The Quiet Hunger

By Craig Turner
Aspire2Hope
Generic/Universal
Levels: Ghouls as an ememy

In Faynford at the Staple, tension simmers beneath the smell of hearth smoke and fresh bread. Old fears stir as food grows scarce, livestock go missing, and whispers spread—of sickness, of shadows, of the dead no longer resting easy. Beyond the river bends and chalk downs, the Hundred is holding its breath. The boundaries between custom and survival, welcome and warning, are wearing thin. Something hungers in the dark, and the quiet strength of this land may not be enough to hold it back. Your road has led here. Whether by duty, kinship, or necessity, you have arrived on the edge of a story that will not wait. Will you uncover the truth before Faynford at the  Staple falls to fear—and to what walks in its shadow?

This twenty page horror-ish adventure describes a bucolic village, and the refugee situation that is unfolding as they absorb villages who have been displaced by war. It is quite long-winded and verbose for what is essentially an outline of an adventure. The outline part is ok, but the long-windedness results in confusion of the overall situation. Too much time on vibes and not enough time on specifics. 

I’m a sucker for Harn-like settings for adventures. Call something A Hundred and I’m drooling, for some reason. I guess it was 100 Bushels of Rye. Whatever. We’re here today because of that. And, then, we mix in, from the marketing blurb, what appears to be a horror element. I think horror translates well because of the emphasis on situations that it fosters. I can restart a monster, but the vibes and plot and horror elements are for the designer. I love my classic exploratory dungeons, but the journey to and from the dungeon, and shit going on in town, has always been a part of D&D and these little situations are great for dropping in to spice up the “downtime.” 

So, we got this village. Humans, halflings. The halflings were refugees about fifty years ago and have settled in. More war has caused an influx of new refugees. The locals kind of recognize kinship to them, accents, mannerisms, far less alien than the halflings were. Then a lamb goes missing. And a couple of people die from a new disease, ashskin. Things are tense. The local sheriff wants to relocate the refugees a little farther down the valley. This is the pretext for the adventure. It turns out that a local seedy patriarch is an agent for a foreign power and ashskin? That’s people turning in to ghouls. Did you recognize it by the name ashskin? I didn’t at first. And I love that kind of shit .Where you describe something to peoples faces and they don’t get it. They drop some gnawed bones and bodies here and there, and once you get to the graveyard and find out the graves were dug out from the INSIDE, well, the undead is up, so to speak. 

The adventure wants to outline a situation. It’s trying to present a map with various locations on it and then explaining what is going on at those locales. It provides some NPC overviews with mannerisms and goals, for the DM to drop in to the game and use as the party comes across them or seeks them out. It flirts with doing the right thing. And then it fucks everything up.

The NPC descriptions fit, maybe, two to three to a column. There’s a bullet for Appearance, Personality, Goal/Motivation, Quick, Disposition, and What they know. Maybe somewhere from three words to a dozen or so, and then the person ends with a little quote. This is all too much. It’s on the right track, a quick, a goal, what they know, but then it muddies it up with too much information that one needs to dig through. And this is going to be a theme here.

The locales, a half dozen or so, stretch on for a column or page, and then have their NPC’s, in the same format as above. It starts with a setting prompt, in bullet form: Light, Sights, Sounds, Smells. This is too much. Shortening this to  a sentence or two, including all of them in it, to give a little vibe would have been better. There’s a brief couple of paragraph description of the locations “the fields are well tended, it’s maintained through diligence.” Again, too much. The diligence comment it meta, and the whole location description is hard to sort through, I suspect, during play.  Terse. Hit. Get out. We want a quick vibe if its not super-important to the location to have details. Then we have a section called Plot. I’m looking at seven paragraphs, one or two just a sentence, like “Corwin is dead” or “Pip knows what that means, even if he struggles to say it properly.”  The plot section, what is happening, the meat of the location, what the party can find out and do and so on, is all muddled by this. This is NOT the time to get flowery with your language and clever with your descriptions. And yet it does, over and over again. This is a nightmare to dig through. This would have been the PERFECT time for all of those bullets. 

The overall plot, what leads to what and who’s doing what, is confused because of all of this. Cognitively it’s a problem. After a couple of times through this I’m still not sure I can explain the hows and wherefore and whats connected. I THINK 

The elements it wants to emphasize, the contention between the refugees, the more established refugees from fifty years ago and so on, these are not well handled at all. There’s little to bring these to life. The tension that should be going on isn’t added to by specifics. We’re not looking for everything spelled out and scripted, but vignettes, specificity, to drop in to make that tension come alive. Even the spying, it’s not really brought home. 

This was a good idea. Blaming The Others should be relatable to the players. The mixing in of the ghouls and people turning. Great potential there. But this would need a lot of effort to bring to the table. It knows to outline a situation, and it knows the major elements to hit, it just fails in doing that in a way that can be run or in bringing it truly to life.

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages, not quite enough to get a good vibe check on it. Only the last page really gives you an idea of what to start to expect in terms of writing and presentation. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/562279/the-quiet-hunger?1892600