Review 20: The Bark Witch of Carcass Country
We're going to be going into some rather different territory this week. So far, the bulk of the adventures I've reviewed have been relatively standard in presentation, with the exception of the pamphlet adventures-- but even those are definitely designed in a "normal" way. "The Bark Witch of Carcass Country" was an entirely new experience for me, in that it is laid out essentially as series of tables which allow you to procedurally generate the adventure as you play through it, and the tension and horror grows as it progresses. It was written by Walton Wood, with art and design by Johan Nohr plus a photo by Alewife. I ran it with Frontier Scum, its intended system.
Getting it to the Table
As I mentioned, this was a different experience for me in that it required absolutely zero preparation other than reading through the 16 pages of terse tables and wrapping my head around the general procedure. The first few tables are for setting the stage for the GM-- hooks for the party, followed by what the Bark Witch wants. My favorite result on that table (and indeed, the one I rolled when I ran it) was simply "amusement." I do wish that the order of pages was adjusted a bit, as the main exploration procedure doesn't show up until page 8, and it appears after some of the tables that detail what the PCs can find in their exploration of Carcass Country. The procedure works basically as follows:
- The GM rolls a d6 to determine if an encounter happens during the day's exploration
- Once a 6 is rolled on the encounter die, or the party spends the night in a spooky place, the encounter roll becomes 2d6-- worse things happen with higher rolls, and "Mundane" encounters are replaced with "Peculiar" ones
- Eventually, the Bark Witch will appear and trigger the big finale
At the table, this resulted in a tense, nightmarish series of weird events that escalated in intensity and resulted in the PCs acting panicky until the Bark Witch finally found them.
This style of adventure was really fascinating to run, because so much of the meat of it was left up to the GM's ability to improvise and string encounters together into a coherent whole. That said, this definitely meant that there was a good amount of heavy lifting on my part, because there are no maps of the area, and a lot of the procedure is left abstract. I found that it worked best to try to create a vibe rather than a coherent space to explore-- wet marshy woods with weird ruins and remnants of abandoned civilization, with plenty of places for the party (or other things) to hide at night. The adventure is described as "a horror swampcrawl" but I would recommend putting the emphasis on the horror rather than the crawl-- it's perfect for a one-shot or a picaresque interlude in a longer campaign, because the spatial relationships of it are less important than the horror you feel when you find out that something is hunting you in the woods.
What Worked?
- The escalating encounter die is a brilliant way to build tension and bring the adventure to a peak. Special mention goes to the "Signs of the Witch" table.
- Varied, creepy, weird, and dangerous encounters. They range from a foreshadowy social encounter to regular fights to weird mutant creatures to straight up metal album cover terror.
- Great art and photos that perfectly captured the feeling of the kind of wilderness that is described in the adventure.
What Didn't Work?
- I'd have liked to see the exploration procedure placed before the location table-- as it is, it can be a little confusing to grok how to actually use the adventure, so it would also have been nice for there to be a more detailed explanation of its intended use. I got there in the end though.
- The escalating encounter die does have a chance of escalating too quickly-- as written, it goes up to 2d6 after rolling a 6 or spending a night in a "haunt" (one of 8 creepy locations that can be explored), but it is not made clear how frequently a party will come across a haunt in their travels. So it is very possible that the Bark Witch could appear almost immediately after starting the adventure, which doesn't give you time to build up the horror. When I run it again, I will probably have a haunt be encountered only on a 2-in-6 chance or something like that, to allow for more camping out in the trees and pacing the escalation.
- I would have loved to have seen some art of some of the creatures on the Peculiar encounter table.
Final Thoughts
This was an absolute blast to run, especially once I got a feel for the flow of the procedure and was able to start slowly building up the dread. I ran it with only two players, and it felt like Butch and Sundance stumbling through a forest after taking mushrooms, with something on their heels that definitely wasn't the law. The Bark Witch herself is not given stats or a definitive description, but is instead presented as "whatever most frightens and challenges the PCs." After several spooky encounters related to the trees, one of the PCs was under the impression that it was the trees themselves that were after them, so I decided to take some inspiration from Pando, the Trembling Giant-- a grove of trees that are all the same organism, sharing one root system. The two cowpokes subsequently shat themselves and bolted away on their horses from the cursed tree roots erupting from all around them, tossing flaming bottles of booze behind them. Did they survive? Or are they still trapped in the forest, hallucinating the specifics of their escape? Or did I slip an X-Files reference into this mess too?
You can get "The Bark Witch of Carcass Country" from Walton Wood's itch page. Thanks for reading!