The Lost & Found: Campaign Codex + GM Kit

A girl ran off to the city thirty years ago. Everyone in town agrees on it. They are all, very gently, lying. And the things she left behind are coming home, one at a time, to the one woman who can feel what they have to say.

The Premise

In the storybook market town of Hartleigh, Hazel Penhallow keeps the Lost & Found, a little shop of unclaimed and unwanted things. She has a quiet gift: she can feel the last strong feeling pressed into an object, grief or guilt or fear, though never the facts. This season, the things that wash up on her counter all belonged to the same girl: a comb, a dance card, a locket, a single river-stained shoe. Each one is heavy with the same old terror. And the more Hazel and her friends tug the thread, the more the whole warm, lovely town closes around one three-word story: she ran off, didn’t she, years ago. She did not. The campaign is a season of solving small, human mysteries that all turn out to be threads of one larger, gentler, sadder truth, building toward the next Lantern Fair, when a lost girl can finally come home.

It is a cozy mystery with a tender heart: warmth, gossip, tea, and the deep satisfaction of a town that has to decide whether it is finally brave enough to be honestly sad.

What You Get

This is a complete, ready-to-run cozy mystery campaign for any tabletop system, a full season bible you bring your own rules to:

• The full Campaign Codex: the town of Hartleigh, the season-long mystery, a season of five connected cases each seeded by an object, the full cast with GM-facing playbooks, seven mapped places, and a complete Running the Campaign toolkit (a village rumor table, non-combat encounter seeds, pacing notes, off-script responses, a pronunciation guide, and more).
• Print-ready player handouts (the dance card, the memorial list, the parish register) and one-page NPC reference sheets.
• A 5-session GM Session Planner (print-ready).
• A 2-page Campaign Tracker for the powers of Hartleigh, Posy’s surfacing things, the Lantern Fair clock, the four hinge decisions, and the keeper of the silence.

Why It Runs Well at the Table

• A true, fair-play mystery: the gift only ever points, never solves, so your players always earn the truth by paying attention to people.
• A no-villain cozy with real emotional stakes: no killer to catch, just a town that defends its comfort with kindness and a grieving sister to understand.
• Five connected cases with a midpoint that reframes the whole season and three true endings, including a soft and bittersweet one.
• A cast with built-in voices and if-mishandled notes, so every NPC plays itself.
• A visible clock your players can feel: the Lantern Fair drawing nearer, one poster and one lantern at a time.

System-Agnostic

No stat blocks, no rules, no math. Run it in whatever fantasy or modern system you already own. The single uncanny element, Hazel’s gift, is presented as gentle flavor with an optional, ruleset-neutral GM hook, so it drops cleanly into any table (and you can even play it as nothing more than a very perceptive woman’s intuition).

What’s Inside

• Campaign Codex (PDF, print-ready 8.5 x 11)
• GM Session Planner, 5-session pack (DOCX)
• GM Campaign Tracker, 2-page (DOCX)

Who This Is For

Game Masters who want a warm, character-driven mystery they can run with almost no prep, who like their stakes emotional rather than violent, and who love a small town worth caring about and a secret worth grieving. A complete, self-contained season that also opens a series of Hartleigh mysteries.

License

For personal use at your table. Run it, print it, adapt it for your own games.

The Architecture of Legend. We Build the Foundation. You Tell the Story.