Your Tuesday Dose of the Spooky: The Ruins of the Branch Davidian Carmel Center

Carmel Center Entrance

Entrance to what remains of the compound. Apparently if the gates are open, you’re allowed to go in.

It’s Tuesday again!  Time for your weekly dose of the Spooky, culled from around the web, the world, and life.  Every week I’ll have something new to send a shiver down your spine.

This week’s theme is the abandoned Branch Davidian Compound.

While exploring the area surrounding Waco, Texas for our Society expedition, we of course made a stop at the Branch Davidian compound.  What happened there is of course controversial, but I want to sidestep that discussion and focus on our exploration of the compound ruins.

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Your Tuesday Dose of the Spooky: Goatman’s Bridge

AltonBridge

It’s Tuesday again!  Time for your weekly dose of the Spooky, culled from around the web, the world, and life.  Every week I’ll have something new to send a shiver down your spine.

This week’s theme is Goatman’s Bridge.

Goatman’s Bridge is one of those local haunted treasures that seems like something out of a Stephen King novel.  It’s more or less the subversion of the Creepy Things That Seem Real But Aren’t trope; this is a Creepy Thing That Seems Fake But Isn’t.  The bridge known as “Goatman’s Bridge” is actually called Old Alton Bridge (sometimes it is also called Argyle Bridge), but local legend has forever superseded its original name.  Goatman’s Bridge has stood there spanning Hickory Creek on Copper Canyon Road since the King Bridge Company built the iron through-truss bridge in 1884.

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Your Thursday Dose of Apology: Goatman’s Bridge Edition

So I did get to go see Goatman’s Bridge, and I’d intended to have the post about the experience up by the Tuesday just passed.  Obviously I didn’t.  I only arrived home from Texas last night at midnight, and in about an hour I’m leaving for PAX, so I’ll just post it next week.

To those kids I met at the bridge, you can definitely expect a shoutout!

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Your Tuesday Dose of the Spooky: Creepy Black Figure Appears in the Sky and Leads to Goatmen

Satan visited El Paso on a Tuesday.

Satan visited El Paso on a cloudy day in July.

It’s Tuesday again!  Time for your weekly dose of the Spooky, culled from around the web, the world, and life.  Every week I’ll have something new to send a shiver down your spine.

This week’s theme is…strange.

Chalk this one up to the bizarre.  I’ve had a strange article sitting in my file for a few weeks now, waiting for the appropriate time to post it.  It being Tuesday, that time is now.  The trouble was, I didn’t have much to say about it.  I mean, it was suitably creepy looking, no doubt about that, but there wasn’t anything to talk about.  Until now.

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A Bit of Shameless Self-Promotion: “A Haunted Island,” now available on DriveThruRPG

A Haunted IslandA little shameless self-promotion here.  I recently published an RPG product called “A Haunted Island.”  Some of you might be thinking, “didn’t Algernon Blackwood write a short story by that name?”  Yes, yes he did.  Mr. Blackwood “collaborated” with me on this project.  By that I mean I took his story and modulized it for any RPG horror setting.  If you like what we do here at the Spooky Scary Skeletons Society, please consider taking a look, it would help us out a lot.

The module is on sale as a PWYW title through the end of August (after that it will be $3.75), so if you want to check it out, now’s the time!

From the storefront description:

Special Sale:

As this product launches our L line, we feel that it is appropriate to offer a special discount.  Therefore, for the month of August, this title will be “Pay What You Want.”  We want as many people to try the module out as possible, and we hope you like it.  If you download the module for free, please consider coming back to give us some money (if you liked it, of course).  We have other projects in the pipeline and we will be able to bring them to market more quickly if this product does well.

Literary Note:

This is a very special module, as it marks the first in our L line (you can guess what it stands for). This module is based on the short story “A Haunted Island,” by Algernon Blackwood. Because his works are now in the public domain, we have taken the liberty of writing this scenario “in collaboration” with Mr. Blackwood, to give you the product he would have delivered had he written RPG supplements in the early 20th century. The overall location, the central action, and the descriptive language are (mostly) Blackwood’s, in his own words wherever we could justify his style. The greater plot behind the island are ours; we hope Mr. Blackwood would have approved of the direction we took his story.

Scenario Description:

“A Haunted Island” will put your PCs straight into a classic ghost story:

A small group of characters spends a fortnight on an isolated island in order to rest after a particularly harrowing adventure, perhaps to catch up on some scroll scribing. The island in question is on the edge of a frontier only subdued in the last twenty years, with the prevailing barbarian tribes still very much extant, though now mostly confined to an empire-sanctioned reservation located fifteen miles from the island. They remain a fierce people, but after a bru-tal defeat by the empire a generation earlier they mostly keep to themselves, though they are free by treaty to hunt and fish in the forests and lakes near the island.

After a few days spent in relative peace and iso-lation, the PCs begin to experience an acute sensa-tion of fear when they wake up in their beds each morning. This sensation of fear heightens until they can no longer stand to repose in their beds, upon which they experience a phantom visitation.

A note about system:

This product is published as a “system-neutral” product. That means that any specific implementations of rules are left to the end user, and Gothic Roleplaying Accesso-ries makes no claims of compatibility with any existing roleplaying game system. We have done this both for legal reasons and to make our products available to a wider audience.


Tuttle, Joshua. “A Haunted Island.” Gothic Roleplaying Accessories, Inc, 2015. Digital PDF. <http://drivethrurpg.com/product/154143/A-Haunted-Island>

 

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