Have been working on a TTRPG adventure. A small town has been destroyed by a literal act-of-god; there is point-crawl through its ruins.
Writing this town meant building two versions of it in my head:
The town, still living. What secret dramas fuel it?
The town, destroyed. What fires continue to burn?
And figuring out how to use the latter's fires to imply the former's fuel.
One of several locations in the main road through town:
A tent of bright textiles and fine rugs, where traders wined and haggled. Now flattened.
From under the fabric: sobbing. Manan, a young boy. “Bad babies took mummy away!” Fetus spirits dragged her to the Yellow House attic (pg xx).
One of the houses in a wealthy hilltop neighbourhood:
Turmeric-caked columns. Missing roof; disaster has flung it elsewhere (pg xx).
Ground floor: a medicine cabinet, fallen on its face. Salvageable tinctures and powders enough to treat 6d6 persons.
Second floor: a chest. Hair combs and scarves and toys—one hundred personal items townsfolk previously thought lost.
Out back: Tun Dek, the town physician, decapitated. In the roll of his sarong: a cord strung with dried infant pinkies. Fetus spirits (pg xx) obey this cord’s holder.
Finally, a location on the forested edge of the valley:
The roof of Tun Dek’s house (pg xx) landed here. Upended like a beached ship.
In front: a woman grilling rats. This is Kirata, mother to Manan (pg xx) and Maran (pg xx). Tied to her ankle: a rope, disappearing into the attic.
In the attic: hammocks and cages; would fit infants. A jumble of broken toys. Kirata is an unwilling servant to thirteen fetus spirits (pg xx).
Maran, Kirata's other son, is not found in the town's ruins, due to some magic bullshit.
Elsewhere, in the adventure's encounter table / bestiary, is an entry for fetus spirits, a creature very loosely based on the toyol:
FETUS SPIRIT
HD 1, as light armour, knife d4. Morale 5. Surrounding, stealing, taunting.
Teenage urges in the bodies of hairless tofu-hued one-year-olds.
Missing pinkies. Invisible at night. The doctor Tun Dek (pg xx) created them from babies stillborn or aborted; used them as spies, petty thieves.
To acquire baby corpses, Tun Dek must have had a votary accomplice.
A monster / encounter around the ruins;
Location(s): a rich doctor's house getting blown up due to disaster befalling the town, inadvertently setting his dirty secrets loose;
Background: A rich doctor with a dirty secret: he turns the town's stillborn children into monsters, and uses them to steal townsfolk's personal effects;
A powerful magic item: a cord that confers control over the monsters;
An explicit hook: a son looking for his mother, kidnapped by monsters;
An implied hook: it is elsewhere established that this town practices cremation; the doctor was working with a corrupt priest, who helped him spirit dead babies away from their rightful burial. Is this dude still alive? What else is he up to?
Spread across the breadth of the point-crawl---hopefully enticing players to tug on its various threads.
Also tried to practice economy. "Tun Dek makes fetus spirits!" is a minor detail, totally unrelated to the adventure's main themes. The passages above represent the total wordcount I allowed myself to spend on it.
( Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kuman_Thong.jpg )
