Red In Tooth And Claw (2025)

Red In Tooth And Claw is a 5e-compatible survival horror supplement of wilderness scavenging and survival in the lands overrun by the Devouring, a chaos entity that floods the wilderness with hydras and wyverns. Scavenge for supplies from the wilderness, rustling up magical materials based on terrain like the flammable tar sands of a desert, the poisonous herbs of a jungle or swamp, or the supernaturally cold liquid ice found in tundra. Every time you long rest, you can use these supplies to create improvised tools and weapons like elemental ammo, tar grenades, and healing potions and other herbal concoctions, poisons like insanity mist that inflicts confusion or hound powder that inflicts fear, improvised weapons and armor, and a flamethrower. Specializing in such scavenging is the Fringer class, with sub-classes based on your favored terrain, which grant powers which work anywhere, but which will likely be especially effective in the terrain in which you're most at home. The Grassland sub-class, for example, makes you better at combat at extreme ranges, allowing you to take advantage of long sight lines, lets you dash as a bonus action to help cover open terrain quickly, and gives you advantage on hiding within foliage or other natural obstacles. The Grassland sub-class expects to use that viridian stealth for tall grass, but the jungle sub-class uses it to hide in the trees along with a climb speed that makes them more adept at vertical movement, and some poison and sneak attack abilities to make them deadly ambush predators. The tundra sub-class is focused on resilience in the face of harsh weather and deadly enemies, gaining bonuses to resist environmental effects and extra HP. Your sub-class is your favored terrain and grants you powers specialized for that terrain, but the powers can be used anywhere - you can take the Fringer out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the Fringer. Plus the usual sundries - some new ether techniques, plot hooks, and an encounter table for the Devouring, the chaos entity of wild fury and predation. The chaos entities are a set of nine disembodied magical energies that serve as a source of both monsters and magic in the setting, usable as one of many powerful magical phenomenon alongside whatever other gods or devils you have in a standard D&D setting or as the ultimate source of all supernatural power if used by themselves. The Devouring covers the wilderness in thick foliage and fills that foliage with savage monsters. Why does ordinary trade between two cities not at war with each other, and even in the same country with the same ruler, require armed guards to stave off death by manticore? Why does the journey out into the wilderness to explore an ancient ruin have a twenty-ish percent chance of getting jumped by hungry dire wolves? Why are there so many carnivorous plants in the forests? Why are the elves such territorial assholes? Because the wild places are where the Devouring lives, distorting reality with its supernatural presence, giving the bloody-minded focus of the predator to those who live there, both man and beast, and spawning from its pools of concentrated magical power an ecosystem of comprised purely of predators, a steady trickle of monsters to kill and be killed by, lurking under leaf and branch, restless and hungry, red in tooth and claw.