the-barlo-daily-journal

[the-barlo-daily-journal]

Final week!!

The official RPG is live on kickstarter!

The campaign runs through May 7th. It's already fully funded and reaching stretch goals like crazy. Check it out!

[the-barlo-daily-journal]

Two weeks left!

The official RPG is live on kickstarter!

The campaign runs through May 7th. It's already fully funded and reaching stretch goals like crazy. Check it out!

[the-barlo-daily-journal]

The official RPG is live on kickstarter!

The campaign runs through May 7th. It's already fully funded and reaching stretch goals like crazy. Check it out!

[the-barlo-daily-journal]

Skin Tom had come with the beast that was called Miss Lavinia back then, who had been full to bursting with the dark touch of their masters.

She showed up buck naked and covered in somebody else’s blood, which the granny ladies found distasteful and show-offy. And the end result was that Skin Tom had to wear this damn hood and cape now, an injustice he deeply resented.

Old Gods of Appalachia / Episode 13: The Dark Earth at Night

[the-barlo-daily-journal]

The thing that detached itself from the dark patch under a mess of laurel bushes wore what was almost the form of a young man. It walked like a young man, and when it spoke, it sounded mostly like a young man, and if he approached you alongside the road asking for a ride to town, you might almost pick him up. Until you realized he had no skin at all.

He wore, for the sake of modesty and the terms of the pact, a cloak over his shoulders with a deep hood to hide his raw and bleeding face. Now, he took joy in the ways that eyes widened in fear once they saw him good and proper, all lipless mouth and screaming teeth.

He relished the feel of their yielding flesh as he would pounce upon them and take their skins for his own. Some he might wear a while, go about a few nights like an actor in a play, but it never lasted. A skin rots and it just came right back to the knife again when folks found him out.

Old Gods of Appalachia / Episode 13: The Dark Earth at Night

[the-barlo-daily-journal]

Generations ago, something rose from the earth bearing a mantle of death stitched from a tapestry of stolen life. It took the deaths of many a good man and woman and the disillusion of many a haint and creeping shadow before they were able to count her pattern and to find where she laid her head.

There are things that have walked these mountains since Those Who Sleep Beneath were entombed in their black earth slumber, that are capable of destroying or devouring the bones and minds of those they encountered. Things beyond mere life and death.

Perhaps she’s one of these. Perhaps she is some aberration of the green, turned inward and gone to rot. Perhaps she’s a haint or a booger that grew so dark and hungry that she found her own way to feed.

Regardless, the stories and the research led them to this nameless, faceless place every seven years to renew the bonds. Dead earth and still air. This place where there lay a single grave - a grave that every seven years would birth death in the shape of a woman and a babe. A grave that had lain silent for the past fourteen, or so it had seemed.

The rite was complicated and involved arts unknown except to the wisest and oldest grannies, fueled by the blood of two of the foulest things to ever crawl from the inner dark - two from each. Two to weave, two to be the wool.

Old Gods of Appalachia / Episode 13: The Dark Earth at Night

[the-barlo-daily-journal]

I hope Build Mama a Coffin is released to the general public someday, because I would love to post quotes from it 🥺💚

[the-barlo-daily-journal]

The dog advanced on him slowly, hackles up, teeth bared, still half in shadow. Ricky’s first thought was that it was rabid, maybe, because it moved in jerks and stuttering back-steps, gnawing on itself. Hell, it almost looked like it was taking bites out of itself when it did that. It must have the mange something awful. What he could see of its hide was covered in thick scabs looking more like mottled tree bark than fur. Oh, yeah, this old boy was sick alright...

Ricky held his pistol at the ready, fully prepared to act as the angel of mercy, and then the thing stepped fully into the moonlight - and all thoughts of heaven fled Ricky Lee Gibson.

The dog’s muzzle frothed and shook -- if you could call it a dog; Ricky wasn’t at all sure about that anymore. Its first set of jaws were locked in a vicious shaking snarl, so fierce that bits of itself seemed to be falling from its face, as the second set of jaws yawned open from its mangy throat and it made a wet, awful sound that he supposed must have been some hideous approximation of a bark. The very sound rooted him to the ground, frozen in horror and a kind of sick fascination.

Ricky’s heart slowed as the dog’s eyes - the usual two in the front of its head and the other pair that slowly opened just above them - radiating a cold and shuddering glow, met his.

Ricky Lee screamed, all thoughts of mercy or marksmanship lost to panic as he fired his gun blindly at the creature advancing upon him. He would have kept shooting until the cheap thing clicked empty... but he never had the chance.

Old Gods of Appalachia / Episode 13: The Dark Earth at Night

[the-barlo-daily-journal]

[the-barlo-daily-journal]

There used to be a road that led to this place, but both sides agreed that it would be best if it was forgotten - and so it was.

There used to be folks that lived around here, but both sides agreed it would be best if they moved or passed on - and so they did.

It was deemed a place too tainted and too dangerous for man or haint to inhabit... and so they didn’t.

There are forces that even the glorious vastness of the green and the ravening hunger of the inner dark do not understand and cannot harness or destroy; so binding is the best they can do.

Old Gods of Appalachia / Episode 13: The Dark Earth at Night

[the-barlo-daily-journal]

They did their due, and for two cycles now that bitch stayed in the ground. She was bad for the world. She’d laid waste to a whole camp of the old black stag’s church people up on the high mountain - human-type people, just getting started being turned. She tore through all of ‘em. Tore their heads clean off and lined the road to the camp as a welcome for whoever might not have been home while she called.

Old Gods of Appalachia / Episode 13: The Dark Earth at Night

[the-barlo-daily-journal]

The second thing took the form of a black mist that hovered beside the first - and if the first thing had been a man, he would have felt the screaming dread and cold that poured from that floating shadow; lost his mind to madness if he dared to meet the gleaming green eyes that floated within it.

Old Gods of Appalachia / Episode 13: The Dark Earth at Night

[the-barlo-daily-journal]

He watched the earth below erupt with nightmarish creatures that vaguely resembled dogs, wolves, and rats and possums and all other manner of critter that had lived and died on this land, clawing their way to the surface at her command.

Every one was an affront to any god that you could think of in its own unique wrongness. An extra set of gleaming eyes here, claws on a bobcat made from jaws of a red wolf there, a possum with three impossible mouths open and screaming with teeth like needles, beasts whose bodies were made up more of fouled earth and dead vines than flesh, all rising at her behest.

Old Gods of Appalachia / Episode 13: The Dark Earth at Night

[the-barlo-daily-journal]

Between the crooked spine of the Cumberland plateau and the broad shoulders of the Blue Ridge lies a place of the richest green and deepest shadow... rarely has there been such a place where the green and the inner dark twine around each other like lovers -- lovers that have one hand around each other’s throat and a knife in the other, but lovers all the same.

It is a place of railroads and passage, of river barges and deep pockets hidden away like heartache - towns lost to the swallowing tongue of the green or that lay fallen beneath dark lakes of the inner dark.

Old Gods of Appalachia / Episode 13: The Dark Earth at Night

[the-barlo-daily-journal]

[the-barlo-daily-journal]

Some nights the thick sweetness of the air and the songs of the frogs down by the pond made it seem like a little patch of heaven. Now the soil wasn’t as rich as it could be, and the trees left standing were ugly old things jutting up out of the earth like the clutching fingers of a corpse - it wasn’t much, but when they were done with it it would be theirs.

And thus the Gibson family had given it a name. Big Jim had painted that name as half a joke on an old plank of wood posted up at the bottom of the hill: "Welcome to Craw." Cause you see, this is where they finally stuck.

This may not have been the brothers’ first mistake, but it would be their last. There’s power in a name, family. Believe it and know.

Old Gods of Appalachia / Episode 12: The Other Queen

[the-barlo-daily-journal]

It’s a delicate balance to teach a boy to be both brave enough and scared enough to live in the world at ten years old. It’s a balance that can sometimes go... all kinds of wrong.

Old Gods of Appalachia / Episode 12: The Other Queen