The adventure ahead
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Thornwell is a small village at the edge of a wide, misty fen. Its people fish, cut peat and keep to themselves. For three generations the fen-bell on the green has rung only for funerals.
Last week it rang at midnight, with no hand on the rope.
Since then three villagers have vanished, the shrine's reliquary has been stolen, and lights have been seen moving out in the Reedmoor where no one walks after dark. The village elder needs someone to go and look.
The Hollowfen Marches is a starter adventure for levels 1–3. It is a mystery in a wet, quiet country: follow the clues, cross the fen, and find out who has been collecting the names of Thornwell's dead — and why.
Expect mud, old oaths, and a first glimpse of something much larger moving behind it all.
Share with your players
You came to Thornwell for your own reasons — a road, a debt, a rumour, a cart that broke an axle. You are in the Bell & Bramble inn when the fen-bell rings at midnight, and every villager in the room goes silent and white-faced.
By morning, Elder Mara Thorn is standing at your table with a purse and a problem: three neighbours gone, a shrine robbed, and nobody willing to walk the Reedmoor.
Quiet, wet and unsettling. Folk horror more than heroics: mist, mud, old promises, and people who would rather not say what they saw. There is room for jokes and warmth — Thornwell is a real place with real people — but the fen is patient and it does not forget.
You are in Thornwell, it is raining, and the elder is paying. Begin.
Behind the screen
Act I only — the free preview. This module covers the starting region, the Hollowfen Marches, and its four key locations in play order: Thornwell, the Reedmoor, Greywater Mill, and the Barrow of Ash.
The act is a trail: a stolen reliquary and three missing villagers lead the party out of Thornwell, across the fen, to a dig camp at an old mill, and finally into a barrow where a collector of names is working a ritual she does not fully understand.
The villain, Sable Vane, the Ashen Collector, is a mid-tier threat (CR 3) and deliberately not the campaign's true power. She is a hired hand. Her ledger, her ash-marks and her dying words all point past her to a patron she calls the Quiet Choir — the first hint of the larger enemy. Do not resolve the Choir in this act; let the party leave the fen with a name and a bad feeling.
Run the four scenes in order. Each scene's ending hands the party the next lead. Side quests are optional and can be run between scenes 1 and 3.
Hook 01
You were in the Bell & Bramble when the fen-bell rang at midnight, and you were the only person in the room who did not cross themselves. Elder Mara Thorn noticed. By morning she is at your table with a purse of coin, a list of three missing neighbours, and no one else willing to walk into the Reedmoor. This hook suits parties who like being hired, being trusted, and being paid.
Hook 02
One of the missing is Dorn Alder, or Nessa Fenn, or young Orrin Vale — a cousin, a childhood friend, a debt unpaid. You came to Thornwell to settle something and instead you are handed a reason to stay. Kess Alder latches onto anyone who will not wait for a plan, and the fen is a long walk from anywhere else. This hook suits parties who want a personal stake rather than a contract.
The fen-bell of Thornwell rings at midnight and three villagers vanish. The party follows a stolen reliquary and a trail of ash-marks out of the village, across the Reedmoor, to a dig camp at the abandoned Greywater Mill, and finally into the Barrow of Ash. There they find Sable Vane, the Ashen Collector, half-taught and mid-ritual, holding the acolyte Orrin Vale. Stopping her saves Orrin and wins her ledger — a ciphered list of names that points past her to a patron called the Quiet Choir. The act ends with the fen quiet, the village safe, and a name the party cannot yet explain.
Read aloud
The bell is still swinging when you come out, though the rope is tied off short and the rain is coming down sideways. Nobody on the green will look at it. Mara Thorn stands under the frame with her arms folded, water running off her braid, and says: 'It rang at midnight. It rings for the dead. Nobody died last night — three of them just went.'
Mara hires the party for 20 gp each plus lodging. She names the missing: Dorn Alder the peat-cutter, Nessa Fenn the fisher, and Orrin Vale the shrine's acolyte. She will not mention that Dorn is her grandson unless the party earns it. The bell frame shows no tampering; the clapper is furred with grey ash. Brother Ilya is evasive about the reliquary until confronted kindly. Kess Alder is in the inn and will demand to come along. The trail out of the village is east along the old road and north into the Reedmoor; the ash-marks point north.
Read aloud
The ferry pole touches bottom and Halden Crane does not push off. Ahead, the reeds open onto a ring of black water, and in the middle of it nine stones lean out of the mist like teeth. Two of them have been scrubbed clean, and the ash on them is fresh. Something in the water between the stones turns over, slowly, and stands up.
Halden ferries the party for 5 gp or a favour, and talks only if paid or frightened. He describes a hooded woman and four hired diggers who crossed a fortnight ago and have crossed back twice since, always at night. The island is guarded by three drowned villagers — the fen's answer to the spoken name. They are not the missing three; they are older dead. After the fight, the party can read the stones: eight sigils are worn, one is freshly cut. Kess Alder recognises the fresh sigil as the same mark she saw on a stranger's coat in Thornwell. The trail of boot-prints and drag-marks leads east to Greywater Mill.
Read aloud
The mill yard stinks of wet canvas and old smoke. Four tents, a cold fire, and a trestle table with a strongbox on it. Kess Alder crouches at the gate and says, very quietly: 'That's Dorn's boot. That one, by the fire. He's not wearing it.' Somewhere inside the mill, water is running, and something is dragging through it.
Four hired diggers (use 4 Bandit) hold the yard; they are tired, unpaid and will surrender if two of them drop. Two ash-bound skeletons (use 2 Skeleton) stand in the mill's flooded office and attack anyone who enters without an ash-mark. The strongbox is locked (DC 15 Thieves' Tools or DC 16 Strength). Inside: the ciphered ledger, 40 gp in old coin, and a hand-drawn map of the Barrow of Ash with the ritual circle marked.
The ledger is in Sable Vane's cipher (DC 15 Intelligence check, or automatically with Orrin Vale's help later). Dorn Alder's boot is by the fire; he was taken on to the barrow. Sister Venn will confirm the Collector went north three days ago with two of the crew and a prisoner.
Read aloud
Brother Ilya's lantern shakes so hard the light jumps. 'She's been in there three days,' he whispers. 'The singing stopped an hour ago.' Inside, the passage opens into a round room full of grey light, and around its walls stand forty dead soldiers in rusted mail, upright and waiting. In the middle, a woman in a grey coat looks up from a circle of ash and says, pleasantly: 'You're earlier than I expected. Sit down. We're nearly finished.'
Sable Vane is mid-ritual with two ash-bound skeletons (use 2 Skeleton) and one risen warden (use 1 Ghoul) between her and the party. The ritual circle is the key: any character who reaches it can break it with a DC 14 Arcana or Religion check, or by dealing 15 damage to the ash ring; doing so ends the ritual, drops the forty standing skeletons into inert heaps, and staggers Sable Vane.
Orrin Vale is bound to a stone at the back (DC 14 Acrobatics or a blade, one action). Brother Ilya arrives at the barrow mouth with Kess Alder if the party told him where they were going. Sable Vane will bargain once the circle breaks: the ledger, the acolyte and safe passage out of the fen for her life. If killed, her last words name the Quiet Choir and say they already have the names.
Milestone: The party reaches level 2 after resolving the Reedmoor, and level 3 when they enter the Barrow of Ash. The act closes when Orrin Vale is freed and the ledger is in the party's hands.
Sable Vane, the Ashen Collector
Sable Vane is a tall, narrow woman whose greyness seems less a choice of wardrobe than a slow profession: ash in the seams of her long trav…
Free campaign generations include one villain sheet. Additional villain, NPC, and player-facing module character sheets are available in premium campaigns.
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Subscribe NowSable Vane gathers the true names of the dead. She believes that if she can speak the buried name of the warband in the Barrow of Ash, she will be granted the thing she wants most: an end to her own forgetting. She is paid in knowledge by the Quiet Choir, and she is far more afraid of them than of any adventurer.
Dry, courteous and unhurried. She speaks to the party as though they were late guests, compliments their persistence, and never raises her voice. She calls the dead 'the quiet ones' and treats grave-robbing as a clerical duty. When cornered she becomes cold and precise, and she bargains rather than boasts.
Sable Vane opens with ash-marks to blind and divide the party, then keeps her skeletons between herself and the strongest fighter. She fights from the ritual circle and gains confidence while it is intact; if the circle is broken she loses her composure, offers to trade the acolyte's life for safe passage, and retreats into the barrow's flooded dark if reduced below half her hit points. She never fights to the death over a contract.
Defeated, she laughs and says the Choir already has what it wanted: the names. She can be killed, handed to Thornwell's justice, or bargained with — she will trade the ledger and the acolyte for her freedom, and the ledger is the act's real prize. She cannot be redeemed, but she can be made useful, and she knows only a fraction of what her patron is.
Recommended party: Three to five characters; four is ideal. A character with Survival, Investigation or a healer's kit will be very useful.
Before play, agree on tone and boundaries. This is folk horror in a wet, quiet country: drowning, dead bodies, missing family,children in danger off-screen, and body horror around the drowned dead. It is not gore-forward, but it is unkind about grief. Use lines and veils — the fen and drowning are the obvious veils. Confirm that players are comfortable with a mystery that will not be fully solved in the first session. Establish that the party already knows one another and has a reason to be in Thornwell together. State clearly that NPCs can die and that the villain can be bargained with, not just fought. Offer the two adventure hooks and let the players choose which one brought them to the village. Keep character creation to level 1 with standard array or point buy, and ask each player for one person in Thornwell they owe or care about — it makes the missing villagers matter.
Target four characters of the stated level. For three characters, remove one Bandit from the mill yard and one Skeleton from the barrow, and let Halden's warning grant a free round against the drowned dead. For five or six, add one Bandit and one Skeleton respectively and give the Ghoul a clear line to a back-rank character. For a party that reaches the barrow at level 2, drop the Ghoul entirely and reduce Sable Vane's supporting skeletons to one — the ritual circle remains the intended solution. For a party that is breezing through, have the ritual advance two steps per round instead of one so the fight has a clock. Never scale by adding more than two creatures at once; the act's tension comes from the water, the mist and the clock, not the body count.
Run the four scenes as a trail, not a dungeon crawl: village, fen, mill, barrow. The ash-mark is the connective image of the whole act — put it on the bell clapper, the shrine threshold, the ninth standing stone and Vane's coat so the players recognise it before anyone explains it. Let Thornwell be warm and specific before the fen takes anything else; the horror only lands if the village is worth saving. Sable Vane is a hired hand with a contract, not a zealot. She talks, she bargains, and she runs. Do not explain the Quiet Choir in this act — end on the name and a bad feeling.
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Sable Vane, the Ashen Collector
Sable Vane is a tall, narrow woman whose greyness seems less a choice of wardrobe than a slow profession: ash in the seams of her long trav…
Free campaign generations include one villain sheet. Additional villain, NPC, and player-facing module character sheets are available in premium campaigns.
Subscribe NowFree campaign encounters use official monster sheets, plus the campaign villain character when referenced. They do not include generated custom monster sheets. Subscribe to create custom campaign monsters and enemy stat blocks.
Subscribe NowSable Vane gathers the true names of the dead. She believes that if she can speak the buried name of the warband in the Barrow of Ash, she will be granted the thing she wants most: an end to her own forgetting. She is paid in knowledge by the Quiet Choir, and she is far more afraid of them than of any adventurer.
Dry, courteous and unhurried. She speaks to the party as though they were late guests, compliments their persistence, and never raises her voice. She calls the dead 'the quiet ones' and treats grave-robbing as a clerical duty. When cornered she becomes cold and precise, and she bargains rather than boasts.
Sable Vane opens with ash-marks to blind and divide the party, then keeps her skeletons between herself and the strongest fighter. She fights from the ritual circle and gains confidence while it is intact; if the circle is broken she loses her composure, offers to trade the acolyte's life for safe passage, and retreats into the barrow's flooded dark if reduced below half her hit points. She never fights to the death over a contract.
Defeated, she laughs and says the Choir already has what it wanted: the names. She can be killed, handed to Thornwell's justice, or bargained with — she will trade the ledger and the acolyte for her freedom, and the ledger is the act's real prize. She cannot be redeemed, but she can be made useful, and she knows only a fraction of what her patron is.
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Black water between the stones is difficult terrain and counts as deeper water at the ring's centre. The nine leaning stones give half cover and can be climbed (DC 10 Athletics) to escape a grapple. Reeds at the island's edge are heavily obscured. The ferry is a flat-bottomed boat that can be pushed off with a DC 12 Strength check.
Searching the drowned dead yields nothing but fen mud and old grief, but the ninth stone is the prize: DC 14 Investigation reveals the fresh sigil, and DC 12 Religion identifies the stones as marker-stones of a buried warband rather than a shrine. Halden will pay 5 gp for a description of what rose. If the party recovers his toll-box from the deeper pool afterward, see the side quest The Ferryman's Toll. The encounter is worth a milestone to level 2.
For a weak or three-person party, run 2 Zombie and let Halden shout a warning that grants a free round. For a strong five-person party, add 1 Zombie or raise the water: the ring is difficult terrain and the dead have advantage on the first attack from concealment. Do not exceed 4 Zombie — the scene is about discovery, not attrition.
Suggested Level: Level 2–3
The yard is churned mud (difficult terrain in the centre). Tents give half cover and can be cut down or set alight with a torch. The trestle table is half cover and holds the strongbox. The mill's main building is sagging and partly collapsed — the eastern end has a hole in the roof and rotting floorboards (DC 12 Dexterity save to cross without falling). The flooded office is knee-deep water, difficult terrain, and the water is opaque.
The strongbox (DC 15 Thieves' Tools or DC 16 Strength) holds the ciphered ledger, 40 gp in old barrow coin and the barrow map. The diggers carry 2d6 sp between them and one has a light crossbow. The ledger's cipher falls to a DC 15 Intelligence check, or automatically with Orrin Vale's or Sister Venn's help later. Dorn Alder's boot is a clue, not treasure. The encounter is worth a milestone to level 3 as the party heads north.
For a low-power party, cut to 3 Bandit and keep the skeletons in the office as a separate fight. For a strong party, the diggers fight from cover behind the trestle and tents and one carries a light crossbow. If the party parleys successfully, the fight should not happen at all — treat a negotiated outcome as full progress and full reward.
Suggested Level: Level 3
The ritual circle is a 15-foot ring of grey ash cut into the floor — difficult terrain, and the lever of the whole fight. Breaking it takes a DC 14 Arcana or Religion check or 15 damage to the ash ring, and ends the ritual, drops the forty standing skeletons into inert heaps and staggers Sable Vane. The chamber is round with a domed roof, 40 feet across, lit by grey light with no source; the walls are lined with standing skeletons that give half cover but are not yet animate. The entry passage is 10 feet wide and dry, with a narrow choke point at the door. Orrin Vale is bound at the back, one action and a DC 14 Acrobatics check or a slashing blade to free.
Orrin Vale, alive. The ledger (already the party's if they took it at the mill; otherwise it is in Sable Vane's coat). Vane's ash-chalk, a stub of grey chalk with three uses. Forty rusted mail hauberks and old shortswords — heavy, low value, and best left where they lie. The warband's true name, carved on the barrow walls and memorised by Orrin, which is a clue and never a spell component. Brother Ilya's blessing and Mara Thorn's reward on returning to Thornwell.
This is the act's hardest fight and it is meant to be winnable by lever, not by attrition. For a weak party, drop the Ghoul and reduce Sable Vane's supporting skeletons to one; for a strong party, add 1 Skeleton and let the Ghoul act before the party's second turn. If the party is struggling badly, have Kess Alder and Brother Ilya arrive at the barrow mouth at the start of round three and draw the Ghoul off — they are NPCs acting off-screen in the fiction, not combatants on the roster.
Halden's Fen-Chart
Completed
Act I — recovered from Halden Crane's sunken toll-box, or given by Halden himself in the side quest The Ferryman's Toll
False
Vane's Ash-Chalk
Completed
Act I — found in the Greywater Mill strongbox, or taken from Sable Vane at the Barrow of Ash
True — by any creature
Grave-Linen Clapper
Completed
Act I — recovered from the drowned acolyte in the peat cuttings during the side quest The Drowned Bell
False
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