Folk Horror Companion

Folk Horror Companion gives you everything you need to run stories where the land remembers. This is a system-adaptable sourcebook that arms you with narrative tools shaped for tension, ritual, and consequence. It is fully compatible with The Simple Approach, but made for any game where you want the village to stare back when the characters arrive.

You’re here to tell stories where curiosity carries a price. This book helps you build villages that tighten their grip the longer you stay. It equips you to design factions that pull strings behind the harvest. It gives you plot structures that don’t just escalate, they implicate. When your players disturb the soil, this book makes sure something stirs beneath it.

You’ll use this book to:

• Build settings where boundaries aren’t just physical, they’re personal: Design villages, wilds, and forgotten places where the edge of the map is not just where the trees thicken, but where trust runs thin and the land starts keeping score.

• Craft factions that survive on secrecy, inheritance, and quiet violence: Shape the groups who pull strings beneath every festival, who whisper pacts through bloodlines, and who understand that power never needs to shout when it knows the price of silence.

• Populate adventures with rituals that demand participation or punishment: Introduce ceremonies, rites, and traditions that no one can simply ignore. In these stories, to witness is to be bound, and refusal is just another way to earn the land’s attention.

• Create plot turns that change the story and the characters: Build twists that don’t just shift events but alter the players’ understanding of the world, each other, and themselves. The story moves in circles, and every revelation tightens the loop.

• Offer rewards that feel earned and consequences that feel inevitable: Give players tools, knowledge, and tokens of survival that carry weight along with scars, debts, and changes that remind them the land does not give without taking in return.

Folk horror doesn’t need tactical maps or monster manuals. It needs places that trap you, beliefs that warp you, and people who smile while they sharpen the knife. That’s what this book gives you.

There’s no right way to play folk horror, but the patterns always emerge. This book hands you the pieces. You’ll decide who puts the mask on first.

This Book Contains

Here’s what you’ll find inside. Every section is built to give you practical tools, story pressure, and the kind of detail that keeps the land heavy and the villagers watching.

• Genre Overview: A clear framework for what defines folk horror, with tools to translate it directly into play.

• Character Tools: Personalities, appearances, archetypes, identities, strengths, weaknesses, and drives that shape every character’s role in the pattern.

• Worldbuilding Prompts: Focused questions designed to reveal the land’s memory, the village’s habits, and the hidden rules that keep outsiders guessing.

• Setting Traits: A structured system to define what the world offers, with categories that shape openness, resources, insight, weirdness, agency, and moral clarity.

• Faction Traits: Narrative tools for creating groups that survive through secrecy, influence, knowledge, and cultural weight.

• Plot Obstacles and Twists: Complications that escalate danger, entangle characters, and turn curiosity into consequence.

• Rewards: Intrinsic rewards that change who your character is, and extrinsic rewards that leave a mark on the world.

• Adventure Hooks: Story starters that carry tension from the first scene, designed to evolve rather than resolve easily.

• Glossary and Bibliography: Real-world references and genre roots to expand your understanding or deepen the story’s texture.