Dragna's Den: Let's Design a Folk Horror One-Shot (Part I)

Let’s build a horror one-shot.

But not just any horror one-shot: a folk horror one-shot.

Today, we’re going to start a two-part process, using my three-act adventure-planning template and my forthcoming updated session-plan template (which you can catch a sneak preview of here) to design a folk-horror adventure.

As a personal goal, I’d like to try and design an adventure that isn’t principally solvable by outright combat—so much the better to suit the Brothers’ Grimm aesthetic that this genre tends to go for. (That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy, though!)

Let’s begin.

Part I: The Adventure Concept

First, we need to flesh out our adventure concept—what, exactly, this one-shot adventure is going to be about. To do that, we need to start by designating a core idea: an antagonist, aesthetic, concept, and/or theme that we’re interested in exploring.

The title for this adventure, as you voted earlier this summer, will be What Granny Says. The inspirational monster for this adventure idea was the annis hag (VGM p. 159), a monstrous hag that enjoys hunting children. “To an annis hag, nothing is sweeter than turning a vibrant community into a place paralyzed with terror, where folk never venture out at night, strangers are met with suspicion and anger, and parents warn their children to ‘be good, or the annis will get you.’”

Annis hags enjoy disguising themselves as kindly-looking elderly woman, approaching children in remote places, and giving them iron tokens that the children can use to secretly confide in them. “Over time, ‘Granny’ convinces the child that it's okay to have bad thoughts and do bad deeds-starting with breaking things or wandering outside without permission, then graduating to pushing someone down the stairs or setting a house on fire. Sooner or later, the child's family and community become terrified of the ‘bad seed’ and must face the awful decision of whether the child should be punished or exiled.”

These iron tokens will be the centerpiece of our adventure—the idea that will form the base of our adventure concept.

While designing the adventure, we should also recall that, according to the definition of the folk horror genre in Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft, we’re looking to build an adventure where:

• An isolated community has passed down strange or terrifying traditions and beliefs through the generations,
• These traditions or beliefs involve taboos and societal interpretations of “truth,”
• Outsiders may be given a chance to adopt the community’s ways, but are otherwise considered heretics or corrupters.

Next, we need to create an adventure ecosystem: two to three notable locations, one to two major events, and three to five major characters.

Locations are easy: We want a rural village, the annis hag’s home (an overgrown, run-down cottage somewhere away from the village), and an isolated setting where the annis hag bestows her iron tokens upon certain children.

Let’s call this last location “the Barrows,” where a “Barrow” is “a mound of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves.” Towns are usually named after significant identifying features, and I’m a fan of big spooky trees, so let’s call it “Oakhill,” after the ancient oak tree that sits upon a hill on the green at the center of the village. (We can give this a fun hidden meaning later by having the townsfolk use the oak tree to hang those they consider lawbreakers.) 

As for the annis hag’s cottage, we can just call that “Granny’s Cottage,” and we’ll call the region where it sits “Leamurk,” where “lea” is an old word that means “an open area of grassy or arable land” (to symbolize the mire that rests beneath the village’s pleasant exterior.)

(Let’s make Granny a grandmother annis hag, as befits her name. According to VGM, a grandmother hag will have the following regional effects: (1) certain types of vermin are common in the area; (2) low-intelligence Beasts are aggressive toward intruders; and (3) strange figurines, twig fetishes, or rag dolls magically appear in trees nearby. That’ll help later when designing the appearance and challenges of Leamurk.)

Next, we need one or two events. In a folk horror adventure, it’s always good to have a festival of some kind. Here, we’ve also got the phenomenon of “Granny” corrupting children—so maybe this is a festival where, every year on the Summer Solstice, every ten-year-old child is sent to the Barrows for a chance to be “chosen” for something. What for? Dunno; we’ll figure it out later.

We also need three to five central characters. I can think of three so far:

1. Granny, a grandmother annis hag.
2. Airic, Oakhill’s local priest and/or political leader (a human druid)
3. Eli, a half-elf child in possession of one of Granny’s iron tokens

Now, we need to describe the history of our adventure ecosystem. This step seems pretty straightforward: two centuries ago, a planar conjunction allowed Granny to step from the Feywild into the Material Plane, where she soon took up residence near Oakhill. Over the past two hundred years, she’s carefully worked to sculpt the village to her liking, causing it to become paranoid, insular, and vulnerable to her own particular brand of cruelty.

Airic is the latest village leader—a title we’ll call “Wisdom”—and, unknown to the ordinary townsfolk, had to personally secure Granny’s approval to win the title. Meanwhile, Eli was sent to the Barrows as part of the village’s custom, received one of Granny’s iron tokens, and is doing…something with it.

What are our characters’ goals? Well, Granny wants to corrupt children, but that’s not a particularly dramatic or immediate goal. However, one thing that annis hags do want is to reproduce—and, as with all hags, they need to devour a mortal infant in order to do so. So perhaps Granny wants to use Eli to kidnap a newborn infant (his younger sister?) that she can then devour to begin her own coven.

(Why does she want to begin a coven? Perhaps the planar conjunction is once again approaching, and Granny believes that some creature or other monster could emerge from it that could threaten her—as such, she needs backup.)

Airic’s goals are pretty simple: Stay in power. He also believes that, by serving Granny, he’s keeping his “flock” safe from the “dangers of the woods and dark places.” That may or may not be self-delusion, though.

Next: Eli. He’s a half-elf child, so lots of juicy chances for drama there. Perhaps his mother is a former human noblewoman who fled to Oakhill to escape an unhappy marriage to an elven nobleman. She’s been happy to live a meager existence here, but was never entirely accepted by the townsfolk. Eli has always felt slightly isolated as a result, and recently learned the truth of his parentage from his mother—something he still hasn’t forgiven her for.

Finally, we need a high-level major dramatic question. As always, we need an inciting incident, time and place, goal, verb(s), major stakes, and minor stakes. How about: “When the PCs.

The inciting incident is going to be the toughest—why are the PCs in this isolated rural community, anyway? We could pull a Wicker Man and have someone invite them there in bad faith. We could change Eli’s backstory so that his mother left recently, leaving his father believing that someone had kidnapped the both of them (or at least his son). The simplest and most generic approach might just be to have the PCs be serving as bodyguards to a traveling scholar who’s looking to research the traditions and oral histories of isolated communities like this one.

After polling the Patreon Discord server, though, it looks like Option A (someone lures the PCs there in bad faith) is by far the most interesting to explore. So let’s just take a page out of Wicker Man’s book and use the following inciting incident: “When a woman tells the PCs that her ex-husband has spirited their daughter away to the small village of Oakhill…” The woman in question, named Enid, tells the PCs that her husband’s name is “Stefan”—but in truth, Airic is her husband, and they have no child together.

Why are Enid and Airic luring the PCs to Oakhill? Well, we know that Granny is looking to start a coven. We also know that a hag’s daughter “looks human until her thirteenth birthday, whereupon the child transforms into the spitting image of her hag mother.” What if Granny didn’t find out about the forthcoming Feywild incursion until recently—and therefore needs some way to accelerate her daughter’s maturation? The sacrifice of some powerful adventurers (creatures of “great will and spirit”) could be a great way to pull that off!

So now we’ve got the fundamental building blocks of our major dramatic question:

“When a seemingly desperate woman asks the PCs to retrieve her daughter from the small, reclusive village of Oakhill, can the PCs uncover the truth behind the girl’s disappearance before the townsfolk sacrifice them to the mysterious “Granny”—while preventing Granny from devouring the infant she intends to recruit into her coven?

That rounds out Part I of our design process: The Adventure Concept. Later this week, we’ll follow up with Part II, The Three-Act Structure, where we’ll actually plan out our one-shot adventure and prepare to run it at the table.

This is a new exclusive “blog post” for Silver+ patrons, walking through my process for encounter and/or adventure design. If you enjoyed this experimental “newsletter-style” blog post, be sure to let me know in the comments and/or on the Discord!