The Deer
Here's an encounter/event I wrote while doing some prep for my forestcrawl campaign.
A Deer stalks the party through the night, it's yellow eyes shining like lanterns in the dark, teetering on the edge of sight. It's skittish and almost preternaturally aware, always evading capture or poaching. Its presence becomes an omen.
There is a Witch inside the Deer. Watching. Following. The Witch wants to eat one of the party members. There is strenght in meat eaten raw and fresh.
The Deer can be caught by laying a well-hidden trap at the surroundings of a campsite, off trail. It cries in an awful screech, with a bleeding hind leg stuck to jaws snapped shut. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other.1 If the trapped Deer is inspected closer, a pair of yellow eyes can be seen glimering in the dark of Its throat.
If the Deer is eviscerated, the Witch will be exposed, lying in the belly of the beast. Covered heat to toe in blood and nothing else, her small body flops down powerlessly, not unlike guts spilled from the slaughter. Her face betrays an age that her height and build do not. Long, wet hair, and eyes of hornet-yellow, wildly aware, hungry.
If the Deer is left to it's own devices, it will not be long then: 1d4 days later, after the party makes camp, the character with the highest Wisdom will wake in the middle of the night. Paralyzed.
They watch the Deer approaching from the dark, regal and silent like some shadow given form. They will watch as it gets up, man-like, stretching its paws, unshackling it's jaw. They will watch the Witch inside crawling out, so gracefully as to not even rustle the leaves.
And she make her way to the edge of the campfire's glow, now. And how softly she lays her hands on their lips now, as to muffle the screams. And how quietly she crawls inside the body of another. And then, silence, as the night beckons the dawn again.
Next morning, it's like it's as if it never happened. There is no Deer, there is no Witch, there is not a drop of blood on the leaves. But they'll know the truth. They'll know.
XP freeze until they know, for a fact, that the Witch is dead.
I'm still on the fence about this one, and the implications for the gameplay, but I think it's pretty harmless to let the Witch crawl inside a hireling instead of a player character. It's also something I'll keep for when characters start delving deeper into the heart of the forest.
H.P. Lovecraft on "The Call of Cthulhu"↩