The Story
Your village struggles to survive. Crops are difficult to grow and unfortunately hunting and fishing produces little food. Year after year there are more and more mouths to feed. You must take every measure possible to gather food, especially in the months leading up to winter.
Near your village there is a forest, which your long ago ancestors dubbed the “Forbidden Forest.” Every generation of villagers has learned to stay away from this forest. It is strange, dangerous, and every year dozens of villagers mysteriously disappear after foolishly wandering into these woods. Some say the trees speak to each other and move. Some say that an evil spirit dwells there and will curse any who set foot amongst its trees. Children in the village keep each other up at night with scary stories of how the forest even has the power to change men into wolves…wolves with the uncontrollable urge to slaughter and eat human flesh.
Why not just stay away, you ask? Well, for three nights a year, when the moon is at its fullest and at its highest point in the sky, the forest suddenly teems with the biggest, fattest deer the village has ever seen. Hunters toil month after month, waiting for these three nights when even the worst hunter can still manage to kill and bring home two or three cartloads of the juiciest venison imaginable. These three nights of the year are so important to the survival of the village that the warnings from the elders go unheeded and the superstitious rumors are ignored…for better or worse.
Idea of the Game
The players take on the part of the hunting party that has been sent into the Forbidden Forest and has just completed a successful night of hunting. The players are either deemed HUNTERS, who must hack and clear paths out of the woods in search of the way back to the village; or they are WEREWOLVES, who appear as men or women, but have a serious bloodlust lurking just under the surface. The WEREWOLVES try to sabotage the party by trying to put obstacles into the HUNTERS’ path. It is the goal of the WEREWOLVES to trap the HUNTERS in the forest, cutting off their way home, in order to tire them out and to kill them. The HUNTERS’ goal is to get home. The members of each group should support each other, once they figure out who is on their side. If the HUNTERS manage to create a path to the cave which leads back to the village, they are duly rewarded with deer carcasses, while the WEREWOLVES are left without food. However, should the HUNTERS fail, the WEREWOLVES can rise up and are rewarded with human carcasses. After three rounds (the three nights of hunting), the player with the most carcasses (human or deer) wins.
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