Never Going Home: Tales from the Front

 

I never actually managed to find time to use my Never Going Home playset, but I took some really neat photos and had ideas for scenarios, which fizzled out at the stage below this header. Someday, I'd like to try rolling dice with these heroes and horrors, but for now I'd like to offer y'all some short fiction and game prompt stubs to coax your imagination into no-man's land.

 

 

Johnathan had thought it was a tent, blown into the trench by a strong wind. He'd been ready to untangle it, as any extra protection against the elements would be welcome, and had waded through the muck to where it lay flapping against a support. We left him too it, or we would have had he not begun screaming like he'd been caught in a beartrap. A beartrap with wings...

A trio of German soldiers are assailed by a creature from their darkest nightmares as war is waged in the trenches beyond.

3v1, with traps (artillery shells) landing on a random part of the board outside of the foxholes. The monster flies and grapples.

It's breath curls and curdles in the air, from it's lower head at least. The other one sucks air greedily through it's broken gas mask, gurlging between gasps as the glass shards shred the flesh underneath the plastic. It's hooves disturb the dust near the overturned wagon the lieutennant and his men are hiding behind. They mustn't cough or sneeze, or else they'll give away their position, but the soot billowing from that wretched torso threatens to claw its way down their throats. 

Four Americans are being hunted by the Nuckelavee. They know the legends, and he knows their deepest, most primal fears. 

4v1. The monster has an area effect to represent its toxic breath, and it has multiple attacks to represent its rifle and crushing hooves.

The sisters had not spoken for a day (to conserve energy they thought,) but as the sun was lost in clouds, one heard the other gasp. Binoculars were lowered and passed, and then the second sister broke the second seal of silence as a consensus was reached. In the distance there was a tree, and through the lenses of the binoculars, the revised image showed muscle and sinew drifting as would branches in the wind. "What do you make of it," asked the second sister. 

"Nothing good," replied the first.

Two Russian snipers approach the Butcher's Tree to assess the threat to the battalion for which they scout.

2v1+d4. The monster spawns lesser monsters to buffer itself from the snipers. Perhaps there's a ticking clock, where the tree is fruiting a greater evil, who is nearly done gestating in its boughs. If it is allowed to be born, this will surely mean the end of the war, and everything else.