what's my name? what's my station?

W H I T E   W I L L O W
these roots run deep.



"in time, all foul things come forth."
 

White Willow is a small, sleepy town in the heart of Virginia. It was established in the early 1700s - since then, it's been everything from a Puritan colony to ripe plantation land to a Civil War battleground to a prosperous little logging town. It's seen good times and bad times, produced a few celebrities and more than a few good-for-nothings. 

These days, it's a lot like small towns everywhere else. Old-fashioned, maybe, and a little insular, but all in all a nice, quiet place to live. Many residents have spent their whole lives in White Willow - some can even trace their heritage back to the town's founders all those years ago. Others are more recent arrivals, drawn by the low cost of living and its proximity to Richmond and D.C. (Many families find it cheaper to commute during the working week than to find a house or apartment in the city.) It's a good place. Nothing ever happens, but that's okay. Most folks like it that way.

Except--

Well, people do love their ghost stories, don't they? Every now and again some idiot with a TV crew will show up to trample all over things and dredge up bits of the town history that are best left forgotten. Everyplace has its murders, its peculiarities, its urban legends - many far more scandalous than the ones here. But you can hardly stop children from talking, daring each other to go inside the abandoned house at the edge of town or walk to the darkest part of the woods and call up the Willow Witch. 

The fact of the matter is, this town has a dark past. There's something odd about it on a very fundamental level, an oddness that stretches back before the white settlers, before the Algonquian people, in the land and the water and the very air. The boundaries between reality and other places are thinner here. 

And things that the town has tried to leave in the past? They have a habit of not staying there.
 

You are a teenager in White Willow. Maybe you're from an old family and can find the portrait of some distant ancestor enshrined in city hall. Maybe you're a recent transplant, still struggling to adjust to small-town life. You might fit in, you might not - either way, you're undoubtedly struggling with a grab-bag of assorted neuroses, insecurities and growing pains. All teenagers are. You attend classes at one of the two local high schools - Virginia Dare High, the public school, or St. Mary's Academy, the private Catholic school that's really less for Catholics than it is for rich kids of all stripes. You do your best to get by.

And then, one day, it all falls apart.

On a too-hot evening in the middle of summer, you're out in the woods. Getting away from other people, sneaking off to meet a boyfriend, birdwatching - whatever. And then, suddenly, the forest around you changes. Goes still. Seems to close in. One moment you're standing in the still summer air and the next the jaws of a nightmare slam shut around you. You're in a place you can't understand, seeing things that you can't believe. It lasts forever and it goes by too fast for you to understand.

The nightmare spits you back out readily enough, but when you wake up on the forest floor, you're...different. For one thing, there's a mark on your skin like a brand - some kind of symbol that doesn't look like it's from any language on earth. For another, you seem to have developed some kind of strange ability. You can move things with your mind, maybe, or start a fire by snapping your fingers. Maybe you hear voices or have visions.

You go home, hoping that whatever weird thing is happening to you will stop if you just will it away. It doesn't. You begin to have nightmares. You have a sense that you're being followed. Certain people in the town stare at you a little longer than they used to, like they know what's happening. 

And they're not the only ones, not in the slightest. The woods are dark. The things that live in them are restless. You've been touched by their world, and now they can smell you. If you care to look through town histories, you'll discover that you're not the first person in town who's experienced something like this.

You've been marked.

The question is: For what?

(This is a game for a core group of, at most, ten player characters ranging in age from thirteen to eighteen! Player characters will have fabulous creepy adventures uncovering the source of their powers and their relation to White Willow's sordid past. Horror/fantasy/teen friendship/magical girl/boy/coming-of-age adventure extravaganza.

I've got some episodic content planned out and little story arcs that connect to a bigger one, with room to personalize a lot of stuff to the player characters. And yeah!)