40 masks for secret cults

Recently in my campaign the players encountered a secret underground cult (as usual).

The gimmick is that all cultists wear different masks, so I came up with a bunch of them:

	1 Animal	2 Demon	3 Theatrical	4 Carnival
1	rat in a hat	horned god	young lover	gold frame
2	sinister cat	beak of horrors	rich old geezer	blue velvet
3	smiling pig	red with fangs	hag	frills and glitter
4	gnarling dog	three-eyed	comic relief	butterfly wings
5	raven with huge beak	iron teeth	single tear under left eye	comes with a veil
6	bat with bloody snout	completely flat; no face; red	cheated & angry	Cyrano de Bergerac
7	fish with feathers	mouth behind bars, Dr. Lecter	cuckolded husband	mirror surface reflects others
8	owl with bleeding eyes	blue with vertical mouth	distorted by pain	seductive silver eyelashes
9	wounded wolf	orange scales	happy face	crimson tears
10	deer, antlers sawn off	three tortured faces	ignorance is bliss	classic Venetian

Most masks are relatively simple, but expressive, hand-made by cult members. The masks don’t have big protruding parts, because they are meant to be worn while moving around in confined places (tunnels and dungeons), or while cavorting naked in the forest.

Animal masks are more or less identifiable natural animals.

Demon masks are nightmarish visions of carved wood and papier-mâché.

Theatrical masks are meant to represent a single emotion or a well-known character type from popular plays.

Carnival masks are halfmasks, covering the area of the eyes and nose. They were obtained in the city.

Downhill Race - a cheese-rolling contest minigame

Need a merry and possibly deadly folk festivity for your setting’s rural areas? Why not consider the famous Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling race at Gloucester?

I wrote up some rules for a minigame for a cheese-rolling contest player characters can enter, and, possibly, win.

There are two eerie alternative outcomes of the contest too, for that weird horror touch.

Download PDF

Have fun!!!

[Swamp '70] George Rodrigue paintings

The paintings of George Rodrigue (1944-2013), depicting life in rural Louisiana have an eerie, haunting quality to them... Definitely inspiring. Check out the site of Wendy Rodrigue (the artist's wife), it has background info on several paintings.

Aioli Dinner (1971)

Doc Moses, Cajun Traiteur (1974)

"A traiteur is a Cajun folk doctor with a special, inherited gift for healing one ailment. In George’s painting, Doc Moses heals earaches. He pours a ring of salt around the patient and touches his ears. Amazingly, only the healer must believe. The patient’s skepticism does not affect the cure." (source)

The Cajun Bride of Oak Alley (1974)

"In 1850, on the occasion of the simultaneous weddings of his two daughters, Durand’s slaves decorated the arboreal alley in a manner befitting his most eccentric nature. Prolific web-spinning spiders were brought in (some say from the nearby Atchafalaya Basin, others say from as far away as China) and were released in the trees to go about their arachnidan business. Then slaves went to their task of coating the dewy, billowing webs with gold and silver dust blown from bellows. And under this splendidly shimmering canopy proceeded the ethereal promenade of the wedding party and its two thousand guests." (source)