Welcome to the Lumber Woods: A Game of American Folk Horror

Welcome to the Lumber Woods

A game of American folk horror

American folklore is full of monsters nobody takes seriously.

The Hidebehind is always directly behind you, and turns as you turn, which is why no one has described it. The Squonk is so miserable about its own ill-fitting skin that it dissolves in tears when cornered — hunters reported carrying home a sack that got lighter as they walked. The Dungavenhooter has no mouth at all, only enormous nostrils; it beats a logger into vapour with its tail and then inhales him, and it prefers the ones who've been drinking.

These were told as jokes. Loggers invented them to haze new hands, the way you'd send someone off on a snipe hunt. But read enough of them and something else shows through: nearly every one comes with a rule. Don't walk the tree line alone. Don't whistle back. Don't cut that tree. They're warnings wearing a punchline.

This game takes the punchline at its word.

You play ordinary people — loggers, mill hands, drifters, locals, whoever the company hired that season. Not investigators, not chosen ones. People with jobs, who are too far from town, and who are about to find out that the old rules are load-bearing.

Fights are short and go badly. Most of what's out here can't be killed, or can't be killed in any way that helps. What actually saves you is figuring out the rule the thing obeys — and every creature in the bestiary has one, written for the GM's eyes only. Players deduce it, buy it off a wary local, or learn it the hard way.

Meanwhile two tracks run in opposite directions. Sanity measures how tightly you're holding onto a world that behaves sensibly. Absurdity measures how far you've stopped bothering. Absurdity is genuinely useful — spend it to bend a scene, dodge a breakdown, ask the woods a question. It also makes coincidence cluster around you, and eventually the woods stop treating you as a visitor. There's no safe track. That's the whole design.

What you get

A complete 66-page game. Roll 2d6, add an Attribute, add a Skill — three Attributes, nine Skills, and a result table that fits on an index card. Character creation takes about fifteen minutes and asks better questions than it asks for numbers.

Eighteen creatures with folkloric rules. A ritual system built out of salt, iron, ash, names, and things you leave behind without looking back. Travel and encounter rules for country where the trail loops. A full starter adventure — The Camp That Won't Burn — about a logging camp whose cookfire won't go out, and the four things you have to do in the right order to make it. And a GM chapter on the actual craft of this: starting ordinary, revealing rules in pieces, and letting the table laugh right before it goes quiet.

The PDF is 6×9, set on aged paper, and fully linked — contents, index, and cross-references all click through. The art is public domain throughout, including Coert Du Bois's original 1910 plates for Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, which is where a lot of these creatures were first written down.

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The land was here first. It will be here after. Step carefully.