Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found On Itch.io…Carver’s Ridge

FORMATING

A wilderness horror adventure by Dungeon Crab, level not desired, but 1-3...
Written for any number of systems (so none at all)
   There’s something about horror writers, man. I know one guy who writes horror and has his stuff together, but by and large they’re a ramshackle bunch, prone to make crazed DIY art projects linked by madness and silly-string. This one’s FORTY-FOUR PAGES LONG and loaded with colorful  public-domain art, weird slanted text, and snarky writing. It’s completely insane. I’m not sure if it even counts as an adventure, but it was free and on itch.io, so I’m going to make an attempt.
   This is called a pointcrawl, not a plot, and that’s, um…correct. Our basic setup is that we have a mysterious national park amidst the Cascades in Washington, Carver’s Ridge, a lonely place full of disappearances and mysteries. Absent an overriding plot, we are instead provided a big pile of potential characters (DREAD-inspired) with individual goals, a bunch of locations filled with quests, and a complex set of encounter tables that all pull toward “The Call”, a kind of psychological/spiritual effect that gradually drives players insane while they interact with encounters…basically, there’s this song that makes you go toward getting lost in the wilds, eventually going completely “Missing 411”. There’s 44 pages here, so you could run tons of sessions here, but I am a little unsure about what the goals here would be. Every horror story has to answer the basic question, “why don’t they just leave?” There’s not a lot compelling everyone to stick around after Dave gets turned into a missing persons report, outside of “players want to play”. Not great there.
   Details are all over the map. Trails are dotted with weirdness, getting increasingly odd as you go south and west. There’s a summer camp, Camp Lackmore, that’s a ramshackle reformatory. There’s a decaying gas-and-diner as the only major hub of civilization. There’s an old firewatch tower that’s a bit haunted. There’s an old army base with an elk-monster living in it. There’s a decaying manor in the middle of nowhere. There’s an anomalous factory that’s a straight-up SCP. And there’s a massive network of caves that link all these places…yeah it’s a lot.
   Let me be the first to admit that there’s a lot of what I liked among these details. The summer camp in particular is a standout big of setting-writing, both humorous and mildly horrific, with the camp owners as an oddball couple and the counselors as a mix of layabouts and enthusiasts running four different lodges each with their own strange rituals and customs. Great. There are moments of writing that genuinely made me laugh, despite not normally being a fan of Millennial snark, but guy did a good job. There’s also some nice moments of horror writing, like with the recurrent theme of human teeth lodged in a tree. It’s got some definite levers to play with. I like the UV trail markers for the most remote trails.
   …unfortunately, what could be improved more than anything else is TIE THESE THNGS TOGETHER MORE. There’s no through-line here, and some of the stuff, in particular that weirdo factory is just out-of-context and screams “I’ve been reading SCP Archive”, not “spooky stuff in the woods”. The manor is similar, although I do know there are some surprising gothic ruins scattered around the Pacific Northwest from the early 1900’s. Monsters are also a little too lolrandom in places…creepy imagery, good, but a central point is better. Maps outside of the trail maps are of the “abstracted boxes-and-lines” variety, which is always strictly inferior to real maps.
    Finally, not enough sasquatch.
   The best use case is going to be “read as a fun creepypasta”. There are several times where I genuinely enjoyed the act of reading on this one, which is admirable. Using bits and bobs from this as inspiration for a focused lost-in-the-woods horror scenario could definitely be done, but it’d take a heck of a lot of work so I’m not sure if I can recommend it for that.
   Final Rating? **/***** because we’re in the business of reviewing adventures here, not creative writing exercises. I admire what was done in a lot of places around here but I don’t think this fundamentally works as an adventure.

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Map is...atmospheric.