Description
Those you live with are worried for you.
Every day you wander into the woods… alone. When you return at dusk, a wild shadow lingers about you.
Those you live with wish to stop you.
But their efforts have proved useless. You always find a way into the woods again.
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.
Carved By The Garden is a dark, folk horror solo journaling RPG. What pulls you to the woods? Mystery? Freedom? Transformation? Or were you called? Lured? Perhaps something very old and very hungry wishes you to disappear into the trees, never to return.
Created with the Wretched and Alone system, Carved by the Garden all but guarantees stress, strife, fear, and, perhaps, the tiniest sliver of hope before your eventual downfall. Draw from a deck of playing cards to determine the action. A tumbling tower tracks your energy and a handful of tokens (stones? wood chips? bone fragments?) track your progress. In your journal, you’ll tell your story. Document the final days of your life before the woods claim you.
Includes 52 prompts (one for every card in a standard deck), 10 possible endings, and 7 character archetypes.
- PLAY IT IF: you enjoy storytelling RPGs, you want to create your own lore, you relish the unexplained, you love media like The Witch, The Ritual, that episode of The X-Files where Mulder and Scully get kidnapped by a mushroom, and the Search and Rescue r/nosleep series
- SKIP IT IF: you prefer stat-based character creation, you want to roll against skills for outcomes, you dislike folk horror tropes (paranoia, loss of self, the occult, the paranormal, animal phobias)
- Requires a deck of playing cards, one d6 die, eight tokens, a tumbling block tower, and a way to record your story
- A5 size, 40-pages, soft-touch color cover with B&W interior
