Eyes by the Roadside

A Community of Horrors...

You're barreling down the Old State Road just after midnight, the music is on and you can't stop thinking about the date you just went on. This one might be something serious. The way they smiled as they left your car... Just gives you chills. How long is long enough before you can send them a text?

Screeeeeeech

You snap back to yourself as you slam on the brakes, a cold shock ripples through you and your mind goes blank. Wordless fear, your heart hammering in your ears drowns out the music entirely. Eyes- too many eyes- stare at you unblinking, reflecting your headlights. Its feet look like a deer's, but your beams don't go up past its knees. 

Too many eyes...

A sound emits from it like a quiet bubbling laughter. It vanishes. Your hand brushes through your hair and your mind reels, unsure how to correlate what you've seen to your existing reality matrix. Then the eyes are behind you, in the rear-view reflecting your brake lights. Even more of them...

You slam on the accelerator and hear yourself screaming as you flee from impossible shapes flapping and jittering behind you. More gurgling laughter and sounds like drowning screams echo all around your car. You start skidding through the turns, you're taking them so fast. Then you hit one particularly tight corner just a little too fast and all you know is twirling, light, then dark, then light, headlights, a sound like exploding glass...

You awaken to an EMT's penlight in your eyes. You're strapped into a gurney with a neck brace on. They ask you questions you can hardly hear. Everything hurts so much. They promise you that you'll be fine and as they're closing you up into the ambulance you catch a glimpse of your upside down car flattened like a crushed soda can.

Then you hear gurgling laughter and some truncated screams of "WHAT THE FUH-!".

Then you see them. Too many eyes peeking into the ambulance's narrow windows...

Welcome Home...

Welcome to Eyes by the Roadside. This game is a communal storytelling and tabletop role-playing game of Midwestern gothic community horror. In it, you and your group of friends designs a Midwestern town with a dark and confusing history and a smorgasbord of bizarre folktales called "Oddities" which hint at a darker, more mysterious nature for the town than that which is readily suggested by its sleepy appearance.

Your group will explore an "Incident", a vague and confusing event which brings the characters together and suggests a terrible and imminent threat to them, the town, and/or their loved ones. Are the Oddities related to the Incident? Is the town's dark past repeating itself? What frightening echoes of the region's grim history are coming back to haunt the community?

The game works on a system of dice pools called Risk and Action dice, which encourages the players to push their limits and take risky actions in order to further the story. In effect, the game has a mechanical reinforcement for (or meta-explanation of) making all of those terrible decisions characters in horror movies and media tend to make.

Gather some friends, put on some spooky music, wait for the sun to go down, and build a troubled town full of creeps, cryptids, disappearances, and disasters. An in-depth Session 0 gets everyone involved and invested from the get-go, and helps give everyone at the table some creative control. A constantly-filling Tension Gauge keeps the action going and serves as a consequence for a group which takes on too much Risk too quickly. The rules themselves are simple, and all serve to keep the story moving and the mood tense.

Welcome home...