The Gleaning: Campaign Codex + GM Kit

There are no graves in Barrowmere. The fields never fail, the children never sicken, and no one ever grieves. Your players are going to find out why, and the harvest rite is only weeks away.

The Premise

Barrowmere is the loveliest village your players have ever seen: a green valley, gold corn, warm faces, a beautiful harvest festival called the Gleaning that everyone insists they simply must stay for. It is also a trap. Generations ago the village gave its grief and its dead to the thing in the land, the Neighbour, in exchange for a paradise that never knows loss, and the bargain must be fed every year at the Gleaning. The villagers are not monsters; they are trapped, terrified people doing a terrible thing to survive, fattening their guests with total and genuine affection. As the players uncover the graveless churchyard, the neighbours who cannot weep, the swept cottages of strangers who moved on, and the road that will not let them leave, they come to understand that a village which never loses anything urgently needs something new to give, and that the Gleaning, this year, is for them.

It is folk horror with a tender, terrible heart: no monster to fight, only a bargain to understand and a choice to make before the rite falls.

What You Get

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

• The full Campaign Codex: the valley of Barrowmere, the bargain and the Neighbour, a season-long descent in four movements, the full cast with GM-facing playbooks, seven mapped places, and a complete Running the Campaign toolkit (a village rumor table, dread encounter seeds, pacing notes, off-script responses, a pronunciation guide, and more).
• Print-ready player handouts (the Gleaning song, the parish register, the corn dolly) and one-page NPC reference sheets.
• A 5-session GM Session Planner (print-ready).
• A 2-page Campaign Tracker for the powers of Barrowmere, the truth as it is uncovered, the Gleaning clock, the four hinge decisions, and the one villager who still grieves.

Why It Runs Well at the Table

• A true, fair-play horror mystery: every wrongness is a clue, the truth is always findable, and the players lose only by failing to understand in time.
• A no-villain horror with real moral weight: the keeper of the rite is a grieving grandmother who calls the bargain mercy, and she is genuinely hard to refute.
• A season-long descent with a dark-night reveal (the welcome was a fattening) and three true endings, including the terrible, beautiful one where the players free the village by letting it die properly.
• A cast built to unsettle: villagers who cannot grieve, an outsider who already settled, and one girl whose sorrow is the only crack in the bargain.
• A clock your players can feel: the Gleaning drawing nearer, one corn dolly at a time, until one is woven in their likeness.

System-Agnostic

No stat blocks, no rules, no math. Run it in whatever system you already own. The supernatural is kept offstage and folkloric, presented as fiction-first dread with an optional, ruleset-neutral GM hook, so it drops cleanly into any table.

Content Note

Mature folk horror: themes of grief, sacrifice, and a community trapped in a terrible bargain. Dread, not gore, with violence kept offstage. The codex includes session-zero guidance and a safety-tool recommendation. Best for tables who like their horror slow, sad, and unsettling rather than splattery.

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 literate, character-driven folk-horror campaign they can run with almost no prep, who like dread over gore and moral weight over monsters, and who love a beautiful place that turns out to be the most frightening thing in the room. A complete, self-contained season that also opens a series of Barrowmere horrors.

Looking for one terrifying night instead of a whole season? The standalone one-shot, The Gleaning: Folk-Horror One-Shot, drops your players into Barrowmere on the night of the rite, and it is the opening of this very campaign.

License

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

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