Dramatis Personae: Folk Horror

Dramatis Personae: Folk Horror presents 100 distinct characters ready to step into your stories. Whether you need a player character built for consequence, an antagonist with grounded motivations, or a supporting character who shapes the tone of a village, this book offers people you can use immediately. Each is defined through appearance, personality, archetype, identity, strengths, weaknesses, drive, and assets. These elements give you a framework, not a script. You can portray them as written or adapt their traits to fit the mood and needs of your setting.

The characters are written for The Simple Approach, a narrative-first roleplaying system built on trait ratings from 1 to 5. However, their design is deliberately system-agnostic. You can adapt them to the mechanics of your preferred game without losing the story signals that make them memorable. Each character sits at a competent level of ability, suitable for player characters, credible adversaries, or pivotal supporting cast. If your game calls for someone just starting out or someone unmatched in their field, you will find guidance on scaling in the following pages.

These characters are meant to feel alive in any time period, from isolated villages to forgotten modern corners. They carry the weight of consequence, ritual, and community memory. Whether you are running a historical folk horror scenario or setting your story in the present day, these figures remind us that the soil, the dead, and the living are never fully separate.

Using This Book

The Simple Approach is a trait-based system that rates characters across their defining elements on a 1 to 5 scale, with 3 representing a competent, reliable level of skill. Every character in this book is built with 15 build points, which positions them as competent by default. That makes them suitable as player characters or narrative equals to the players if used as antagonists or supporting cast.

You can adjust any character’s level of experience by scaling the number of build points allocated to their traits. If you want a character to present a greater challenge or occupy a position of authority, you can increase their total build points to reflect that experience. If you need an apprentice, a youth, or someone just finding their place in the world, lower their build point total and redistribute their traits accordingly.

Each character profile is simplified for quick use, but that simplicity leaves room to add skills, abilities, or narrative tags based on your system’s mechanics. The personalities and drives provide immediate hooks for roleplaying or storytelling, and the assets section helps situate them in the material culture of their community.

You can introduce these characters directly into your story, tweak them to match your setting’s specific details, or use them as inspiration to build entirely new figures. However you use them, they are designed to carry the weight of folk horror’s essential tension: the past never truly rests, and the land never forgets.

A Note on Respectful Use

Folk horror draws deeply from cultural traditions, rituals, and belief systems rooted in real histories. This book presents characters inspired by global practices, but they are fictional constructs designed for storytelling. When incorporating cultural elements into your game, approach with care, curiosity, and respect. Every culture carries its own weight of meaning, and using these characters is an invitation to reflect on that heritage without resorting to caricature or stereotype. Let the stories you tell honor the depth of the cultures they echo.