On Kickstarter now by the award-winning indie RPG designer Cassi Mothwin is a single-player journaling horror called Carved by the Garden.
Mothwin is known for What Crooked Roots, 15 folk-horror encounters for 5e and other successes might be why Carved by the Garden has smashed its $1,000 funding goal many times over. You can see the countdown tick dangerously on the pitch page.
On offer are seven character archetypes to play, and each play-through will be different. In fact, there are ten possible endings and 52 prompts to drag you towards that final destiny.
You can sample the folklore game with a free to download preview.
The system uses dice, cards, blocks, tokens, and journalling. Sound complex? It’s based on the very popular The Wretched by Chris Bissette.
You don’t need tarot cards, just playing cards, only need eight tokens, and you can use anything there, including other dice, but the hope is you can find something to represent nature, like stones.
The Tumbling Tower is trickier, but Cassi says Max Kammerer’s d100 dice roller or SnepShark’s work online. You’ll see straightaway how they work to capture the doom of a block tower being slowly whittled away.
The final game will print as an A5 zine of about 44 pages, using 70lb paper with a 10lb soft-touch cover. It contains more than 50 folk-horror prompts.
Those you live with offer a compromise.
Journal each day about your experiences. Those you live with promise they won’t read your journal unless there is a night you don’t come home. They beg you to be honest in your journal.
You agree.
But you wonder if they’ll ever believe what they might read.
You can support the indie project by sharing it on social media or offering cash. If you can contribute $14 or more, you’ll get three digital versions; PDF, ePUB and an HTML copy.
There’s worldwide shipping offered to those who can step up to $20 to get the physical copy of the game instead.
Signed copies are the reward at $65; beyond that, there are some special and limited deals.
The first limited tier is $100, which gets your name listed in the Old God credit section and the last at $130, more popular, and Cassi will burn three Jenga blocks with custom designs, one exclusive prompt and instructions on how to use those blocks.
The delivery, from digital to physical to burnt Jenga, is slated for November this year.
What do you think? Measured observations are welcome and you can leave them in the comment section below.
