Vs. Stranger Stuff Season 2: Urban Legends of Crestview Hills – The Hanging Tree (VsM Engine)

This supplement clocks in at 3 pages, 1 page front cover (including relevant text) and 1 page editorial/SRD, leaving us with slightly more than a page of content, so let’s take a look!

This review was moved up in my reviewing queue at the request of my patreon supporters as a prioritized review.

This is an installment of the “Urban Legends of Crestview Hills”-series of small pdfs that provide brief adventures and hooks for use with Vs. Stranger Stuff Season 2’s default setting of Crestview Hills, though adaption to another setting is simple enough.

It should be noted that the supplement differentiates between the different play-modes for Vs. Stranger Stuff Season 2, which is a neat plus.

The following contains SPOILERS, so potential players should jump ahead to the conclusion.

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All right, only GMs around? Great! So, the hanging tree is a kind of macabre cultural icon, and as such, declaring a tree as the proper hanging tree should not be hard; depending on the mode chosen, the angle differs, with different degrees of closeness to the triggering incident, which is the death of someone, found hanging from the tree.

In the easy mode scenario, the solution is rather simple – a vengeful spirit is responsible, and we receive some guidance on making one.

In normal mode, hungry tree spirits are responsible, and we get full and proper stats for the spirits – and, in a nice angle, a tie-in to the Krampusnacht adventure. Hard to injury and with noose-like vines, these will probably require some serious investigation to put to rest!

The hard mode option is one I really liked, as it throws a wrench in preconceived notions – here, the culprits are assumed to be terrible, but thoroughly mundane people.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are very good on a formal and rules-language level. Layout is great and b/w, adhering to a two-column standard. It utilizes public domain art to great effect. The pdf has no bookmarks, but needs none at this length.

Lucus Palosaari’s Hanging Tree offers a surprising amount of material for you to develop into an adventure; it may be a hook, but it is a nice one that offers some neat angles. My final verdict will hence be 4 stars – well worth getting for the low price point!

You can get this neat little supplement for a single buck here on OBS!

Missed the great Vs. Stranger Stuff Season 2? You can find it here!

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Endzeitgeist out.

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