premium added to the price.

Staining

Wood Finishing – which is the generic term for treating timber to achieve a desirable finish to the surface – can be up to 30% or more of the manufacturing cost. Aside from aesthetic motivations, this provides resistance to moisture and decay, can make wood easier to clean, keep it sanitized, and can modify other wood properties, such as the hardness of flooring and the sound of musical instruments.

Defects in the wood are removed by various means including sanding and removing of gauges and other defects. Marks and stains may be bleached out. Timber may be dyed or colored or stained, especially to reduce the variation between sapwood and heartwood, and can be used to give bland-looking woods like Poplar the appearance of more prized woods such as Ebony, Mahogany, or Walnut. Color choices are not restricted to those found naturally – blue, green, black, and purple have all been used.

Chemical staining is difficult to control, even in modern times, because some parts absorb more stain than others, which can lead to a blotchy or streaked appearance. For this reason, wood staining has gone out of fashion to some extent, though it persists in high-end hand-stained form.

Oils

There are a number of oils that are used to polish timber surfaces. Amongst the most popular are Boiled Linseed Oil, Tung Oil, and Hardwax oil. Except for the latter, these processes can be fairly expensive because the curing time can be lengthy. Attempts to speed the process with metal-based drying compounds failed because the residues were poisonous, while the natural drying process produced a relatively safe surface.

Linseed Oil gives wood a warm yellow ‘glow’ that emphasizes natural grains, and darkens with age.

Note that many products labeled “Tung Oil” are actually oil-varnish blends. Pure Tung Oil produces a more neutral ‘warm glow’, accentuates the grain, is lighter colored than linseed oil, and has some water resistance. Many coats are usually necessary, the first diluted or thinned to speed the overall process.

Hardwax Oil can produce finishes that range from Matt to satin, with the latter more frequently preferred over the former. It gives moderate protection to the finish and water resistance, but it may require periodic reapplication.

Oils used in this way can be susceptible to becoming rancid through oxidation, while rags, cloths, and paper saturated with such oils may spontaneously combust after a few hours from the heat released as they dry by oxidation.

Wax

Waxing a wood deposits a layer of relatively soft, translucent, material onto the surface. This is easy and relatively cheap as a finishing technique, but wax comes with a number of drawbacks – it has to be reapplied frequently, and to achieve a desirable finish it needs to be buffed or polished even more frequently.

One of my old bosses bought himself a beeswax desk. It looked good, but the wax had to be reapplied every sic months to a year, and had to be polished by hand – a labor-intensive process – every week, a task he expected one or more of his staff to perform.

Without such buffing and polishing – which is admittedly much easier these days using appropriate drill attachments – the finish is a dull and even sheen. The difference that such treatment is remarkable.

Lacquering

There are a number of lacquering agents (including shellac), the oldest of which is probably varnish. These all coat the surface of the wood in a substance that dries or cools hard.

Other lacquers include nitrocellulose, conversion varnish and Acid-Cat Lacquer, Alkyd Varnish, Polyurethane oil-based varnish, Polyurethane water-based varnish, two-part Polyurethane, Oil-varnish blends such as Danish Oil and Teak Oil, and Epoxy resin.

With such a wide variety, the difficulty of application is variable from the very easy to the very difficult and only performed in professional workshops. Not all of these methods were available in Medieval times. Some of them produce a ready-to-use surface in less than an hour, and some of them demand sanding in between coats.

Lacquering was developed in Asia and was carried into the Middle East and then Europe, originally using the sap of a tree. The process was first developed to a high art in China during the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BC), but prehistoric lacquered products (known as lacquerware) have been unearthed in China dating back to the neolithic period. The earliest such object unearthed thus far was found at a Hermadu Culture (5000-4500BC) site in China.

The word ‘Varnish” comes from the medieval Latin word Vernix, meaning odorous resin (more vernacularly, ‘smelly resin’), and Vernix itself derives from Middle Greek, a word which means amber or amber-colored glass. Early varnishes were developed by mixing resin (eg pine sap) with a solvent and then applying it to a surface. It was well known in ancient Egypt.

Many oil painters apply a clear varnish to their paintings. Over time, this varnish yellows and begins to obscure the painting, but it can be removed and a new coating applied, and this preserves much of the original color beneath (though some paint compounds also change color with age). Nevertheless, this is the best known method of preserving old paintings.

Carved

Lacquering and Varnishing techniques mean that the surface of the object can be built up and sanded flat, meaning that it didn’t have to start that way. Furniture makers were quick to realize the possibilities, carving reliefs and decorations into wooden surfaces before preserving them with a finish built up in many layers.

Inlaying

Further artistic touches were also quickly realized – embedding metallic foils and glittering dust in layers of lacquer or varnish resin, for example. Substantial shapes of metal could be cast and glued into recesses within the wood panel designed for the purpose and the whole then coated in layers of finish until the metal lay just below the surface, providing a contrast with the wooden base.

The more expensive a piece of furniture, the more artistry will usually have been employed in its production, and vice-versa. It is also likely that the rarest and most expensive materials would not be available to those without sufficient skill to use them wisely.

You can find more details of the different finishes, including photographic reference for what they look like, at this Wikipedia page.

The Functions Of Wood

The preceding sections hint at the many and varied ways in which wood has been used by cultures all over the planet.

In order to properly evaluate the impact of a reduction in the supply of wood and wood products, though, I always expected that I would need to go further, and look at these in a more comprehensive way. I have no doubt that I’ve left things out – but its the totality that I think is most important here.

While I have organized this list into a number of categories, I then found it necessary to break those up still further. I’ve tried to use indentation to make these clear, but if that didn’t work, I’ll have resorted to far clumsier naming conventions. I’m pushing the boundaries of what I know how to do, here!

Image by liggraphy from Pixabay

Houses

People have been building houses out of wood for a very long time. They probably started by building fences and palisades out of timber, and timber posts were used in Neolithic roundhouses and longhouses. Little remains of these structures – only the very lowest parts of the walls and post holes have been unearthed by archaeologists, making the reconstruction of the upper parts largely conjectural.

The basic principles of wooden architecture were essentially worked out from stone-work precedents – lintels, mortise-and-tendon joints, and tongue-and-groove joints were all developed in the Neolithic.

The name itself means “new stone age”, and is applied to the period from 9000- to 5000BC (roughly). The time-span is so named because it was the last period of the age before wood-working began.

In the (copper and) bronze age(s), a new tool was developed, the saw, and it made woodworking possible beyond stone age tools like simple axes and chisels. The ability to cast metal made relative precision possible, and if the tools became damaged, they could be recycled simply by casting them again.

Woodworking took a major step forward with the beginning of the Iron Age. Iron itself is not much harder than bronze, but 900 years into the Iron Age, steel was invented (about 300BC). One of the many new tools that steel made possible was the hand-plane.

Ancient Greece contains the first timber structures that can be established as having existed, but no timber structures survive so knowledge of how they were put together is limited. The spans are mostly short and suggest simple beam and post structures spanning stone walls; for longer structures, it’s uncertain whether it was the Greeks or Romans who invented the truss, but the Romans certainly used Timber roof trusses. The now-famous Greek temples were built of wood until until about 650BC, but we don’t know when this practice began. The implication is that woodworking was still labor-intensive and expensive, and therefore reserved for high-status buildings; the fact that the Temples were built of stone from 650BC onwards suggests that timber was becoming more common and its use more common. The timber structures were replicated precisely in stone, a practice now referred to as “Petrified carpentry” – and this has preserved the construction techniques for archaeological examination; the techniques are clearly those appropriate to wood.

Chinese temples from approximately the same period as the latter days of Ancient Greece use wooden frames, usually without trusses, relying on post-and-lintel construction. The oldest wooden building to have survived is the Nanchan Temple in Wutai, parts of which date from 782AD.

By the time of the Middle Ages, wooden construction was very much the ‘poor citizens’ choice, while stone and brick were prestige materials.

It was in the renaissance that water mills in Western Europe began to be used to saw timber and convert trees into planks. The size of bricks became standardized by law in many regions, because brick makers were typically paid by the brick, giving them an incentive to make them a little small. Stone was still the premium choice of material, but this industrialization meant that wooden houses could be constructed in more uniform and reliable manners. The relative affordability of wooden structures also gave rise to multi-story wooden dwellings in villages as the professional (middle) class grew; it became common for a family to live in premises above their place of business, instead of in an attached structure. This saved massively on land costs, and enabled buildings to crowd in closer to each other.

In the 17th century, the manufacture of glass began. Most fantasy games are set in a hodge-podge amalgam of elements of the middle ages, renaissance, and this period in time. There was still no equivalent of the Roman concrete, whose secrets had been lost; the best that could be managed was a lime mortar.

Frames

Frames are constructed of strong beams. Even today, problems can arise when two sections need to be connected, because this creates a point of weakness in the resulting structure that often needs to be reinforced by a pillar or column. Steel frames avoid this problem, while introducing other restrictions and considerations, but that doesn’t start until the 18th century. It follows that there open span of a building is largely limited to the height of the tallest trees of suitable lumbar. Timber frames are still being used today, especially for brick buildings – the combination being more resilient and stronger than either material alone would be.

Walls

Timber walls are still in use in some types of construction (Log cabins, etc), but were replaced by other materials in most places – some time after the period in question. Wood paneling is still used for high-end interior walls, however, and was even more ubiquitous in this role in the medieval time-frames of fantasy gaming.

Floors

I can clearly remember when people started tearing up the carpets and linoleum floors to expose the timber flooring underneath, which would then be finished and polished. My apartment is furnished with a wood-tiled floor everywhere except the bathroom, laundry, and part of the kitchen. High-class floors are now, as in the medieval period, made of stone (especially marble), but quite often these were relatively thin panels of stone atop a wooden base. Middle-class dwellings almost certainly simply omitted the stone and used basic timber, perhaps cheaply finished, perhaps raw. Upper Low-end floors might have been untreated timber, perhaps with terracotta tiles on top, perhaps not. The very bottom rungs would still have used earthen floors, perhaps sealed with some sort of resin or other preservative.

Roofs

Wooden shingles are really pushing credibility to the very edge in most fantasy settings, but are too much a part of the iconic look of towns and villages that most people picture. Other materials were generally preferred, though timber boards were often used as a ‘base’ for such roofs. Thatch and (for the rich) stone such as slate are the roofing materials of choice in most fantasy game settings, as they were in the medieval period.

The reason for this is simple: Thatch is cheap and relatively replaceable, and – most importantly – light. More substantial roofs require more substantial walls of stone, thicker and heavier beams, and so on. Timber might be relatively cheap (compared to slate) but it is relatively heavy (relative to thatch).

Doors

Doors have been made of wood for almost as long as wood has been used as a construction material, and certainly from the iron age – hinges have been recovered from a number of archaeological digs.

Window Frames

Glass doesn’t get used as a construction material until the 17th century, and glass windows tend to be massively undervalued in most Fantasy RPG settings. Before then, windows undoubtedly had shutters – if one had a window at all – or were open holes through a wall, perhaps covered with a cloth or leather flap. Windows were one of those things that really took the world by storm, and most existing structures belonging to the wealthy were retrofitted with glass windows at some point. This is so ubiquitous an image that glass windows seem to be everywhere in fantasy game towns and villages – not to mention every fortress and castle.

Staircases

Wooden staircases are likely to arrive somewhere wooden frames and wood-panel / plank walls. The light weight and relatively short lengths required would have made this a desirable construction material for the purpose, and it’s likely to have stayed that way until the advent of concrete. But a timber frame was likely needed to fix the top of the staircase to; while it’s possible for a wooden tongue to have been inserted into notches in stone, I remain unconvinced that this would be regarded as secure, so that’s my reasoning. I could be wrong, though.

Furniture

The only thing more ubiquitous than wood as a construction material is wood as a manufacturing material! And one of the biggest such applications is the creation of wooden furniture, which takes advantage of the relative strength and light weight of the material.

And what a broad range of furniture wood has been – and often still is – used for. I can’t hope to be complete; so I’ll just hit the high points:

Chairs

I don’t have any wooden chairs. But a lot of people do, and they are often regarded as higher-class in formal dining settings than any of the alternatives. While these may have started off relatively primitive, this is one field in which Ergonomics and Design are always looking for improvements.

And then of course, there are rocking chairs and stools and wood-framed sofas and…

Tables

I strongly suspect that tables and benches were amongst the first timber furniture, and we’ve only been learning how to make them better ever since. Once we get to the middle ages, you can add desks to that list – I can’t picture them fitting in sociologically prior to that point..But with bureaucracies come desk jobs, and desk jobs require a desk… The first versions were probably simple shelves, but proper examples would not have been far behind, needing only some way of joining multiple planks together and getting a straight edge – the saw, in other words.



Image by David Nisley from Pixabay

Chests & Steamer Trunks, etc

And, of course, other containers of all sorts, with the common structural element of opening at the top (and possibly the front) to reveal a storage space. Before the chest, you either had a cast-metal lock-box or a sack to use for these purposes. They’ve become somewhat out of date at the moment, and arguably hit their peak in popularity in the 18th and 19th centuries – but “tea chests” were commonplace even in the 20th century until the early 1960s. These were thin-walled wooden boxes with riveted metal edges (usually 1/2mm-thick steel bands) – about 1/20th of an inch or so – with an opening at the top. Some had metal-lined interiors.

It was cheaper to dispose of a used Tea Chest and make a new one than it was to gather them and take them back for re-use; it wasn’t long before they started to be re-sold by the tea importers, so they became commonplace for non-food storage in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Thin-walled, reasonably sturdy, fairly large, and cheap made them desirable – I remember when I was a (young) child, we had one in the laundry (but I don’t remember what we used it for) – possibly as a dirty clothes hamper? Not sure.

And just a couple of years ago, I was in a store selling Middle-eastern handicrafts and saw a beautiful little hand-made chest about ten inches across, made of stained and lacquered rosewood, with polished brass fittings, for just A$30. I intended to buy it for a Christmas gift that year, but it was sold before I could round up the money. So they are still around.

Wardrobes

…and chests-of-drawers, and all sorts of other furniture that isn’t a desk but contains drawers. These are still used today, despite the development of walk-in closets with built-in drawers or shelves that (effectively) take you inside a wardrobe.

Cupboards

Either open-faced or with doors in front, semi-portable storage for linen and kitchenwares and the like have been a standard furnishing for centuries. At their simplest, these are just shelves attached to a couple of side-walls with some planks at the back to provide rigidity. At a pinch, you could even lose those last, and you would still have a cupboard – though you normally need a couple of doors on the front to deserve that title.

That makes them just a little more complex than a table, but simpler than a wardrobe.

Bookshelves

A development of the cupboard, I’ve got lots of these – eleven by my count (12 if you count the CD rack). Most of them are full “cupboards without the doors”, and the remaining three don’t even have the backing – and are prone to tilting sideways if you aren’t careful. I can fit three more into my residence if I have to, but would need to immediately fill one to create the space required.

Bookshelves are designed to display their contents without the need to open a door, which stems from the time when books were a status symbol. But scroll manuscripts were undoubtedly placed on shelves right back into ancient times.

Beds

Wood-framed beds were ubiquitous as soon as we stopped sleeping on the floor. They range from the elaborate four-poster bed to the dirt-simple. I find that they often form an inflexion point between RPG campaigns – some have them (relatively) rare, others stock every inn with ‘hotel rooms’ containing honest-to-goodness beds – and charge merely ten times the going rate for space on the floor in the common room (when it should be 100 or 1000 times as much).

Tools

Use of wood in tools is also about as old as wood itself, no doubt dating back to the first wooden clubs made by picking up a broken branch.

Handles

The first thing that I thought of were handles for tools like axes.

Poles

…and that brought handles for other tools, like rakes, to mind – which I immediately generalized to poles in general.

Bats and other sporting equipment

I then went in the other direction from axe handles, to clubs, and thence to bats and other sporting equipment – everything from hockey-sticks to polo mallets.

Utensils

Something of an afterthought – but wooden-handled utensils are common-place. The big trick here is finding some way of binding the wood to the working surface, though wooden spoons are still routine.

Bowls and Buckets

That led me to bowls, and buckets, as a second afterthought.

Barrels

And to barrels. What more need be said?

Boards

Chopping boards and platters.

Measurements

And, last but not least, T-squares, rulers, and the like.

LOTS of tools there. I can’t think of too many fields of human activity that aren’t affected in some way.



Image by Shon Flaherty from Pixabay

Sculptures and Decorations

For a change, I didn’t really need to subdivide a section – wood may not last as long as stone, but it’s a lot more easily worked and readily available. And if your work isn’t up to a standard that you are proud of, you can burn your rejects for light, warmth, and cooking – and no-one will ever know.

Weapons

Of course, clubs got mentioned in the section on tools. But wood is used for a surprisingly large number of weapons, too.

Polearms

The tour of mayhem starts with spears and polearms of all sorts (or, as one of my players once described them, can-openers with reach). No matter how fancy or functional the head of such a weapon may be, without the proverbial 10′ pole (or 8′, or 6′, or even 4′) to stick into that head, it’s not worth very much.

Bows & Arrows

And, of course, bows have been made of wood for a VERY long time. Even composite bows prior to modern materials comprised wood and something else – bone or horn, usually – inlaid into the wood to reinforce it. Take away the wood or wood-analogue and bows are pretty much gone.

And, of course, so would be the wooden projectiles that they fire..

Practice Swords

Not something that a lot of people would think of – but it’s quite common for swordplay to be taught and practiced with wooden weapons, at least until the instructor can trust the student not to skewer himself or his teacher in the course of training.

Battering rams and Siege weapons

And finally, there’s the big end of town – battering rams and trebuchet and the like. Wood is vital to them – whether you’re talking about a siege tower on wheels, a wooden gift horse, or something more mechanically sophisticated.

Vehicles

Mention of ‘wheels’, of course, immediately brings to mind another category: vehicles.



Image by DEZALB from Pixabay

Carriages

Carriages, are of course, the most common wheeled vehicles of medieval times – and stay so, with design and construction improvements, all the way through to the 20th century, when the coach-builders turned to constructing automobiles on supplied chassis. This category would include trolleys and wagons of all sorts. Take away the wheels and add some runners, and you have a sled – so add that to the list.

Boats & Canoes

Almost certainly, hollowing out a log to make a primitive canoe was one of the first wooden vehicles to be constructed. Boats only grow more sophisticated in design and construction technique from there.

Ships & Barges

If you super-size a boat, you get a ship. And if you make a ship big enough and broad enough, with a flat bottom suitable for shallow landings, you have a barge.

Rafts

And if you take away everything but the deck from a barge, and construct it out of whole logs and branches, it gets called a raft. I think it likely that simple boats predate rafts – but wouldn’t blink very hard if presented evidence or argument to the contrary.

Food & Pharm

Included purely for completeness, this was reasonably extensively covered under “Fruit, Berries, & Nuts” earlier – plus mention of the pharmacological applications of many wood-derived oils like Eucalyptus.



Getting this photo probably involved getting way closer than was safe! Image by skeeze from Pixabay

Fire

The original application of timber was, of course, to make fire. This happened sometime in Prehistory, somewhere between 1.7 and 2 million years ago. There is some evidence that naturally-occurring fires may have been used for cooking even earlier than this date, as far back as 2.3 million years ago. The earliest Hearth to be found dates to 790,000 years ago, but didn’t become commonplace until about 250,000 years ago. We’ve been at this a long time.

Of course, fire is a tool for which vastly more purposes have been found than cooking!

Cooking

The early dates are – not speculative, but not conclusively proven, either. But there is clear evidence that Homo Erectus was using fire to cook food 500,000 years ago – like I said, a long time.

It’s no surprise, then, that we have developed a vast array of techniques for cooking food. The method that is believed to be the oldest is simple roasting, in which a fish or bird is placed on the end of a stick and held over an open flame, but baking on heated stones within a fire would probably not have been very far away. Officially, though, the second cooking technique to be developed was Steaming of food wrapped in leaves and placed over/in hot embers.

It would soon have been learned that cooking techniques influence or alter the flavor and/or texture of the resulting food almost as much as including different supplementary ingredients. For a very long time, however, food would have been ‘whatever we find or have on hand’, and the art of cooking would have been about the best compromise that used ingredients at hand to best effect.

As an elite social class began to separate from the ordinary citizens, and wealth began to concentrate in their hands, it becomes possible for there to be at least some discretionary use of ingredients, and at the same time, some ingredients begin to be reserved for the sole use of the ruling class. This is the beginning of ‘recipes’ as we understand them today, in which ingredients are selected and cooking methodologies employed to match or compliment those ingredients. Starting with the rise of a professional class in the renaissance, this flexibility begins to slowly spread through the rest of society, until it is now thought of as the norm.

Most RPGs occupy that interesting intersection point in which some downward spread of technique has begun, but is still mostly reserved for the middle and upper classes, and a true culinary master is a prized possession and valuable diplomatic asset.

I have found that extrapolating these properties can give solid foundations to ‘feasts of the Gods’ which add credibility and color to such beings. An entire subtext can be built around the extent of the preparations exhibited by such ‘feasts’ that ranges from “they want something from us” to “something’s up”.

Smoking

Smoking foods as a preservative technique dates back at least to ancient Mesopotamia. This culture also developed irrigation, cultivation, animal and plant domestication, and salting.

In modern times, smoking has experienced something of a resurgence; you rarely heard of it outside of a few varieties of cheese and fish back in the 1970s and 80s, and it was uncommon right up to about 2010 or so. From that point onwards, the awareness that smoking using different materials – tea, cherrywood, sandalwood, pine chips, and more – can incorporate additional variations in flavor – has spread broadly, fueled by the use of the technique in high-end cooking shows on TV.

Yet, these are not new techniques or variations; they are rediscoveries of methods that have been around for millennia. The principle difference would have been that the focus back then (i.e. in ‘FRP Times’) would have been on the techniques that would best preserve whatever was smoked for the longest time, with flavor only a secondary consideration, whereas now flavor is the primary consideration and presentation the secondary. Presentation would have been a distant third place in olden times, if it was considered at all.

It follows that social class in an RPG can be conveyed as simply as having a preserved meat to snack on that is not only well-cured, but is tasty and pleasing (or remarkable) in appearance to boot – implying that the kitchen that supplied it is sufficiently high-class that preservation need not dominate the culinary preparation of food, or not until supplies for late in the season are considered.

Heat & Light

The other purposes to which wood was put in prehistory, and which continue in limited service through to the present day, are for the provision of light and heat, especially when sheltering in the outdoors.

Domestically and in other urban settings, wood has largely been supplanted in these roles by oil, gas, and electricity. The latter two are rarely found in RPG settings, though occasionally “Magic” is employed as a substitute.

As a result, though, the industrial necessity for wood is often overlooked or underestimated in modern times. The number of products which would have relied on heat from wood fires, from charcoal fires, or from coal fires (coal being yet another form of preserved wood) is more vast than can be readily appreciated.



Ceramics might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you’re listing timber products, but in medieval times they were just as dependent on woodfires as a wood-fired stove. Image by marcelkessler from Pixabay

Pottery

Clay turns into very slippery mud very easily with the addition of water. Preventing this involves shaping the clay and then baking it in a kiln. Again, while in modern times energy is provided in other forms, in a Pseudo-medieval RPG era, wood was undoubtedly the principle focus.

Various substances – combinations of fats, oils, and earths – become glass-like and bond to ‘fired’ pottery – they are called ‘glazes’, and the process is ‘glazing’. There are (I think) some that will do so even when applied to raw clay, though these are rare and relatively hard to control to the same degree and finesse of the more usual types.

I have also seen some glazes which remained water soluble or poisonous (especially those that are lead-based), and which required the application of a clear glaze or varnish over the top to make them safe. While it’s unlikely that fantasy societies would have sufficiently advanced medical science to recognize the dangers (look at how long it took us to do so), this suggests various artistic techniques that might well have been employed in a fantasy setting.

I’m not aware of any famous artists being commissioned to paint scenes on pottery which would then be preserved by glazing, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, and it certainly doesn’t mean that it can’t happen in your fantasy worlds.

Tanning and Dyeing

In addition to the need to heat or melt compounds for purification purposes in the production of wood finishes like varnishes, heat is central to the crafts of tanning leathers, and the dyeing both cloth, leather, wood, and other materials.

One reason these are often referred to as ‘the smelly professions’ is that the fires boil the solutions, and this creates odors. Another is the boiling of urine to get ammonia, which is often used as a bleach in these processes.

It’s easy to imagine local ordinances requiring the use of a magic wand to create local wind conditions that keep these smells away from the urban centers of a high-magic society! It’s equally easy to imagine such magics being restricted for use when the Palace was directly affected by such smells!

Scents

And, speaking of scents, the burning of incense comes to mind. In fact, the very word “incense” derives from the Latin word for “to burn”. Incense is burnt to release a fragrant odor, and both aroma and material are referred to by the term.

Incense is composed of plant materials, often combined with essential oils, and may have a clay, charcoal, or wood-powder binding agent that is usually combined with plant saps that form gum. There are two varieties: indirect-burning (which cannot combust on its own, and requires a separate heat source) and direct-burning which is lit directly from a flame and then fanned or blow out, leaving a glowing ember that smolders and releases the fragrance. These days, the latter are far more prevalent, and I have no doubts that some people will never have heard of the former.

A vast variety of materials have been used in the making of incense; historically, there has been a preference for using local ingredients. Trade in incense materials is a major part of commerce along most trade routes.

Many varieties of incense use tree-derived materials (powdered wood, powdered leaves, oils, and saps). Sage and Cedar were used by the indigenous populations of North America, for example, and Sandalwood is a popular Indian incense variety.

Varieties and variations on Incense are common in religious ceremonies and home practices, but there are some that aren’t often regarded in this respect: mosquito coils, for example, which are used to repel the insects. I can also personally attest that a number of incense varieties reduce night-time insects in general if burned near a light source. Incense has been used as an aphrodisiac in a number of cultures, both ancient and modern; and incense clocks are used to time social, medical, and religious practices in parts of Eastern Asia.

The value of incense products may be inferred by the gifts of the three wise men in the biblical account of the first Christmas: Frankincense and Myrrh, two of the three gifts, were used in incense at the time.

Ash

The ash of various woods also has value and function. Gardeners traditionally use it as a good source of potash to increase soil fertility, and it is also employed as an odor control agent in composts. It is used as a “flux” in pottery, reducing the melting point of the glazes – which means that materials that could not be employed in a home kiln or potter’s kilns in past ages become available for use. Wood ash has been used to create cleansers and soaps for centuries. And it is sometimes used in cooking, especially soaking corn in an ash-based alkali solution.

And, of course, driving the moisture out of wood by strongly heating it produces another critical material: charcoal. Traditional methods of charcoal creation use the wood being converted as the heat source, burning it while restricting the air supply available to support combustion.

Charcoal burns hotter, more consistently, and more reliably than pure wood. It is a central ingredient in everything from gunpowder to fireworks to barbecues and as an artwork material.

Red Colobus monkeys in Africa eat charcoal for the purpose of self-medication; their diet consists of leaves that are high in cyanide, so they have learned to consume charcoal which absorbs the cyanide and relieves the indigestion that results. This practice is passed from mother to infant.

Humans have used charcoal for medical purposes for centuries, often consumed in the form of charcoal biscuits. Research into its effectiveness remains controversial, according to the American Journal of Gastroenterology.

Metalwork

Of course, the generation of heat is essential in metalworking, for everything from casting metal to a blacksmith’s forge.

While it would be possible to imagine a very different society in which wood was not essential to the manufacture of metal products in one form or another – using oil, or magic, or Elementals, or whatever – such would not arise by accident; the essential techniques would be developed using wood-fires and then adapted to other heat sources only when wood became scarce or inadequate.

Paper

Last, but not least, we come to probably the single largest use of wood on the planet today – paper production. Right now, 42% of the non-fuel harvest is consumed in the manufacturing of paper and paper products, and this is expected to rise to more than 50% by 2050.

Fantasy games tend to assume that we are at the very start of the paper revolution. Printing is either non-existent or done by hand with movable blocks of type, and the common citizen doesn’t know how to read – and doesn’t need to, as society doesn’t expect him to be literate; criers will announce anything he needs to know, and professionals can be hired to write (in beautiful penmanship) anything he needs to permanently record – wills and deeds and the like.

Vellum and parchment are more common – much more common – than paper. Most fantasy supplements under-quote the price of paper ten-fold, and few point out that this is unbleached paper, a light dirty brown in tone. Do a search for “raw paper” and you’ll see what I mean.

It can take an hour or more to set the type for a single page. You then print as many copies of that page as you think you will need, plus (perhaps) a few extras – because once you are done, that type is broken back down so that the next page can be set. Normally, because it makes binding easier, two pages are printed at once – on one side of the physical page. If you can do one pair of pages in 2-3 hours, you can get 3 or 4 pairs of pages done in a day. A 200-page book, with printing on only one side of each page, using 100 sheets of paper, is 25 days work – and if you’re expected to take the sabbath off, and have to deal with customers and binders and whoever is producing the leather covers, that quickly blows out to a month. That might produce as many as 50-100 copies. And, of course, the content is almost certainly right over the printer’s head; he doesn’t care or need to know what the words mean, he just has to pick the right piece of type. Working off a written manuscript, errors are inevitable, and are preserved forever – and can inadvertently change the meaning of a piece of text irretrievably. In fact, it would be rare to have errors less frequent than every printed couple of pages. On top of that, the occasional page would be smeared or off-center. The pages would not be evenly cut; rough-cut is so much easier.

Alternatively, you could pay a scribe to produce a single, (almost) letter-perfect, exquisitely-crafted copy in a similar time-frame. And since the scribe is a single individual, perhaps with an editor to verify the accuracy of the text, whereas the printer is likely to be a team of two or three or more, and to have greater expenses to boot, the cost of each copy is likely to be fairly similar.

That’s if printing is even in existence in your world; you might well be still in the illuminated-manuscript-and-scribes stage. In which case, the underestimate of the cost of paper is likely to be twenty- or twenty-five-fold, not ten-fold.

The other perception that modern-day players and GMs often get wrong is the thickness of the paper. Because the sheets are hand-made, not the result of an automated industrial process, the thicknesses are both higher and less consistent than would be expected. Two-and-a-half times is probably a fair average – some sheets being twice as thick as typical paper these days and some three modern-sheets thick (at least in places). Not quite a cardboard, but heading in that direction – by modern standards. The thickness of a modern-day ream of paper would be a stack of about 200 pages.

And then, as now, paper is priced by weight. So those 200 pages, if all else was equal, would cost as much as 500 pages do now – but, as explained, very little is actually equal or even equivalent.

This all changes if you bring Asian influences into your campaign world, because that also introduces rice-paper – incredibly thin and delicate stuff. That’s up to you.

An alpine village from Switzerland. Most people will focus on the mountains and the slopes; I want you to look at the distribution of the trees, and how thick the forest Isn’t. Image by pasja1000 from Pixabay.

The Historic Depletion Of Wood

When considering the myriad of applications for wood and wood products, it’s no surprise that lands that were once forested were stripped, but it’s still astonishing how far land clearance went, and for how long it has had substantial impact.

When considering the question of historic land-clearance, the greatest difficulty can be deciding where to look. Should our model be the forests of Eastern Europe and Germany? Or the tree-dominated landscapes of Switzerland? Or should we look to the forests of France and Belgium? Or should Medieval Britain be our guide?

Or is a more holistic view, in which all of the above are relevant to different parts of our game world, be our guide? This is (obviously) going to be the most realistic, but it increases the world-building efforts, and research required, four or five-fold.

The alternative is to compare the differences between these different locales, and then pick one of them as a standard which can be modified as necessary. Which means a quick spot-check on historical forestry in the different regions and then whichever one is most easily researched can be investigated in greater depth.

In fact, I can write most of that spot-check off the top of my head using general knowledge acquired from numerous documentaries over the years!

• The Bavarian forests are legendary, and something I think of whenever I see or think about a slice of Black Forest Cake (yum!). These are how most British think English Forests looked like back in the time of Robin Hood, and how most gamers think of thick forests even today. Travel is either on foot or by river except along cleared paths, which are rare. That’s because the forests are so thick that expanding settlements produce enough timber to meet the needs of the population.
• Switzerland is how most gamers think of the non-forested regions – perhaps flatter, that’s all. Clear regions of rolling green are separated by clumps and walls of trees – woods and forests and the like. Picture-book stuff.
• France is how the agriculturally-dominated areas, where the rural population is at its highest, are generally perceived. Trees act as windbreaks and barriers between farms (perhaps because no-one could agree on who should clear them or should be allowed to clear them). When you think of Farmer Maggot, it’s the French countryside that usually comes to mind.
• Finally, we get the rocky mountaintops of Northern England or Wales, which is the domain of most Dwarven settlements, in the minds of many GMs and players. Which bears little or no resemblance to the landscape of rural England, of course, but the popular zeitgeist can’t have everything.

Unfortunately, the popular zeitgeist is wrong in a number of key respects.

• While some of the Bavarian forests were that thick, most was not all that different from a Swiss forest today.
• Low altitude trees, and especially non-evergreens, are very different to the alpine trees common in Switzerland. You can’t just create a generic bundle called “trees” or “forests” and lump them all in together like that.
• 34% of France, today, is forested. This is not only a lot higher than most people picture for Farmer Maggot’s fields (even with the Wood a rock-throw away), it’s about what people picture for England in the Robin Hood era, a fallacy sometimes described as the Sherwood Syndrome – something I’ll get back to.
• Try to follow this logic: Dwarves live in mountains. Fantasy mountains are like the Alps. Therefore Dwarves live in Alpine regions that are rocky like Scotland and Wales. I could keep up until that last hairpin bend, I’m afraid. Either Dwarves live in Scotland/Wales -like conditions, and at considerably lower altitudes than the high mountains, or they come from an Alpine setting – you can’t have it both ways.>/li>

Having modified the ‘generic’ fantasy image with a splash of reality, which has the general effect of making most regions a little more like the ‘average’, we now have a context in which to interpret the historical record. I use English, so England is the easiest baseline for me to research; if this article ever gets translated into French or German, other choices may be more appropriate.

Image by jplenio from Pixabay

The Consumption Of English Forests

There has been a belief amongst historians for a long time that the Romans were responsible for a lot of land-clearing in England.

Lately, though, archaeological evidence has been building up in opposition to that theory.

There is also a common perception amongst laypeople that Medieval England was a land of enchanting (and enchanted) forests; this is also incorrect.

In fact, there appears to have been a long history of successive inroads into the available timber supply.

England’s forests were rather more uneven in density than most people think, with considerably more open spaces – clearings and the like.

The first great wave of clearing was in the Bronze age, in about 1000BC, when intensive farming was carried out on a scale that is only slowly becoming recognized. When the Romans arrived about 2000 years later, villa was able to abut villa for mile after mile, with the gaps filled by small towns and farmsteads. The forests were already confined, and while the Romans did build roads through them (they were obsessed with straight lines when it came to such things) very little clearing was needed by the time of the Roman Conquest.

It was during the Bronze age that southern Britain was more or less completely stripped of pine trees, for example, because (unlike the other varieties of tree), pine burnt readily whereas other species’ logs, if more than about 10 inches in diameter, was almost completely fireproof without being logged and dried.

Even in the bronze age, forest conservation and cultivation was taking place, for the purposes of providing what wood was required for the many purposes listed earlier, and a few more besides – pigs were released into the forests every autumn, there to feed themselves and have litters ready for spring hunting.

Little by little, the remaining forests shrunk as the desire to create productive farmland grew. By the time of the Domesday Book, more than half (perhaps as much as 75%) had been eliminated and most of the remainder thinned out considerably.

William The Conqueror then pronounced the Forest Law, which held that all forests were Royal land, for the raising and hunting of game. He began to enlarge the forests, planting large areas with trees to create preserves where deer could thrive, for example. Some woodlands were too sparsely populated with trees to be labeled forests, and these remained the source of timber of the lower classes. Isolated trees do not a forest make!

In effect, small stands and groves were left untouched, often claimed by lesser nobles, while trees were dispersed throughout the remaining land, most notably at the borders and boundaries of agricultural fields and plots.

The next great intrusion into the old growth of England took place in the early Industrial Revolution. Wood was needed for railroad timbers, and for possessions to be sold to the newly-affluent. Records show that the forests retreated to about 5% of their original coverage within the United Kingdom during this time. But this was also the low=water mark, the beginning of serious reforestation efforts that have now restored the English woodlands to about 35% – still some distance shy of the European average of 44%, but directly comparable to the French “average” that we discussed earlier.

(Of course, all this is terribly condensed, and as a result, may be inaccurate or misleading – though I did my best!)

From this basis, we can project backwards and assign some rough numbers to an appropriate reality.

• Farmland: 5-10% trees, mostly at the boundaries of rural plots, and along the banks of rivers.
• Rural Townships: 5-10% of the urbanized area around or near the town in small stands or pockets, carefully managed.
• Woodlands: 5-10% of the countryside, with trees about half the density of a forest, making them relatively easy to travel through on foot or mounted. The densest parts of the woods are often beside the roads, because they are protected as part of the “King’s Highway”.
• Forests: 5% of the countryside except in more alpine regions, where they may be up to 50% of the available land, especially slopes that are too steep to be conveniently logged or farmed. The former are at 125-175% of the typical English tree density of a woodland, the latter are more Swiss (about 200% tree density).

It rarely suits RPG purposes to have the Forest Law apply as extensively and universally as it actually did in the time of William The Conqueror. Instead, specific forests and woodlands are typically reserved for royal use, while other forests and woodlands are publicly available.

So that’s the “standard” that I will be assuming as a baseline for the rest of this article.

Image by Albrecht Fietz from Pixabay

Percentage Loss Impacts

Which means that we’re finally in a position to start thinking about the impact that would be posed by a restriction to the supply of wood and wood products, from any cause.

This article is already more than twice the usual length, so I don’t have room to get too specific; instead, I want to paint a general picture of the impact and leave the specifics to individual GMs. I want to look at five levels of reduction: 5%, 10%, 20%, 30%, and 50%, and anything more would simply take too long.

I’ve tried to avoid excessive value judgments, as these assessments will vary from campaign to campaign, depending on the availability and suitability of alternatives. Sometimes, an available alternative was obvious, and so spelt out. I’ve also tried very hard to park any idealism in preference to hard-nosed realism in my assessments.

Five percent

Five percent reduction would normally come out of the luxury applications, but there’s no indication that the Nobility would be any less rapacious. It follows that the lower end of the market would have to make up the shortfall; where there was a cheap alternative, it would be used. But overall, not much would change.

Ten percent

At this level of reduction in availability of wood, significant changes start to happen. Previously uncompetitive alternatives become practical, because they release more timber for high-end products for which there are no alternatives. Timber products rise in price by 15-20%, as do agricultural products and anything that requires timber for its transport. Because timber is more expensive, staining and lacquering become more common – there’s not much difference between a little bit too expensive and a lot more expensive, at the end of the day. Timber rustling becomes a thing.

Twenty percent

Now things are really starting to bite. Timber products become a status symbol. Any application of timber in which paint is used to hide imperfections becomes an undesirable use of wood. Architecture is affected, with alternative construction techniques and types of buildings that use less timber becoming prevalent or never going out of fashion – so more longhouses (which use less timber) than small cottages. There would be consequent social impacts. What wood products exist are reserved for high-status individuals – the rich and powerful and well-connected – and would cost 2-5 times as much. This would include having a personal dwelling. Bows and Arrows are no longer something that can be provided to armies; but there might be elite military units that are trained in their usage and supplied them.

Thirty percent

Large-scale use of wood – a polished timber floor, for example – becomes symbolic of great wealth, a status symbol the equal of polished marble. Only the wealthy can afford timber products at all, but so great is the demand for the material in applications where there is no alternative at all that nobles and communities claim ownership of such as common property. There is, for example, no more individual cooking; an entire community are served by a single cooking fire. Wastage of wood becomes a criminal offense the equal of banditry, and received capital punishment. Wood products cost ten times as much as the prices quoted in official guides, or more, or not available at all. Power balances become directly influenced by the forests that can be controlled – and protected from raiders. Society becomes more tribal, more like that of the Vikings, in many respects. Agriculture is affected, production declining by 10-15%, and prices for food almost double as a result, except for produce farmed locally (which still increase, but not by as much). This impact is the equivalent of a never-ending drought in terms of the food available to the lower classes, and mortality rates rise accordingly. Small wars are fought over renewable food resources like groves. There are profound changes in other aspects of society; not even the wealthy can afford individual homes; they get isolated rooms in communal housing. The politically-connected can afford to build out of stone, with government subsidies that are used to bind loyalties – so those in favor get castles, and get to expand existing structures of the sort, and those not in favor don’t.

Fifty percent

At the fifty percent reduction level, secondary impacts derail whole industries. Every possible alternative has to be exploited, and if it’s not enough, demand has to be reduced – which generally means smaller population levels. Agricultural productivity is down 25%, and food costs 4-10 times as much; government rationing applies to all agricultural products. No-one could afford substantial use of wood in things like walls and floors; the elite may still have wooden furniture. Construction is stone pillars and thatched walls and roofs, with hessian ‘shelves’ stretched between pillars the predominant furniture for those less affluent. Everything listed in the official soucebooks costs 2-3 times as much as usual, and is correspondingly rare. Many wear animal-hide loincloths and cloaks, because they can’t afford better. At this price point, products of pig iron and bronze are comparable in price to a timber equivalent; steel is still more expensive, but not ruinously so.

In estimating these consequences, I have assumed that there is a multiplicative effect – that production costs will increase, and so will transport costs, and so will storage costs, and so on. At the same time, I have assumed that increasing price will have a deflatory effect on demand.

Before I compiled that long list of wood products, I had intended to present a sample set of products that would not be impacted – but I now think that there wouldn’t be any, only a reduction in the scale of the impact.

Primary sources for this section include:

• Who Chopped Down Britain’s Ancient Forests, and
• England’s forests: a brief history of trees,
• as well as numerous television documentaries.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Supplemental Timbers

Of course, since we’re talking about a fantasy game environment, we can mitigate some of the damage by postulating the existence of some new and exotic varieties of tree. I’ve got half-a-dozen or so varieties to suggest, and there should undoubtedly be more. In fact, it’s entirely plausible for magical creation of new tree breeds to be a recognized branch of the arcane arts – under these circumstances. It would only require the accidental creation of one such variety for that outcome to transpire!

I have to apologize for the consistency in the naming – I seemed to get into a rut in that respect, at least to start with. None of the names is all that bad in itself, but collectively… I did better with some later inclusions.

Flamewood

Picture wood that naturally burns ten times as slowly. One log could last for almost 40 hours instead of the more usual four. Picture a wood that slowly regenerates after being burned until, a week later, it is ready to be burned again – less a tenth of what fuel was there the first time around. Picture a wood that can be induced by fire magics to greater temperatures than any basic timber – 1st level, melting silver or gold; 2nd level, melting copper; 3rd level, melting brass; 5th level, melting iron; and 7th level, becoming hot enough that steel can be refined, as though the wood were a like quantity of purest coal. How much would you pay for a ton of such wood?

Well, the bad (or perhaps, good) news (depending on your point of view) is that there isn’t that much of this rare variety of timber. The trees are short, and often hard to spot, and not very good at reproducing, and very slow to grow. If you’re lucky, and find a century-old mature specimen, you might get a full quarter-ton of Flamewood from it. Plant 100 seeds and you might get a single plant that survives.

Firewood costs 1000 times as much as regular wood for a twentieth the standard amount. It is a dark brown in color, but with a bright red sap, and it’s leaves are the colors of autumn all year round; it is often mistaken for a dead tree of some other variety. But if you look hard enough, you might get lucky.

Wetwood

Wetwood is about as common as White Birch – which is to say that it isn’t rare, but it’s hardly the most common variety of tree, either. It’s usually fairly indistinguishable from the varieties of tree around it, because the tree has a natural ability to camouflage itself. It is only when it’s bark is removed or it is cut down, or a branch is broken, that it can be identified. It’s sap is naturally a self-sealing lacquer which dries hard, imparting a reddish-brown or dark golden tint to the cut timber. It is a great deal harder to work than most woods (think ironbark, for those familiar with that plant. For those who aren’t, pick another variety of ironwood that is better known to you and your players).

This wood is not only prized for its rarity, but because it makes the finishing process much cheaper (eliminating several processing steps). However, once it is cut to shape, carpenters have only a short window (an hour or so) to use the timber before the process begins. As a result, it is usually kept in inconveniently large and heavy sections of timber – and note that it is WAY too dense to be floated downriver under its’ own buoyancy.

That means that it costs more than most premium timbers to acquire and transport, but yields a greater percentage profit and the value of products made from it is proportionately higher as well.

The Mockingbird Tree

Another rare tree, and one that is highly prized for a completely different reason. It’s branches bud, but do not produce fruit; however, any seed that comes into contact with such a bud will generate seemingly natural leaves and fruit, the only difference being that the seeds within will be those of the Mockingbird Tree.

This remarkable property means that you can attach any fruit to a limb, and that limb will produce seemingly authentic fruit of that variety so long as there is a single piece of fruit remaining of that variety – in fact, of any seed-bearing plant. The one tree can grow apples and oranges and lemons and apples and grapefruit and pumpkins and squash and plums, all at the same time.

What’s more, multiple varieties of fruit can be seeded to the same limb, provided that they do not mature at the same time of year.

This is a tree that will make you the envy – and the enemy – of farmers throughout the district or region.

Gravelgrain

This tree is prized not for it’s timber, which is fairly unremarkable and ugly, and takes stains unevenly (resulting in furniture with a splotchy appearance no matter how skilled the artisan), but for the bark, which fragments into pieces roughly sized between 1/2 and 1 cubic inch and is very regular and even in size. These fragments are remarkably durable, and the resulting ‘gravel’ lasts for years. Beware of immersing it in water for any length of time, however; each of these pieces of ‘gravel’ is actually the seed of another Gravelgrain tree, and germinates under such conditions.

The tree is native to bogs, swamps, and areas which experience regular flooding, and it is known to have particularly deep and strong roots.

Strip the bark from most living trees and they die; Gravelgrain will simply stop growing until new bark has formed, 3-5 years later. Careful forestry management can thus yield substantial amounts for gravel surfaces costing a tenth or so the expense of rock gravel.

Skywood

The wood of this tree is exceedingly light, and grows lighter as the tree passes from mature to venerable. There are no known ancient trees of this variety; such would be more than a thousand years old.

Newly-mature trees are favored for ships, being almost as buoyant as cork but as strong as a hardwood.

Over the next couple of centuries, the timber grows lighter still, but also more brittle; this makes it suitable for single-use applications like siege equipment.

Past the age of 400 or so, the timber can no longer be submerged by it’s own weight, but it is as fragile as a clay pot. No longer suitable as a construction material, it is often packed into boxes of metal or stronger wood which are attached to the hulls of vessels as buoyancy aids. This can permit such vessels to have substantially more metal armor than can be carried on a vessel of normal wood.

In theory, somewhere between 800 and 1000 years of age, the tree’s wood becomes lighter than air itself, and broken limbs float on the breeze like a dandelion seed. No one knows for certain, because the timbers shatter and break under their own weight before that happens.

Cloudwood

Cloudwood is unremarkable as a tree. What is more noteworthy are the gossamer foliage and seeds (one seed for each leaf) that carries this tree to everywhere in creation; in spring and summer, it is as though every branch was bedecked in dandelion-heads. If the winds are right at the right time, these can remain aloft for months on end. Fortunately, most of the seeds are infertile, or Cloudwood would be a serious ecological problem.

The tree gets it’s name for the color of the wood from the tree which has cloud-like inclusions. These make it relatively unpopular as timber; it’s not strong enough to be used as a construction material, and too unattractive for most (unpainted) furniture.

Relatively recently, it has been found that the wood contains an oil that makes the surface of the raw timber relatively soft and smooth – not as much so as polished timber, but more than any other untreated wood – so it is becoming increasingly popular as a lining for drawers and cabinet interiors in certain quarters.

Silveroak

Silveroak trees are very similar to other varieties of Oak; most of the differences are not apparent to superficial inspection. The leaves have ‘veins’ on their undersides that lean toward the silvery-gray in color; and the acorns are a bright gray. And Silveroaks are universally large and magnificent specimens.

The real differences are in the growth patterns of Silveroaks relative to other varieties: Silveroaks experience what in humans would be called a ‘growth spurt’ every year until the age of about 50 years, growing at a rate 5 times that of other oak varieties each year. This then declines to double the normal rate of growth for the next 75 years. In a single century, then, a Silveroak appears to be a mature old-growth tree of 350 years age, and in 125 years, it appears to be 400 years of age.

Even after this initial burst, Silveroaks continue to grow more quickly than most Oaks; only the rate declines. For 300 years after that first 125 (up to about age 425), Silveroaks grow at 150% the rate of other oak trees. At this age, 425 years, a Silveroak appears to be a tree of twice its real age, in terms of size and foliage.

At the same time, it remains a youthful and vigorous tree, with limbs both supple and strong – far more so than is usual for a tree of such size.

There is a price to be paid, of course: in this case, relative longevity and ‘middle age’ are both severely curtailed. Past about 750 years, Silveroaks abruptly seem to lose their resistance to a great number of natural enemies and pests and begin to rot from the inside out. Between 800 and 850, they will reach the point of being an increasingly hollow shell, progressively weakening. Only one in ten thousand will see a millennium in age – while most Oak trees are just getting started at that age.

Further shortcomings have also been noted; the size of the canopy means that management of groves of Silveroaks is comparatively difficult, and only 1/4 as many can be planted in a given area, more than compensating for the rapid growth. The size of the canopy also means that other plants tend to wither and die in their shade, so farmers consider them a pest and remove them whenever possible.

However, the quick growth entices enough promise for all the usual applications of wood that perpetual attempts to find ways of overcoming the forestry problems are continuously undertaken. There is always another optimist with a new idea they want to try. So many wealthy patrons have lost money bankrolling such endeavors that the very name ‘Silveroak Plantation’ has become synonymous with bad or misleading investments, and the facility with which deceivers can claim such plantations have failed has made these a common tool for con-men. Many of these stories are apocryphal but persistent.

Tubertrees AKA Vampire Vines

Tubertrees are also a variety of oak, but are altogether more remarkable, as they grow completely upside down, with no trunk visible above the surface. Instead, all their growth occurs in their root systems, which yield grass-like tendrils that protrude up like a grass. The distinctly oaken character of the leaves is the only indication that a field has been colonized, and at first, they appear only to be scattered weeds (rather than parts of a single much larger plant). Individual stalks are thus cut down by farmers without mitigating the growth of the overall plant markedly, until a tipping point is suddenly achieved and the Tubertree strangles all the other plants in its’ ‘footprint’ by stealing the lions’ share of the nutrients. One year, a circular plot around the ‘trunk’ is completely dominated by Tubertree leaves, seemingly out of nowhere, up to 100′ in diameter.

By then, it is too late for the easy eradication and removal of the tree; it’s roots are likely to protrudes dozens of feet both down and outward from the central trunk, are as tough as oak-tree branches, and may be a foot or more in diameter, i.e. the size of other tree’s trunks. This combination means that the field has to be excavated sufficiently to expose the roots before they can be dismembered by sawing them, and even then, the presence of earthen coverings tend to prematurely blunt saw blades, further making this pest hard to control.

What’s more, the way that you have to dismember the roots, and their particularly knotty nature, means that the resulting timber is not useful for long timbers or large panels of furniture or flooring, and gives off a foul black smoke when burned, limiting the usefulness of the recovered timber.

Tubertrees are nothing but inconvenience and hard work.

In recent times, it has been proposed that a progressive eradication strategy would be more effective than the brute-strength approach described above; this involves planting of specific crops that target different aspects of the tree’s needs. Shallow-root broad-leaf plants, for example, are able to grow despite the limited nutrients available from the Tubertree’s leftovers, and the resulting foliage limits the sunlight that can reach the leaves of the Tubertree, weakening it enough that an aggressive grass can begin to steal nutrient from the roots, leaving them vulnerable to termites and other pests, which can then be exterminated and plowed under. Leaving the roots in place to rot, with supplementary fertilizer, can reinvigorate the soil, leaving it just as productive as it was originally, if not better; but such rehabilitation programs are likely to take a decade or more, so there are significant disadvantages to this approach; most will continue to implement the quick-and-dirty and labor-intensive manual approach even though it leaves the soil permanently weakened in productivity.

Early attempts at controlling Tubertrees involved using animals with unselective diets – goats and pigs – to consume the foliage of the Tubertree. These attempts were total failures, and the manner of the failure gave the Tubertree it’s other popular nickname – Vampire Vines.

The sap of the tree has a soporific effect on those who consume the leaves, causing them to fall asleep; and this is a sleep from which they will never awaken; quick-growing vine-like tendrils penetrate the flesh of the sleeping creature and drain it of blood, which is used by the tree to enhance the soil in which it is growing. The carcass is progressively broken down and consumed by the tree until nothing remains; even an ox can be consumed in a week or so.

There have been unverified claims that in spring and early summer, the trees exude a sweet odor that tempts animals to approach and linger to the point of slumber, providing a food ‘hit’ just when the tree is looking to grow most vigorously. How potent, and how soporific, these effects might be is entirely speculative, and differs from tale to tale. Travelers are nevertheless advised to tread warily when a sickly-sweet odor is on the wind. Tubertrees have been known to penetrate tents and mail while the subjects slept, oftentimes lethally..

Ghostwood

I described Ghostwood in my 2015 Article, Some Arcane Assembly Required – Pt 3: Tab A into Slot B. This wood can also be thought of as the Undead form of sentient trees (or, perhaps, as the “anti-undead” form of same). It is found on both the Negative Energy Plane and the Ethereal Plane. It is created by exposing a sentient tree to sufficient negative energy to destroy it – refer to the original description. The thing is that Planar Flux, which is intimately bound up in the (‘natural’ or ‘accidental’) creation process, works both ways – some Ghostwood gets returned to the Material Plane, where it inevitably causes serious trouble – again, see the original description. But if you want to trigger a Kingdom-wide apocalypse with the PCs caught in the crossfire (or recruited by one side), there’s nothing better. I’m including it here as a bit of a bonus.

Still More

GMs may derive still more inspiration from the list of imaginary plants (NB: Not all of them are trees!) maintained by Wikipedia on this page. Details are limited, so this is really just a starting point, but a good one.

I encourage all GMs to supplement my imaginary tree-kinds with more entries of their own – my examples show you how to do it, the rest is up to you! Key points to remember are how the tree occurs in nature, how it interacts with the wildlife and vegetation around it, what use people have found for it, and how that impacts on commerce. The more useful it is, the rarer it should be, unless you want to make society relatively dependent on it – in which case, go for your life!

Images like this one from France give a false impression of the density of Forests. Understanding tree density is a good place to start appreciating the original wonder material, Wood. Image by Jörg Vieli from Pixabay

The Miracle Of Wood

You can’t really appreciate the impact that wood and wood products have had on society until you see a comprehensive review of the subject (and trust me, while my summation may have been broad, it was necessarily shallow). The breadth and depth of utility produces a proper awareness of the severity of the impact of any restriction on the availability within a society of wood.

To those functions are now added another – layers of campaign color. Truly, wood is a wonder material, and – used properly – can be a miraculous addition to a campaign. Trees don’t need to be able to walk around a-la Triffids and Treants in order to to excite and contribute. In truth, such things barely scratch the surface.

And that’s the real miracle of wood.