FIELD GUIDE

Creatures & Horrors

The Game Marshal’s Grimoire contains the operational bestiary. History of America explains where many of these threats belong in the setting, why some exist, and why calling everything a monster can conceal the more dangerous truth behind it.

Field Classification

Something Left the Mark

A supernatural creature may be the immediate danger without being the thing that caused the danger to exist. Thin ground, battlefield trauma, supernatural contamination, ancient obligations, and deeper threshold forces can all leave something behind in the mortal world.

Selected Threats

Creatures of the Wicked West

These entries reveal identity and setting context only. Exact combat statistics, abilities, vulnerabilities, and encounter procedures remain in the Game Marshal material.

Game Marshal Bestiary

Spirit

Banshee of the West

A spectral threat whose Death Wail can inflict necrotic harm and drive the living into fear. Like other Veil-touched manifestations, its existence does not make it a Primordial.

Game Marshal Bestiary

Undead — Reanimated

Bonewalker

A reanimated corpse animated by unnatural persistence. A Bonewalker can reassemble after being brought down, making apparent destruction an unreliable measure of whether the threat has actually ended.

Game Marshal Bestiary

Spirit

Phantom Rider

A mounted supernatural pursuer built around relentless pursuit. It can track prey without revealing itself and move through obstacles while maintaining the chase.

Game Marshal Bestiary

Construct

Blacksmith Golem

A heavily built supernatural construct of iron, heat, and violence. Its existence demonstrates that the frontier’s horrors are not limited to ghosts, corrupted animals, or things that were once alive.

History of America

Veil-Touched Creature

Blighted Elk

An animal altered by supernatural contamination where Primordial influence presses through thin ground. The creature is not a Primordial — it is one of the marks left behind by that deeper pressure.

History of America

Era 4 Manifestation

Confederate Shade

A Civil War supernatural manifestation created by industrial-scale death, unresolved trauma, and the accumulated pressure of the Southern battlefield landscape. It belongs specifically to Era 4 rather than to a timeless category of frontier ghosts.

Beyond Ordinary Bestiary Entries

Some Threats Are Patterns

The setting also contains recurring phenomena and manifestations that cannot be understood as one animal, ghost, or individual creature.

Pattern-Entity

The Second Casualty

A recurring battlefield phenomenon first documented after the Revolutionary War and confirmed far more severely during the Civil War. It is not one individual monster; its manifestation changes from battlefield to battlefield.

Debt Manifestation

The Interest Collector

A force associated with collection on the House of Vael and Gilded Eye obligation. It appears when generational debt comes due and operates on a timescale much longer than an ordinary mortal life.

Localized Manifestation

The Unpaid Interest

A smaller phenomenon associated with a missed Vael-descended payment: localized bad luck, spoiled goods, and minor accidents accumulating around the responsible party.

Reading the Field Guide

Three Things to Remember

Field Note 01

The Monster Is Not Always the Source

The Blighted Elk, Bonewalker, and Banshee of the West are explicitly identified as mortal-world consequences of Primordial pressure rather than Primordials themselves.

Field Note 02

History Creates Monsters

Some supernatural threats belong to specific historical conditions. Confederate Shades and Bone Cavalry arise from the Civil War’s mass-casualty environment and remain evidence that those events never fully resolved.

Field Note 03

Not Every Threat Is a Creature

A dangerous presence may be a spirit, construct, corrupted animal, pattern-entity, environmental phenomenon, debt manifestation, or something that does not fit an ordinary biological category at all.