Beastmen of the North Country

The blog Phantoms and Monsters, which circulates stories of weird happenings and odd creatures, posted an article on the “wild man” of the North Country. It relates some of the stories told over the years, by native peoples and more recent arrivals, about Bigfoot-like creatures, often with a menacing taste for flesh, roaming both the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York and the Green Mountains of Vermont. I see the beginnings of more than a few scenario possibilities in the idea of ape-like carnivores coming down out of the hills to terrorize the populace. It also puts me in mind of a Call of Cthulhu game I played at OGC in 2007, where the characters were lost scions of the Martense family from Lovecraft’s The Lurking Fear.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dvs/ / CC BY 2.0

Or, suppose an old spur off the Long Trail, built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps and mysteriously dropped off the maintenance schedule a few years later, is officially reopened to use in the modern day. The PCs are all disparate hikers who happen to overnight together in a trail shelter. As dusk falls, a lone howl pierces the gloom. And then it’s joined by others.

Are the wild men merely aggressive carnivores looking for dinner? Or are they protecting something more, maybe an outpost of their society previously undisturbed by modern humanity?