Blood and Bark

A surreal mini-sandbox adventure of woods that are not a wood at all 

 

They call it The Wolf Woods. No wolves have been known to roam it but the trees shift and travellers vanish. Sometimes they are found, picked clean to the bone. Still, no howls are heard on the wind. Yet the name is more accurate than they know.

The truth is the wood is not a wood at all. The towering black pines are furry legs of Sepnir, outcast from both the heaven above and the dark below. Once the terror of the land, he was tricked into being chained to the earth and now he is little more than a corpse. The ‘trees’ are his many skeletal legs, some still with clumps of fur. But his consciousness has not passed away. He can still haul his bones just enough for the ‘trees’ to shift and the paths to be lost. But chained to the earth, he cannot stray far and his hunger never dissipates. His body has died, sapped of all strength by the chain, but the right meal can change that and he knows it.

 Blood and Bark is a mini-sandbox adventure I wrote for an 8 page adventure design contest with a 'winter wonderland' theme. You say winter wonderland, I say primeval wolf-forest with hallucinogenic blood-sap.

 It is technically systemless but may have an illusion or two to a 'move' so probably works best with Dungeon World or your OSR ruleset of choice if you're comfortable enough to come up with stats on the fly. That is, if you actually try and play it (which, full disclosure, I have yet to attempt).

You might like it if...

• Giant ticks that can explode in a shower of tainted wolf blood need to be in your next session.
• A comb that summon witch ghosts who replaced their vocal cords with stone so they could speak with Death is the magic item you always needed but never knew you wanted (until now).
• You need another badass old, one-armed (probably immortal) smith with armour that is literally a NPC.
• Incorporeal sparrows that eat sorrow until you are the friendliest (and most foolhardy) adventurer around sound like your kind of character progression.
•  You just want to see what happens when I get carried away and fill 8 pages with vaguely Norse, mostly strange ramblings based around the improbable concept that a giant, multi-legged wolf could resemble a forest.

If anyone of those sound agreeable, you can download it for free (though comments/feedback are a welcome form of payment) and check out the original contest and other entries on RPGGeek.com

God bless,
Kezle