Cryptid · Codex
A Field Guide to the Unverified · Issue № 5 · From Scoundrel Games
Cryptid № 5Bigfoot
Most Bigfoot stories are a blurry photo and a friend of a friend. Whitehall’s comes with a police report, a spotlight, and an officer who could not pull the trigger. Here is its legend, and two ways to loose it on your table.
“Not that it was seen. That it was spared.”
Most Bigfoot stories come down to a blurry photograph and a friend of a friend. Whitehall’s comes with a police report. On a warm August night in 1976, two young men parked on Abair Road, a dark farm lane outside Whitehall, New York, at the southern tip of Lake Champlain, when something screamed in the tree line and then stepped into their headlights: a hair-covered figure close to eight feet tall, heavy through the shoulders, with two eyes that threw the light back red. They drove straight to the state police, scared enough that the troopers went back out with them.
What makes Whitehall different is what happened next. The authorities came, and they saw it too. A young patrolman named Brian Gosselin got the closest look of anyone, close enough in his spotlight to make out the muscle in its arms and the almost-human set of its face, and he drew his revolver. He did not fire. The reason he has given for decades never really changes: it looked too much like a person. Other officers reported the screams, the animal reek, and the sense of something big pacing them just past the trees. Casts were taken of very large footprints.
The mundane answers are the usual ones, a bear on its hind legs or a prankster in a fur suit, and the honest snag is the witnesses: not one jumpy teenager but a carload, and then trained, armed officers who gained nothing from it but a story that would follow them for life. Nothing was ever caught, and nothing was ever cleanly ruled out. Whitehall kept the tale anyway, held a Sasquatch festival, raised a statue, and passed a measure making it illegal to harm a Bigfoot in town. What lingers is not the monster. It is the trigger that never got pulled.
Bigfoot
Large monstrosity, unaligned
(+5)
(+1)
(+4)
(−1)
(+2)
(+0)
Powerful Build. The bigfoot counts as one size larger for carrying capacity and for any check or contest to push, drag, lift, or grapple.
Woodland Phantom. The bigfoot has advantage on Stealth checks in natural terrain, and it leaves no trail followable by nonmagical means except the signs it chooses to leave.
Unsettling Humanity. Its face is disquietingly human. Before the bigfoot has harmed anyone this encounter, a creature that tries to attack it must first succeed on a DC 13 Wisdom saving throw, or it cannot bring itself to strike and must take a different action or move that turn. Once the bigfoot deals damage to anyone, this trait switches off for the rest of the encounter.
Actions
Multiattack. The bigfoot makes two Slam attacks.
Slam. Melee Attack: +8 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 14 (2d8 + 5) bludgeoning. If both Slams hit one Large or smaller target in a turn, it is grappled (escape DC 15) and dragged along as the bigfoot moves.
Hurled Debris. Ranged Attack: +8 to hit, range 30/90 ft., one target. Hit: 16 (2d10 + 5) bludgeoning. A thrown rock or deadwood limb, usually a warning more than a kill.
Terrifying Scream (Recharge 5-6). The cry that empties the woods. Each creature within 60 ft. that can hear it must succeed on a DC 13 Wisdom saving throw or be frightened of the bigfoot for 1 minute (repeat the save at the end of each turn to end it).
Bigfoot
No stat lines, just what it is and how to point it at your players, whatever system you run. A huge, reclusive, hair-covered wildman of the deep woods, more often heard or smelled than truly seen, and unnervingly human in the face when it is. It warns before it harms.
How it behaves
- It wants to be left alone. It is not hunting anyone. It screams, it throws things, it looms at the edge of the firelight to make you go. Real violence is its last resort, not its first.
- It escalates in warnings. Signs, then a scream, then a thrown rock, then a bluff charge. Read the warnings and you can back off; push anyway and you earn what follows.
- It is a glimpse and a feeling. The stink, the snapped branches, the eyes at the tree line. Do not give the clean, whole, resolving look. The not-knowing is the point.
Ways to use it
- The police-blotter night. Run the Whitehall hook straight: the party are, or ride along with, the responders to a thing-on-the-road call. The dread, the standoff, the awful question of using force on something that looks half human. A whole session with barely a blow struck.
- The nonlethal job. They are hired to drive it off, or to prove or disprove it, without killing it. Now it is a tracking, patience, and wits challenge, and the stat block is the failure state, not the goal.
- The guardian in the trees. Its presence marks something: a denned family, a place the locals hold sacred, or a worse thing deeper in the woods that it has quietly been keeping people away from.
- Cut it loose from Whitehall. Forget upstate New York. A reclusive forest giant reskins into any wilderness you already run: a swamp as a skunk-ape, a snowline as a yeti, a logging frontier as the thing the old-timers will not name. Keep the silhouette and the reluctance; leave the map pin on the shelf.
Difficulty dial
- Scarier: never let them see it whole, and let the dread do the work.
- Safer: lean into its reluctance and its humanity, so the encounter ends with everyone walking away and no body on either side.
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