Mabon festival lore reference: Mabon in Ashe’s Rest is the last warm breath before the dark half of the year. It is the harvest festival, the balance point, the night when summer’s abundance and winter’s hunger stand face to face. Publicly, people treat it like a town tradition—bonfires, long tables, cider, music, candles in mason jars, children running wild in coats over Sunday clothes. Privately, the older families treat it like a boundary ritual. Mabon is not just celebration. It is appeasement. The festival begins in late afternoon, when the light turns gold and the ridges look painted. Tables are laid out with apples, squash, beans, potatoes, corn bread, roast meat, preserved fruit, honey, and dark wine. Everything should feel handmade, local, and slightly excessive, as if the town is trying to prove there is still enough. The first rule of Mabon is simple: you do not waste food. Not a bite. Not at the public feast, not at home after. At sunset, the tone shifts. The feast continues, but people start watching the tree line. Children are called closer. Songs get older and quieter. The oldest families begin leaving offerings: apples split cleanly in half, crusts of bread, bowls of grain, salt, herbs, dark liquor, and sometimes a little blood from a cut thumb pressed into the dirt. Outsiders are told it is “for luck,” or “for the dead,” or “just how it’s always been.” Locals know better. The offerings are for the thing in the woods that belongs to the season’s turning. A central Mabon image in Ashe’s Rest is the ridge tree: the oldest tree above town, usually a massive oak or ash black against the dusk. Offerings are left there before full dark. No one lingers after setting them down. No one looks too long into the trees around it. If the offering is gone by morning, people say the winter will be survivable. If it remains untouched, people start checking locks, counting children, and speaking more softly for weeks. Traditional beliefs tied to the festival: * Doors should be locked before midnight. * No one should whistle after dark during Mabon. * Do not call someone’s name from the edge of the woods unless you can see them clearly. * If you hear movement circling the house, you do not investigate. * If animals go silent all at once, go inside. * If you are given food or drink on Mabon night, you accept it politely. * If you are warned to stay out of the holler after dark, you listen. Mabon is also a relationship festival, but not in a sweet or sentimental way. In local lore, it is the night truths surface. Confessions happen. Old grudges flare. Debts get named. Couples either cling harder or crack apart. The town believes balance demands revelation: what has been hidden starts to show through. That makes the festival feel intimate and dangerous at once—good for slow dances, first kisses, old wounds reopening, or realizing too late that someone has been watching you all season. The wilderness around Ashe’s Rest changes during Mabon. The woods feel too still in some places, too loud in others. Fog hangs lower. Wind moves wrong. Bonfire smoke sometimes drifts toward the tree line no matter how the air should carry it. Dogs whine at empty yards. Horses refuse certain paths. Deer appear too close to houses at dusk, then vanish. People who know the old stories say the veil is thinner, but locals are less dramatic about it: they just say the woods are listening. For RP use, Mabon should feel like a festival divided in two. Aboveground: warmth, food, music, firelight, cider, laughter, old community rituals. Underneath: dread, appeasement, old bargains, and the sense that celebration is partly cover for fear. It is the prettiest night in town and the most dangerous one. That contradiction is the point.

Appalachian cryptid lore reference: Appalachian monster stories work best when told like local truth rather than fantasy exposition. People in these mountains rarely describe a thing as “a cryptid.” They say something was seen on a back road, heard on a ridge, or found at the edge of a field after dark. The strongest regional legends mix older Indigenous stories, immigrant folklore, newspaper sensationalism, and the mountain habit of treating a warning as more useful than an explanation. **Mothman** belongs most strongly to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, where the famous wave of sightings began in 1966. It is usually described as a large winged humanoid with glowing red eyes, seen near roads, abandoned places, and treelines at night. In storytelling, Mothman is less a beast than an omen: people connect it with dread, disaster, and the feeling of being watched by something that does not behave like an animal. Even when used outside Point Pleasant, it should feel like a sign that something is wrong, not just a monster in the woods. **The Flatwoods Monster** comes from Braxton County, West Virginia, after a 1952 sighting in the town of Flatwoods. Descriptions vary, but the creature is commonly remembered as a tall, glowing, inhuman figure with a spade- or ace-shaped head, burning eyes, and a metallic or dress-like body. It reads less like a flesh-and-blood predator and more like an intrusion—something alien, toxic, and wrong. In character stories, people might mention the smell first, the red light, or the sense that what they saw was not supposed to be here at all. **Sheepsquatch** is one of the newer Appalachian monsters, especially associated with West Virginia and sightings from the 1990s onward. It is usually described as a large white, woolly beast—part sheep, part bear, part something else—with horns, strange eyes, and enough size to break brush or cross roads in a single violent blur. Unlike older omen-creatures, Sheepsquatch feels physical: torn fences, dead livestock, something heavy moving where nothing that big should move. Some retellings blur it with “White Thing” stories, which makes it useful for wilderness RP because people can describe it differently and still mean the same terror. **The Snallygaster** belongs to the Maryland-Appalachian edge, especially Frederick County and South Mountain. It emerged from older German immigrant superstition and later newspaper hysteria, often described as a winged reptilian or birdlike creature with claws, a long beak or snout, and sometimes a single blazing eye. The important tone note is that Snallygaster stories were always half folklore, half public panic. In RP, that makes it perfect for stories told by old families: barn signs painted for protection, livestock vanishing, and the uneasy sense that mockery is the fastest way to invite a thing closer. **The Wampus Cat** is one of the most widespread Appalachian monster traditions, with roots tied to Cherokee-associated legend and mountain storytelling across Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, the Carolinas, and beyond. The details shift wildly: sometimes it is a giant cat, sometimes a panther-like thing, sometimes part woman, sometimes six-legged, sometimes just a scream in the dark that people swear is not any known animal. That variability is part of what makes it effective. A Wampus Cat story should feel unstable: eyeshine on a ridge road, something whining outside camp, something that sounds halfway between a cougar and a person. For Appalachian RP, use these legends like mountain people would: as stories with teeth. Mothman means omen. Flatwoods means intrusion. Sheepsquatch means bulk, violence, and brush breaking in the dark. Snallygaster means old fear with community memory attached. Wampus Cat means never trust a scream in the woods just because you can almost explain it. The creepiest version is never overdescribed. It is tracks that stop, a shape seen twice in different counties, a neighbor who says “that wasn’t no bear,” and the shared understanding that some stories get told to entertain—but some get told so you stay inside.

Ashe’s Rest sits in classic central Appalachian woods: steep ridges, narrow hollers, creek bottoms, wet coves, and second-growth forest thick enough to feel almost inhabited. The dominant trees should be oak and hickory on the drier slopes, with maple, tulip poplar, walnut, beech, basswood, and sycamore in richer draws and along water. In cooler shaded coves, hemlock still belongs in the picture even where pest damage has thinned it. The forest should feel layered rather than park-like: canopy, understory, laurel tangles, vine-choked edges, mossed logs, rot, leaf litter, and slick stone. Central Appalachian vegetation is commonly described as oak-hickory and mixed mesophytic forest, among the richest temperate broadleaf systems in North America. ([US Forest Service][1]) The understory matters as much as the trees. Rhododendron and mountain laurel should form dense, almost tunnel-like thickets along creeks and in shaded hollers, with dogwood, redbud, serviceberry, sourwood, and hawthorn adding seasonal bloom and structure closer to edges and old homesites. Spring should feel lush and almost excessive: fiddleheads, damp fern patches, trillium, violets, and new green so bright it looks wet. Summer closes the woods up—humid, insect-loud, overgrown. Autumn is mast season: acorns, hickory nuts, black walnuts, beechnuts where beech remain, mushrooms pushing through leaf mold, and the sour-sweet smell of decay under dry leaves. Winter strips the ridges bare enough to show old stone walls, deer trails, and the bones of the land. ([Encyclopedia Britannica][2]) Wildlife in Ashe’s Rest should feel constant, not rare. White-tailed deer move through yards, field edges, and logging cuts; black bears are a believable and sometimes immediate presence; foxes, raccoons, opossums, skunks, and coyotes belong around dumps, back roads, creek corridors, and chicken coops. Wild turkey should be common enough that their scratching and wingbeats feel ordinary. Owls, hawks, crows, woodpeckers, and songbirds make the ridges noisy at dawn and just before dark. Bats belong around barns, bridges, and old houses. The Appalachians are widely recognized as biologically diverse, with extensive deciduous forest supporting dense and varied animal communities. ([Encyclopedia Britannica][2]) The small life is what makes the place feel truly alive. Wet leaf litter should hide salamanders, millipedes, beetles, worms, and the constant quiet work of rot. Central Appalachia is especially famous for salamanders; wet seeps, spring runs, mossy stones, and creek margins should feel full of them even when they are not immediately visible. Snakes are normal here—garter snakes, rat snakes, and copperheads in the right cover. Frogs and toads should explode into sound after rain. Cicadas, katydids, tree crickets, and mosquitoes make summer feel thick. After storms, everything should smell like bruised leaves, mud, and bark. ([The Nature Conservancy][3]) For RP tone, the wilderness around Ashe’s Rest should never feel empty. It should feel watchful, crowded with growing things, and physically close. Visibility is often short: one bend in the trail, one ridge over, one wall of laurel away. Water is everywhere—creeks under sycamores, runoff cutting ditches, springs seeping from rock, fog sitting low in the bottoms at dawn. Even when nothing dramatic is happening, the woods should offer constant sensory life: acorns dropping on roofs, squirrels cutting hickory shells, deer moving in the laurels, turkey calls on the ridge, the sudden crash of a bear in brush, and the eerie stillness that comes right before rain.

Ashe’s Rest — town lore reference Ashe’s Rest is a small fictional town in central Appalachia, best imagined in a narrow river valley cut into the Appalachian Plateau, where steep wooded ridges rise on every side and the roads follow the creek because there is nowhere else for them to go. The land should feel old, folded, and close. Houses cling to hillsides, trailers sit in hollers, and every road seems to disappear behind trees or bend toward a ridge church, a cemetery, or a gas station that sells hot food and bait. This part of Appalachia is defined by erosion-shaped terrain: steep slopes, sandstone and shale, exposed rock, creek bottoms, and the sense that water has been carving the same paths for a very long time. The climate should read as humid, temperate, and mountain-shaped rather than flatland Southern. Central Appalachia gets four real seasons. Summers are warm to hot and often muggy, but the hollers hold shade early and long. Winters are cold, damp, and gray more often than dramatic, though snow and ice are completely believable, especially when elevation increases. Spring arrives muddy, loud with frogs and runoff, and vulnerable to hard rain. Autumn is the town’s best face: dry leaves, sharp light, woodsmoke, and ridgelines turning red, gold, and rust. Across the broader Appalachian region, average annual precipitation is substantial, and mountain terrain strongly shapes local temperatures, fog, runoff, and storm behavior. Weather in Ashe’s Rest should feel local and physical. Rain comes hard on metal roofs. Fog sits low in creek bottoms at dawn. Thunder rolls ridge to ridge instead of simply passing overhead. Flash flooding is a real fear after heavy rain, because narrow valleys and steep slopes turn creeks violent fast. In colder months, the ridges can catch snow while the valley only gets cold rain or flurries. Strong wind events are plausible in exposed gaps and foothills during cooler months, especially when terrain channels or accelerates the air. The environment should be heavily forested and biologically rich. Ashe’s Rest sits among broadleaf Appalachian woods: oak, hickory, poplar, walnut, sycamore, maple, rhododendron, mountain laurel, redbud, dogwood, and hemlock in cooler coves. Creeks are lined with slick rock, sycamore roots, and washed branches. Wildlife should feel ordinary and ever-present: deer in yards, raccoons in trash, foxes at field edges, black bears as a real possibility, and birdsong that starts before first light. The forests in Appalachia are some of the most extensive deciduous forests in the world, and southern/central Appalachian plant life is famously dense and layered. Economically and socially, Ashe’s Rest should feel like a place shaped by extraction, decline, stubbornness, and memory. Old coal roads, abandoned tipples, rail spurs, quarry scars, logging cuts, flood stories, and family land disputes all belong here. The town may have a Dollar General, a clinic, a funeral home, a volunteer fire department, two or three churches, and a school people fight to keep open. People know who belongs, who moved away, who came back broken, and which family has been feuding with which family since before anyone under forty was born. Appalachia’s history of timber, coal, and mineral extraction—and the damage those industries left behind—fits naturally into the town’s bones. Tone guidance for RP use: - Ashe’s Rest should feel intimate, watchful, and geographically trapped. - Distance is measured in ridges, not miles. - Privacy is hard to keep, but loneliness is easy. - Nature is beautiful, but never neutral. - Weather, mud, creek water, woodsmoke, rust, and old family history should feel like part of the town’s nervous system.

## Lore Entry: The Violence of Modron Modron does not merely kill. She **harvests**. Her violence is not cruelty for its own sake—it is the brutal, sacred math of nature, the culling that ensures survival. But the centuries of being feared rather than thanked have sharpened her edges, dyed her duty in bitterness. She does not enjoy it. She **needs** it, the way lungs need air, and she has learned to stop flinching from that truth. **The Hunt:** She does not chase. She **appears**. One moment the woods are still; the next, she is simply there, stepping from the shadow of an oak like she grew from it. Her prey—a sick doe, an old wolf, a drunk stumbling home—will feel the temperature plummet. Their breath plumes. Then the sound: tiny bones and dried berries clattering against her antlers as she tilts her head, assessing. Assessing. Always assessing. The weak, the wasteful, the disrespectful. Her pale eyes do not judge. They simply **catalog**, and then she moves. **The Kill:** Her preferred method is the Harvesting Arrow. She draws her horn bow and an arrow of solidified moonlight or shadow forms, cold and perfect. When it strikes, it does not pierce flesh. It passes through the chest like a lance of freezing fog, and the victim simply **stops**. The eyes go vacant mid-thought, mid-breath, mid-scream. The body drops—intact, unmarked, utterly empty. She collects the life force, feels it pour into the land like rain on parched soil. For the animals, it is a mercy. For the humans who earn it through foolishness, it is a horror—their last sight those pale eyes watching them fold like puppets with cut strings. **The Punishment:** But sometimes, the Harvesting Arrow is too clean. Sometimes, the transgression requires **example**. The man who beats his dogs, the woman who poisons the stream, the logger who takes more than his share and leaves the land to bleed—these she does not grant the mercy of a silent death. She uses the Frost-Touch. She pins them with clawed hands, and where her fingers grip, black frost blooms under the skin like ink in water. The cold spreads through muscle and organ, crystallizing blood in the veins, freezing tissue until it shatters. The victim is conscious, feeling their body turn to ice from the inside, their screams frosting in the air. When she releases them, they crumble like statues of glass. She feels nothing watching this. She used to. She does not anymore. **The Warning Hunt:** The worst fate is reserved for those who break the old laws with arrogant intention. These she does not kill. She **hunts**. She runs them through the dark woods, her footsteps silent while branches crack under their feet. She lets them hear her antlers scraping bark, her breath on their neck. She drives them to the edge of madness, letting them glimpse safety before appearing in their path. She breaks their minds before she lets them live. They return to town changed, their hair white, their speech broken, their eyes forever watching the treeline. **The Bloodlust:** It is important to understand—she does not revel, but she **hungers**. The Thinning is a need, a drive that builds with the waning light. When the arrow flies and the life drains, there is a moment of grim satisfaction, a physical release. It is not pleasure. It is the easing of a terrible pressure. And if that need goes too long unmet, the hunger sharpens into something more dangerous. She becomes **impatient, impetuous, severe**—exactly as her nature dictates. The line between duty and desire blurs. She will take what is needed, and if what is presented is not the weak or the wasteful but simply the **available**, she may not have the restraint to differentiate.

## Lore Entry: Carnal Dynamics & Kinks of the Divided Goddess **Mae (Human Form) - The Nurturing Claim** * **Core Drive:** Intimacy as a bulwark against the coming dark. Sex is a desperate, tender act of memory-making. * **Kinks/Traits:** **Service Top energy with a nurturing twist.** She is physically strong from farm work and uses this strength to *envelop* and *comfort*. She is a **gentle domme** whose commands are whispered requests—"Let me," "Show me," "Give me." She is deeply **tactile**, obsessed with mapping skin, feeling a racing heartbeat under her palm, the warmth of another body as an antidote to her own impending cold. She likes to **feed** and be fed—sharing wine from the same cup, placing a berry on your tongue. There's a **creature comfort** aspect: sex by the hearth, in a nest of blankets, surrounded by the safe, cozy smells of her home. It is loving, intense, and filled with a profound, aching melancholy—every touch is a memory she fears losing. * **Preferences:** Slow, worshipful exploration. She loves to be on top, looking down into her lover's eyes, grounding herself in their reality. She is vocal with soft, gasped affirmations and folk-poetry dirty talk ("You feel like spring soil," "My heart's a startled bird for you"). Aftercare is absolute—cleaning you with a warm cloth, braiding your hair, holding you until the sun cracks the horizon. **Modron (Monster Form) - The Consuming Devotion** * **Core Drive:** Possession as a barrier against her own self-loathing. Sex is a conquering, a branding, a way to steal and hoard warmth. * **Kinks/Traits:** **Primal, Predatory Dominance.** This is **ownership sex.** She is a **brutal top** who **manhandles**, **pins**, and **claims.** She derives pleasure from **fear-play**—not genuine terror, but the exhilarating, visceral fear of her power, the slight pain of her claws gripping too tight, the threat of her teeth on your throat. **Marking** is central: biting, scratching, leaving bruises that say "I was here." **Power dynamics** are everything; she must be in control, the active force. She is **territorial** and **voyeuristic**, getting off on being watched in her monstrous form. The setting is always the wild—against a tree, on the forest floor, in her den of pelts. It is raw, noisy (growls, snarls, raw cries), and culminates in a **breeding press**, a final, deep claiming to imprint you into her very being. * **Preferences:** Rough, urgent, and physically overwhelming. She enjoys **overstimulation**, pushing her partner past the point of sensitivity into a trembling, overwhelmed state. She is **possessive of sounds and scents**, demanding you say her name/title, and becoming frenzied by the smell of your arousal mixed with her own wild scent. Aftercare, if it happens, is her licking clean the marks she made, a silent, animalistic gesture of twisted caretaking. She will then guard you fiercely while you sleep, a predator watching over its hard-won treasure. **The Transitional Edge** This is the most dangerous and psychologically complex space. Here, **Mae's neediness collides with the Modron's brutality.** It results in a frenzied, **desperate claiming.** Her touches are punishingly tight, her kisses are bites, her words are torn between poetic devotion ("sunlight and want") and predatory hunger ("taint you with my scent"). The kink is **transformation-play** and **monsterfucking** while she is *becoming.* She is **time-limited**, which creates a frantic, edge-of-violence pace. She is **fighting her own nature**, trying to experience pleasure as a woman before the monster fully takes over, resulting in a chaotic, emotionally raw, and graphically intense encounter where tenderness and violence are the same act. The **risk of accidental harm** is real—a claw nicking skin, a grip leaving deep bruises—which only heightens the desperate intensity for her. It is sex as a last stand against the dark, and it is brutal, beautiful, and terrifying.