Fucking terrifying forests thread

Fucking terrifying forests thread

Other urls found in this thread:

searchandrescuewoods.tumblr.com./
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

searchandrescuewoods.tumblr.com./

Well that shit is terrifying

This game has the ability to get under your skin in ways you would never expect.

The name is Knock-Knock.

What is it about woodlands and forests at night that makes them so terrifying? Is it some sort of primal instinct, left over from times before our ancestors mastered fire and were at the mercy of the darkness?

>What is it about woodlands and forests at night that makes them so terrifying?
Well, I guess forests were a bit of a predator's wet dream in the past. When you have open plains, if there's moonlight you can still see pretty far and spot danger. But in forest, you ain't gonna see shit, really. And since we are so heavily vision-oriented animals, I guess that is where the primordial fear of night forest comes from.

Pray tell

>Pray tell
It's a "cutesy" cartoonish "horror" game that will never really make you feel particularly scared when you are playing it.
But it has a tendency to induce nightmares and severe anxiety, often without the player realizing before he quits the game. I'm still not entirely sure how the game does it (and it obviously does not work on everyone), but I suspect it's a clever combination of art direction and completely fucked up and very unclear game rules that induce a certain state of anxiety and uncertainity that other games just don't really do.

It's a game where you seriously don't know what is happening: not just story wise, but mechanic wise too. And that does unpleasant things to people.

>After taking a fairy tales course, I learned how the versions Grimms, Disney and others wrote down congealed what were dynamic oral stories, in which characters and dangers were freely swapped according to the boredom of your audience. In most tales, only two elements were constant and immune to anything: the narrator and the florest.

>I combined those into the Ent Narrative: the combined talking and description of countless sentient trees, shaping their territory through a form of true word magic.

>They covered the entire continent, and kept the young humanoid races in the paleolithic so that they would never become a threat as the primordial race they descended from was.

>Accepting gifts, food and water, interacting with the feyfolk, all were ilusionary ways of enthralling mortals into the Narrative, dissolving their individuality. Fey do not live or die, they just pop and are gone as the Ents tell it so.

>The continent 'Culture Heroes', the Unmaginables, contested this, created space for mortal expansion, for nomads to become sedentary farmers, to writing to be. They also were the archetype from which all adventurers are based on.

>Farms needed that trees be cut down, writing something made it resistant to the Narrative.

>The Ents lost most of the continent, until they created a river to divide feyland from any other land, the 'Liminal Border' which usually marks enchanted forests.

>The Unmaginables' bloodlines provide the blood catalyst that makes iron into cold iron, the most horrifying poison to fey.

>Full of grief, loss and hate, they made a weapon from such bloodlines: the orc.

I like forests at night.

I remember doing a stealth exercise when I was a cadet in a forest in the middle of the night.

>pitch black but my night vision has kicked in
>only other person with me was hiding on the other side of the tree to me perfectly silent
>it was raining
>breeze blowing through the trees

So peaceful, other than the light rain and breeze there were no sounds. Moist clean air, all senses save sight barely picking up on anything.

How I was hidden anyone passing through unaware that someone was there would never spot me. Probably even if they had a light they'd not notice me.

Inspiration for a forest ambush in a game? Rain and breeze loud enough to mask sound, darkness enough to mask movement?

Honestly I like being outdoors at night even by myself, I've gone for long walks with no torch out in woodland and countryside before. Being indoors at night is what I don't like.

>A orc is like a gorilla, a morloc or a Frazetta's beastman, hairy, ugly and beastly,, except for: their scar tissue is made of bone; their bones accumulate the iron they digest; this iron is metabolized into cold iron; an orc corpse will scab over wounds and become a womb for a new litter.

>Over time a orc becomes naturally armed and armored, with rusty growths of bone laced with cold iron.

>They don't know how to use fire or any tool. Their purpose is to eat and topple civilization itself, revert the races to the status before the Heroes came. All people and animals on a village will vanish, all shovels and axes will be missing, but valuables are left untouched. Clearing an infested iron mine is the stuff of nightmares, because orcs may gorge and cut themselves to the point of looking more like big, hunched iron golems than hairy beasts.

>Without their stories and tricks wrote down, burnt and forgotten, the Ents will be able to freely use them again, to make mortals fearful of the dark and the woods, the strange noises and the unnatural beasts.

>Because orcs spawn from the borders of the fey river, opposite to the fairy florest, and have cold iron into their organism, most people think they are some kind of predator or parasite of fairies, and may be the reason of their retreat.

>But for the last 4000 years, the Ents are attacking all civilizations of the Sarba landmass, as hateful and patient as they were in the first day, beyond the attention spans of even most dragons.

>Anyone that writes, that plants, that uses tolls. Anyone that lives instead of surviving, that uses fire to light up the night; all those are targets for a communal inteligence older than the gods, and the orcs are their main weapon.

At least half the fun of any Ice Pick Lodge game is figuring out the rules you're supposed to be playing by.

Why is this still a thing?

Have you witnessed anything disturbing?

>tfw you grew up in a swamp town
>like proper wooded swampland all around for a few miles before you get to the next town
>northways there's enough woods and mountains after the swamp that you'd think you were on the edge of civilization if you weren't aware this is America in what was at the time the 20th century

I spent most of my free time out there. Between the boy scouts, an interest in the outdoors and my grandfather taking me out hunting or teaching me various things he picked up in the military, I think I spent more time in the woods than I did in civilization for the first 12 years of my life.

A lot of the shit there I learned pretty quick not to talk about. Most people don't believe you, since they live in their quiet little suburbs or their cozy rural towns and city people just shrug it off for whatever reason. Some of it you don't want to talk about even if they did believe you though; there's one or two things that never left the collective heads of myself, grandpa, and the couple of other BSA kids who were present, because none of us really wanted to talk about it and we all made peace with that amongst ourselves. Of course, this is the internet almost two decades later, grandpa's dead and I never saw the other scouts after I left the area. It doesn't matter if you believe me, you can use it for inspiration either way.

Someting I've been working around in my head. Kind of a crossover between Delta Green and Cyberpunk.

Jacobs was young then. The rain came down from the jungle canopy, his only shelter being the Korean War era shelter half that he called home. He sat against his rucksack and dozed. The radio next to him crackled to life. He answered. The team they were waiting for was inserting in thirty minutes. He went about waking up the rest of the squad that were sleeping. Charge your weapons, put your boots on.
The helicopter, a UH-60 Blackhawk with no markings, hovered down into the clearing. The squad was set up in a perimeter, take a knee and face out. Jacobs rose from where he knelt next to the radioman. He helped the six men off of the helicopter. They wore old jungle fatigues, no patches or tapes to identify them. Few words were exchanged. They were to use the rally point Jacob had secured as a staging area to [REDACTED]. All he had to do was take care of the place while they were out and have dinner in the oven when they got back.

>out on a small camping session
>four days in, couple hours before dawn
>two drunk guys on four-wheelers ride through our camp, hooting and hollering
>we're all up with a snap, grandpa's out of his tent before any of us
>the drunks laugh at him when he shouts at them, drive off
>we're all awake now, no use going back to sleep
>hear them in the distance, then it stops abruptly
>yelling starts seconds later
>we head out
>they hit a small (like ten foot) cliff, one stopped in time
>the other went off, hit a tree, flew off his bike and mangled his leg
>he's not moving, the other guy is the one yelling
>grandpa jumps off the cliff (this looks badass to a bunch of kids) and checks the guy
>apparently not dead
>he commandeers the other drunk's vehicle to get help
>we apply basic first aid as we've been taught to
>the drunk evebntually starts talking
>rambling on about someone jumping out in front of him when he tried to turn
>this made him swerve off the cliff, from what I could gather
>other guy didn't see anything, his friend just careened off
>probably a mixture of drunkenness and shock, but he kept repeating the same basic shit about the guy who jumped out of "fucking nowhere" at him
>of course it's a heli evac, you can't get an ambulance in the fucking woods
>after this, it's just gramps and us again
>we decide to go back early
>rest of the way until we get home, grandpa (who was not there to hear the man's ramblings) is suspicious
>keeps snapping his head to one side or another like something caught his attention
>we tell him about what the man said when we get to the truck to head home
>he told me at home he thought he saw someone following us while we were leaving

...

There is a network of lakes in the forest
An aboleth resides there

He was growing jaded. It was summer of 1996. He had fought in Panama in '89, Iraq in '91, and since November of last year he had been drinking his liver into a fine dust in bars across SouthAm and burning down drug labs that hadn't been used for months. Watching the group of silent men with no dogtags and strange weapons (It was 1996, who still used the RPK?) disappear into the dark jungle beneath the mountains, he pondered what he would do at the end of his 12 year military career. The team was gone now. No sense in continuing to cover them when they were likely already two miles away. The perimeter broke up. They returned to sleeping in shifts and smoking under their rain parkas to stay awake. After two hours a team leader offered to relieve him so he could rest. He did so.

Fast forward a bit
>back in the woods
>we'd been back a lot, but uneventful fun times and all so unnecessary
>just me, gramps, and one other kid this time
>we'd mostly forgotten the whole "mysterious guy who jumps out at drunks and follows campers" thing
>mostly
>ive always had sleep paralysis and the night terrors that accompany it, not frequent but they happen
>one night on this particular trek I wake up in one, see a guy unzip my tent, crawl in, and just crawl up over me
>its too dark to see anything more than the blob of man-shaped black against the slightly lighter blue-black of the top of my tent
>he does nothing for a good solid two minutes; i assume this is just another nightmare, but like the others it still scares the shit out of me
>i can feel his hands to my sides and his breath, this is fucked
>hear grandpa shout
>guy fucking bails as a flash of light nearly blinds us both
>an actual guy in a fucking ski mask
>tumbles out of my tent, bruises me up in the panic
>makes a fucking run for it, i'm too fucked to try and leave my tent, curl up
>three loud bangs bring me out of my stupor
>poke my head out in time to see grandpa run off after the guy, shotgun in hand
>we were hunting after all so not terribly surprising to see it, just the circumstances made it fucked up
>stay at camp, iother kid comes out after gramps had run off
>when he gets back, he shakes his head and tells us he lost "the bear" out there, tells the other kid to go back to bed
>i never knew if the bear thing was just to keep the worry about forest rapists down or not, but it seemed out of character for grandpa to do that if he thought we might still be in danger
>we never saw the guy again, and i never heard anything more about what happened

...

Jacobs' eyes snapped open. Something was wrong. A distant scream was drowned out by chattering machine gun fire, which was then cut off by an otherworldly roar. He jumped to his feet, grabbing his M16 and yelling for those asleep to wake up and get online. The radioman sent in a contact report while Jacobs formed the men into a column and lead them racing through the jungle towards the source of the noise. They were closing fast, the sounds of death and gunfire growing closer. He halted the column and he and the radioman stalked silently through the bush, closer to the approximate position of the team. The sounds were deafening now, the gunfire sporadic and seldom. He radioed for the team and heard only gibberish and crying that was sharply cut off. The radio crackled, this time from higher. They had been ordered to pull out and egress to a landing zone five miles in the other direction. He informed them of his current situation and was reaffirmed of his instructions. He sent the radioman back to the rest of the squad after instructing him to get them moving. He crept ever forward towards a clearing.

No surprises, we didn't use that spot for a camping ground anymore. Grandpa had us stay in more safe and near-town parts of our woods after that, and we started doing longer-term, less frequent treks to other spots around New England.

We started finding things. Old foundations from the towns that basically failed to start hundreds of years ago. Once we found what looked like an abandoned factory or warehouse, out in the middle of fucking nowhere like it had been transported there from a more sane location. We explored the hell out of it, but grandpa stopped us short of some locations for safety's sake. He checked the building later and told us we shouldn't go back because a lot of the floors were unstable and we might fall through, but I remember seeing a lot of graffiti and old trash cans and shopping carts in it. I still don't know how any of that made sense out there, but if you're ever in the middle of fuckall nothing Vermont and find something like that way out past where it belongs let me know. It was cool as a kid but thinking about it more just confuses me and creeps me out now.

We all saw a lot of fucked up things. A rotted out car which, from the looks of the stuff inside, had clearly been a homeless guy's refuge. All signs seemed to indicate the guy had made it a permanent habitat, but given how far from society it was it seemed odd that we'd also found no other trace of the occupant.

Stumbled on a number of smaller weirdnesses. A surprising number of nooses in trees; I imagine it was in at least some cases drunk teenagers or edgy fucks trying to make it looks spooky on purpose, especially in the later, post Blair Witch year or two of it all. Doesn't stop it from creeping you out when you see it, and doesn't explain all the older cases. Couple things you don't expect to find in the woods like kids' shoes or several sets of assorted clothing, all dirty, stained or tattered.

He emerged at the edge of the clearing to see fire. Everything was burning, the charred bodies of men broken and hanging from trees. Above them towered a thing that his mind would not allow him to comprehend. It twisted in grotesque and impossible ways, its legs as thick as tree trunks. He vomited and fell to his knees. He began trying to drag himself back into the treeline. A figure emerged from somewhere amongst the chaos carrying an AK. It was one of the team members. His shirt had been burned off, leaving his skin red and inflamed. A Y-shaped scar marked his torso, dotted with the long healed marks of bullet wounds and shrapnel. Jacobs faded in and out, being drug backwards across the jungle floor, then the sounds of his squadmates' voices. He heard someone in a raspy, low voice talking over the radio. His ears caught the words "Fire mission" and "...osphorous." Then the world spun around him as his squadmates lifted him up onto their shoulders and carried him away. Behind him, the thing roared again before being engulfed in burning white phosphorous explosions and napalm.

Not that user, but you only see what you wait for.
If you spend nights reading skinwalker and other /x/ stories, you will be scared shitless in forests, because squirrel jumped between trees and you though it was mothman coming for your soul.

If you dont care supernatural for shit, you can walk whole night and never see anything else than small animals, that are more scared of you than anything else.


Myself, I have not seen shit...mostly because I cause so much noise while "sneaking" at night that every single animal in 2miles area runs away.
Expect some random hallucinations I got one time in army.

A disturbingly large number of standing stones and stone arrangements I can only imagine had to be put together by human hands, a few places where whole chunks of ground just gave way into pits and underground waterways beneath them. People whom I imagine got sick of life but just weren't fed up enough to off themselves apparently found their way out there too, and a lot of the time all we'd find is their campsites long after they'd gone. Grandpa got kind of freaky in the woods too sometimes; he'd rarely talk about the time he spent in the military, but sometimes you could piece together bits of stuff he'd seen by things he'd mutter to himself out there, and the way he'd get super stressed out and act strange when some nights came was what I only now as an adult recognize as pretty severe PTSD incidents, though god only knows what triggered them.

I think the most "what the fuck is this supposed to be" freaky thing we ever saw though was one of those standing stone arrangements. It had weird lines and letters (hell if I know what kind) carved into it, a single pillar surrounded by a circle of smaller ones, and all around the spot it was in a few trees had been axed down and we found a ridiculous amount of crap scattered around it. Spots where fires clearly had been made a while back, half-buried beer cans and broken glass aside, there was a big cinder block construction with some old rotted wood which was practically black from whatever had been smeared all over it and left to stain for years, a rusted out handle from a shovel or axe or something, and enough signs of use that grandpa was pretty sure this place had been used often for a long time before it was abandoned. I don't know what kind of parties were going on there, but something about the place gave me a hella bad vibe.

Keep them coming bruh!

I mean, there's a lot of small shit. A lot of our trips had the distinct feeling of being watched; we started keeping watches after that particular incident that warranted making it a good idea, and only camping in larger numbers to make that easier.

Some of the kids on watch talked about people being in the woods. Grandpa never found them, but sometimes when he went looking for them, he'd come back looking a bit strange. This usually ended with his muttering and growing short-tempered and struggling to keep calm with us. We knew better than to push him in that state, we'd all grown up around him enough to respect his need for being left alone in those periods.

One time I overheard him talking about them watching us. Waiting for us to wander off. I know now that's paranoia talking, but as a kid it scared the bejeezus out of me. Couple that with weird standing stones and old ruins and you can see how that fucks with a kid's head.

A lot of our other encounters just involved homeless crazies and drunks. The former tended to ramble terribly.and could end up awesome or terrifying, and the latter tended to be more the "jumpscare" kind of scary, stumbling in on what they assume is some college party or something, not a bunch of kids and an irate older guy or two.

I've also learned to have an aversion for any site where you find dog corpses. There's either a bear or some really fucked up people who go around the spots where you find those, and the easier it is for you to identify the dog, the more likely it's the latter.

You don't know how many people will go out someplace quiet to torture a stray or someone's pet Fido to death for kicks. It's fucked up, and I've never been willing to approach anyone I suspected might be involved with that shit. Never know if they might decide to off a kid who separated himself from the group to cover their shit up or get a bigger high out of their bullshit.