1. Seacoast	2. Swamp	3. Forest	4. Plains	5. Desert
6. Hills	7. Mountains	Hierarchy of Terrain	Bodies of Water	WSG

    The term "forest" covers a lot of ground, literally && figuratively.
In the typical campaign world,
unspoiled by industrial revolutions and large-scale lumbering operations,
expanses of densely packed trees can be found in any climate except the polar regions,
where the eternal cold makes it impossible for trees and other large plants to survive.

-
Forests in different climatic areas contain different kinds of
trees: evergreens, or conifers, in the subarctic; deciduous, or
leaf-bearing, in temperate regions; and “evergreens” of an entirely
different sort in subtropical and tropical areas. Characters
may discover a large stand of tall cactus in the middle of a desert,
but this feature does not qualify as a forest in game terms; the
area is still considered as desert for purposes of weather determination,
availability of food and water, and so forth.

Taiga (Cold Forest) +

Temperate forests contain a wide variety of trees, all of which
have one important common feature: They are very adaptable,
able to withstand the scorching heat of a temperate summer as
well as the vicious deep-freeze of a temperate winter. Most temperate
forests are composed primarily of deciduous trees - the
kind that shed their leaves when cold weather approaches, stand
with branches bared to the winter wind, and then grow new
leaves when the cold season is over. A temperate forest is a lush
breeding ground for many types of smaller plants because the
“crop” of fallen leaves each autumn keeps the soil rich in nutrients.
However, there are fewer ground plants and less underbrush
in a temperate forest than in a rainforest, for the reasons
explained in the following paragraph. The largest trees in a temperate
forest (usually oak, maple, and ash) can be as much as
160 feet tall with a “leafspan” nearly as great as that.

Rainforest is the name usually given to forests in subtropical
and tropical climates. The distinctive feature of a rainforest is its
‘‘layered’’ composition; trees of several different heights coexist
with low-lying shrubs and ferns. Most of the trees in a rainforest
have thin, straight trunks that stretch toward the sky and are
topped (in the fashion of an ice-cream cone or a mushroom) by a
roughly egg-shaped clump of vegetation. The trees do not spread
out close to the ground the way that trees in a temperate forest
do, which makes it possible for a rainforest to support a thick
layer of low-lying vegetation at ground level. On a sunny day, a lot
of light reaches the floor of a rainforest; on the same kind of day in
a temperate forest, many areas beneath wide, tall trees remain
shaded from dawn to dusk. As one might expect from its name, a
rainforest is also covered with vegetation because of the large
amount of precipitation the area receives. Trees in a rainforest
are green all year round; before old leaves grow large and drop
off, new ones have already appeared to take their places.
 
 

Cold Civilized Forest	Temperate Civilized Forest	Tropical Civilized Forest
Cold Wilderness Forest	Temperate Wilderness Forest	Tropical Wilderness Forest