The Long Dark Hunt

Game system: dnd5e

A frozen wilderness campaign set in the Hollow North, where rival clans fight over dwindling ember-coal reserves as an ancient curse grips the land in unnatural cold.

PREMISE The Hollow North has endured harsh winters for centuries, but this season something older and colder stirs beneath the ice. The Frostbound Curse — a blight once sealed by the Bone Wardens — has fractured its prison, and the land grows more hostile with each passing week. Into this crisis come the player characters: wanderers, exiles, or desperate souls drawn north by rumor, debt, or duty. LOCATIONS • Grevenmoor — A walled trade-town built on stilts above permafrost. The Moot Hall here is the last neutral ground where clan representatives still speak without drawn blades. • The Shatterfields — A vast plain of cracked ice where the old Bone Warden citadel sank a generation ago. Strange lights pulse beneath the surface on moonless nights. • Cinderveil Pass — The only southern mountain pass still navigable. Controlled by the Ashkeld Clan, who levy brutal tolls on all who cross. FACTIONS • The Ashkeld Clan — Pragmatic survivalists who believe the curse is an opportunity to consolidate power. They hoard ember-coal and sell passage at ruinous prices. • The Bone Wardens (remnant) — A dwindling order of curse-breakers. Their leader, Elder Voss, is half-mad from decades of exposure to the blight, but her knowledge is irreplaceable. • The Hollow Faithful — Cultists who welcome the curse as divine judgment and actively hinder any attempt to reseal the prison. HOOKS • A Bone Warden acolyte arrives in Grevenmoor with a stolen relic and a hunter on her heels. • Ember-coal shipments have gone missing along the northern road; survivors speak of figures that move beneath the ice. • Elder Voss offers the party a map to the sunken citadel — if they agree to retrieve a specific artifact before she will tell them what it does. NPCS • Elder Voss: frail, brilliant, unreliable. Trades information in fragments. Secretly knows the curse cannot be fully broken — only redirected. • Thane Brek Ashkeld: blunt, charismatic, genuinely believes hoarding resources is the only rational response to an existential threat. Not wholly wrong. • Lirien Osk: a young Faithful who has doubts but fears leaving the only community that sheltered her.

Tags: ["hollow north", "arctic", "curse", "survival", "factions"]

A community tabletop RPG campaign shared on TableTop DLC.