From Michael Curtis, the author for the adventure/setting:
You’re about to take a journey to a place that possesses both heartbreaking beauty and bone-chilling horror. A land filled with some of the kindest, goodly-hearted people you’ll ever have the pleasure of meeting as well as the blackest souls to ever wander the earth. A stretch of worn down hills and pine-shadowed hollows known as the Shudder Mountains.
The Shudder Mountains were born from an eccentric idea I had to pay homage to the works of Appendix N author, Manly Wade Wellman. My goal was to transform the rich culture and folklore of the Appalachian Mountains, so evocatively portrayed by Wellman in his Silver John series of stories, into the sword & sorcery genre.
Anyone familiar with Manly Wade Wellman’s John the Balladeer tales therefore understands why these stories resonate with me. Like the songs that John sings, these stories have their own unique music that speaks to the soul. They depict a land that feels both welcoming and foreboding, much like the mountains themselves; a place of laughter and shadow.
From the first time I read “O, Ugly Bird!” I knew Wellman was a kindred spirit. I’ve returned many times to the Appalachians he described, wandering along with John, that champion of good, as he confronted everything from conjure-men to demons to vampires, never tiring of either the plots or the way that Wellman paints the landscape with his choice of language. He remains to many the poet laureate of the Appalachians.
The Chained Coffin is an adventure I'd one day like to run, I think it would be an interesting and unique departure from the bog-standard fantasy settings with which most fantasy players are familiar.
That being the case, I ran across a really cool podcast site, Old Gods of Appalachia, mixing together some HPL-styled horror with Appalachian history and folklore. A link to the website can be found: HERE
Old Gods of Appalachia is an eldritch horror anthology podcast. Our world is an Alternate Appalachia, centered around the belief that the oldest mountains in the world were never meant to be inhabited. Long before anyone lived in these hills, beings of immeasurable darkness and incomprehensible madness were entombed beneath these hills.
It was during this bygone age, when the Appalachians towered much higher and more menacing than the slopes and ridges we know today, that they were conscripted after a great battle to serve as the final prison for these dark forces. But of course, time marches inexorably on.
Eons pass and the walls of the prison begin to wear thin. And Things that slumbered soundlessly below for millenia begin to stir and become restless. And they start to call to those who would hear them. They reached out across the shadowy abyss to the outcast, to the impoverished with nowhere else to go, to the frontiersman and the opportunist willing to kill and die for land and glory.
Then they called to the rich men with their gnashing machines and their devastating blasts to search. To dig. To seek and find. To follow and serve. To keep this dark and bloody land for ourselves and our masters.
Old Gods is set in an alternate or shadow Appalachia. An upside-down Appalachia, if you will. This world feels eerily similar to the hills and hollers we’ve grown up with. But there are some tell-tale differences. The names of towns and counties will be changed. Historical events will slide forward or backward in time. Our stories pass through hundreds of years of this Appalachia’s history.
To link our story to actual Appalachia, the nexus these first stories are based on actual disasters that occurred in the region, but these real events will also be changed, reshaped and altered on this side of the veil. No real names will be used for individuals who may have been connected to the real life inspirations for our stories. Any resemblance to actual persons is purely coincidental or the will of darker forces that we do not understand.