Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…The Witches of the Devil’s Hills

An adventure by David Dudka, levels irrelevant
Written for oneshot rpg
   Welcome to horror season, let's get spooky.
  Well this thing is visually unpleasant. It’s…enthusiastic, looking like someone’s very best effort at making a near website in 1997. Single column, lots of public domain art, generous-but-weird margins, thick blocky font. Despite being a complete mess visually the writing itself is competent and reasonably clear, which is good because this twenty-six-page monster is a social adventure high on setting flavor and a lot of Scooby-Do mystery solving. As always with these things a timeline would be helpful but if rides were beggars then horses would wish.
   As for our story…well, it’s 1600’s Vermont, which is technically not New England but rather New France, but mostly we’re still trading on Salem vibes, just with a slightly Catholic twist. Your party is a group of 17th Century Delta Green Agents, basically, who get sent on a mission by the governor to a little village deep in the titular Devil’s Hills. On the way you bump into some effigies with rotting deer hearts in the place of heads, a nasty supernatural attack of hungry wolves, and then its off to the town where five witches are in the slammer awaiting execution by burning. In a bit of refreshing authenticity over half the accused witches are men, but in a dull bit of predictability the real witches were The Man all along (it’s the village elders, of course). Figure things out or not, it’s time to bumble into the ending set piece where a demon of hunger goes on a rampage along with a third of the town who turn into hungry zombie-ghouls. Survive and it’s job well done, my flintlock friends.
   At this weird little product’s very best, what I liked was The Village feeling conveyed by the environment and visuals. Movie as a whole was a bit of a letdown, but the vibes were impeccable. James Newton-Howard’s soundtrack was wonderful:

​   Some of the horror imagery is well done, with a sacrificed horse turning into the illusion of a grand feast that PCs eat if they fail their saves, while those that succeed witness their fellows eating the entrails of the horse corpse. That’s some strong horror. Flavors of the witch accusations are over-the-top but also convey a nice message of “witch panic”. Mood is decent.
   That means what can be improved can be, well, improved. The writer can manage that level of horror at some junctures, so the fact that most of the set-pieces are very meh is a little disappointing. I know it’s a horror one-shot, and those don’t usually trade high on player agency, but there really could be a more free-floating investigatory section in the middle, complete with the Dyson Logos village map and everything else. Give a mass of character sheets, a timeline, and the map and you could have had this all a lot more organic. Wonky visual design getting fixed would be good too.
   I’ll grant a best use case as “autumnal horror one-shot”. Not a lot of individual bits and pieces to use beyond that sacrificed horse feast horror.
   Final Rating? **/***** feels slightly generous but this module at least tries here, so I’ll take that are something.

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