Eyes by the Roadside

Eyes by the Roadside is a communal storytelling game and tabletop role-playing game about Midwestern towns fraught with horrors both supernatural and all too real. As a group you build a Midwestern community from the ground up, including its name, population, and history, and then fill it up with spooky folklore, shameful and confusing mysteries, and terrifying rumors. The group then puts together an inciting Incident which gets the game rolling and brings the characters together to investigate- and hopefully survive- the horrors of the town.

Is the Incident just the most recent manifestation of some darker truth about the town and its past? Or is it another brush with a dark demimonde beneath the surface of our natural reality?

Eyes by the Roadside features an innovative system of dice pools based around taking Risks in order to build up enough dice to survive the inevitable threat encounters, the moments when the darkness of the town swells to dangerous levels and the characters must think fast to survive. Each session can be handled by the same or a different GM, and as the story unfolds, each player will have plenty of opportunities to embellish and elaborate upon the town's many terrifying and vague mysteries.

Eyes by the Roadside is a complete, fully-functional beta of a final game. It is still in the middle of being playtested and is subject to occasional updates. Please contact me on twitter (@gahostan) or through my support email here if you have comments or questions! I'd love to hear from some players who aren't just at my tables. Also, if you like what you see, consider becoming a patron at https://www.patreon.com/mataramakesgames! Thanks so much for your support!

The game file available here is what could generously be called an ashcan draft. It is a direct .pdf download of the word processor document in which I wrote it. A much more professional-looking version is currently in production and will be released here (and on my patreon) within a couple months. An even more awesome version is in the works as well (one complete with spooky art and other gross goodies), and I'll make more information available about that at a later date.