The Plenty Below – An Adventure
A three-session campaign for Call of Cthulhu, 7th Edition — 2 to 5 Investigators
Keeper’s Introduction
The fens of Cambridgeshire are not natural. They were created — drained across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Dutch engineers and English capital, vast brackish marshes converted to the richest arable land in Britain. Black peat over chalk, ten feet deep in places. Impossibly fertile. The yield from a Cambridgeshire fen field is unlike anything grown on ordinary soil.
There has always been an explanation for this — the peat, the drainage, the flat light that gives crops an extra growing hour each day. These explanations are correct, as far as they go. They do not go far enough.
Beneath the peat, beneath the chalk, beneath everything the drainage engineers surveyed and the geologists recorded, something has been here since before humanity held tools. The Bronze Age people who first settled the fen margins knew it was there. Their votive deposits in the meres, their causeways across the marsh, their careful placement of the dead — all evidence of a negotiation carried out across generations. The Romans built no temples here. The medieval Church planted no foundations in the black fields. The drainage engineers noted that their local labourers would not work certain sites and did not press the matter.
The thing beneath — which the fen communities have called, without quite speaking its name aloud, the Deep Warden — is not evil in any simple sense. It is enormously old, enormously patient, and enormously hungry. It does not think as a human being thinks. It thinks the way a field thinks: in cycles, in seasons, in the slow turning of what goes in and what comes out. It produces fertility. It accepts the dead. It has been doing this since before the concept of reciprocity existed in any mind sophisticated enough to name it.
:::callout The Fen Wardens
The Wardens of Eldmere Parish — a self-selecting, multi-generational society of local farmers — maintained the ritual conversation for over three hundred years. They knew the sites, the seasons, the forms of address. They provided what was required at the quarter-days. The Deep Warden provided the rest of the year. The Great War took four of the seven active Wardens. Of the three survivors, one is seventy-one and frightened, one is sixty-eight and has gone quietly insane, and one left the parish in 1921 and has not returned. The Deep Warden has been unaddressed for five years. It is no longer patient.
:::
The crops in the black fields nearest the central mere are wrong this year. Too tall, too dense, the wrong gold, as though the light comes from inside them. Animals avoid the central fields. Three dogs have gone missing in two months. The children born since 1918 are quiet in a way the village is finding hard to discuss. And Edmund Lease — who has been working the field directly above the Deep Warden’s oldest sleeping-chamber, alone, every day since 1918 — has stopped coming into the village.
The Hook
Choose the approach best suited to your group, or offer players a choice.
Missing Persons. Over the past eight months, four individuals have disappeared near Eldmere: two vagrants, a county drainage surveyor, and a schoolteacher who came from Cambridge and never returned for the autumn term. A relative of one of the missing — perhaps the surveyor’s employers, or the teacher’s family — has engaged private investigators.
The Journalist’s Commission. A London agricultural journal has commissioned a piece on the extraordinary harvest yields from the Cambridgeshire fens. The story was pitched as a piece about post-war rural recovery. It will not be that.
The Reverend’s Letter. The Reverend Thomas Dalloway, supply vicar at Eldmere for eight months, has written to someone he trusts asking for help. His letter is careful and slightly unhinged. He describes his congregation as “devout beyond the ordinary, though not, I increasingly suspect, devoted to the same object as myself.” He asks for discretion. He does not quite name what he needs.
The Survey Commission. A government survey of drainage infrastructure has been commissioned. The county board’s own surveyor, dispatched three months ago, sent one incomplete report and was not heard from again. The investigators are his replacement team.
The Cast
Aldous Cray, Last Fen Warden
:::stats Aldous Cray, 71
STR 50 CON 55 SIZ 60 DEX 35 INT 70
APP 45 POW 65 EDU 45 SAN 52 HP 12
DB: 0 Build: 0 Move: 4 MP: 13 Luck: 35
Skills: Farming / Natural World 85%, First Aid 40%, History (local) 75%, Listen 60%, Occult (Fen tradition) 70%, Spot Hidden 55%, Track 65%
:::
The oldest man in Eldmere and, he suspects, one of the last who fully understands what Eldmere is. He was a large man once — built for fen weather — and is still large in the way of old men whose frames haven’t reduced to match the person inside. He has been trying to perform the rites alone since 1919. He knows enough to attempt three of the seven quarter-day ceremonies: a farmer, not a scholar, he knows the forms without fully understanding their mechanism. His attempts have bought time. The Deep Warden recognises the address even imperfectly made. It does not, however, have the patience it once did.
He will tell the investigators the full truth of the Fen Wardens if he judges them able to hear it. His judgement takes approximately two sessions to arrive at.
:::callout Roleplaying Aldous
He answers questions by looking at the sky first. He pauses for long seconds. He refers to the Deep Warden only as “it” or “the concern” in front of people he doesn’t trust. He does not lie but will not volunteer more than he thinks is needed. The moment he opens up is the first crack in his reserve — pursue it carefully. He will not be rushed. The scenario’s timetable is his leverage.
:::
Agnes Toft, Postmistress
:::stats Agnes Toft, 48
STR 40 CON 55 SIZ 50 DEX 55 INT 75
APP 55 POW 60 EDU 55 SAN 60 HP 11
DB: 0 Build: 0 Move: 7 MP: 12 Luck: 50
Skills: Accounting 55%, Fast Talk 50%, History (local) 65%, Library Use 45%, Persuade 65%, Psychology 70%, Spot Hidden 60%
:::
Agnes has run the post office and provisions shop for twenty-two years, since her husband came back from the South African war with one arm and a cough and then didn’t. She knows the business of every family in the parish to a standard that would embarrass the county council. She is not a Fen Warden — they were always men, which she considered an absurdity but never said so — but she grew up knowing what they were, and she is intelligent enough to have filled in the specifics over the course of a life spent observing.
She will tell the investigators what she knows in layers, each layer requiring evidence that they can be trusted with more. She will lie to protect individuals she cares about — specifically Edmund Lease, whose mother was her closest friend.
:::callout What Agnes Knows
The Fen Wardens and their purpose (outline). The significance of the central mere. Why the animals avoid the field nearest it. The names of the four missing persons and where she thinks at least two of them went. The fact that Edmund Lease has stopped coming into the village. What the grey flour tastes like. She tasted it once, threw the bread away, and will not eat bread she hasn’t milled herself since.
:::
The Reverend Thomas Dalloway, Supply Vicar
:::stats Reverend Thomas Dalloway, 44
STR 40 CON 50 SIZ 50 DEX 45 INT 70
APP 55 POW 55 EDU 80 SAN 50 HP 10
DB: 0 Build: 0 Move: 7 MP: 11 Luck: 45
Skills: History 65%, Latin 60%, Library Use 65%, Persuade 55%, Psychology 60%, Read Latin 60%, Theology 75%
:::
He came from a comfortable Cambridge incumbency for what was meant to be a six-month placement. He has stayed eight months past his planned departure and cannot give anyone, including himself, a satisfactory account of why. His congregation is the most attentive he has ever served, and yet he has become increasingly certain over eight months of weekly services that they are not paying attention to him. They face forward. They say the words. Their attention is focused on something he cannot locate.
He has preached his best sermons here to his least responsive audiences. He administered the sacrament and watched faces that should be moved by it show instead mild impatience — the expression of people enduring one ceremony while mentally rehearsing another. He is not a stupid man. He has read his folklore and his comparative religion. He knows what a community with prior religious arrangements looks like from the inside of its nominal Church.
:::callout What Dalloway Knows
The quality of his congregation’s attention. The children’s complete absence of fidgeting during Sunday school. The pattern of parish activity — which families visit which fields, on which days. The fact that no Eldmere family has buried a member in the churchyard in three years; they are using the pre-Christian sites in the north field, and he has not confronted this. He has also found, tucked into the register of 1643, a note from his predecessor Jeremiah Fosse that he cannot fully decode — and is increasingly certain is the most important thing in the parish.
:::
Edmund Lease, Farmer
:::stats Edmund Lease, 28
STR 65 CON 60 SIZ 65 DEX 50 INT 55
APP 50 POW 30 EDU 40 SAN 40 HP 13
DB: +1D4 Build: 1 Move: 7 MP: 6 Luck: 30
Skills: Farming / Natural World 75%, First Aid 35%, Listen 55%, Spot Hidden 50%, Track 60%
Note: Edmund’s POW is declining. Each month he remains in the central field costs him 1 additional point. He is currently at 30. He started the war at 60.
:::
Edmund came back from the Somme in 1917 with no visible wounds and a silence that his mother thought, for the first year, was shell shock. His father died at Arras in 1918. He inherited the farm — ninety-six acres of black fen field, and the field directly above the Deep Warden’s oldest sleeping-chamber, which no Lease before Edmund has ever worked without knowing what lay beneath it.
He has been working it for five years. Alone, since his mother died in the influenza of 1919. The Deep Warden has been reaching upward through the soil in growing confusion and hunger, and Edmund, standing in that field every day, is the nearest available mind it has found. The process has been slow and not violent, and Edmund has not understood what is happening to him. He sleeps less. He thinks in different rhythms. He has stopped going into the village because the village feels wrong — too loud, too urgent. He finds the field peaceful.
He is not possessed. He is not a cultist. He is a man being slowly and gently colonised by something very large and ancient that does not mean him harm and does not understand that what it is doing is harmful.
:::callout Roleplaying Edmund
He treats the investigators with genuine courtesy and complete detachment — politely, without particular interest in who they are. He answers questions directly and without evasion. He does not understand why the answers disturb people. His tell: when speaking about the field, his fingers press rhythmically against whatever surface he is touching. He does not notice this. His niece Nell Lease, five years old, lives with him. She has never spoken to anyone outside the village.
:::
Joseph Lant, Former Fen Warden
:::stats Joseph Lant, 68
STR 40 CON 45 SIZ 55 DEX 35 INT 65
APP 35 POW 60 EDU 50 SAN 25 HP 10
DB: 0 Build: 0 Move: 5 MP: 12 Luck: 20
:::
The third surviving Warden lives alone in a farmhouse on the eastern edge of the parish that smells of mildew and very old cooking. He does not answer his door consistently. He was a competent, practical Warden for thirty years and tried to continue alone after the war. He stopped trying in 1921, in the same way an elderly person who has lost everyone stops maintaining the house — not from despair but from exhaustion with the effort of continuing.
He talks to people who are not there. He eats haphazardly. But he has moments — lucid, precise, startling — in which the full competence of a lifetime’s custodianship is entirely present. The complete ritual form for all seven quarter-days is in his head, perfectly preserved, along with the oral history of the Fen Wardens going back to 1623. He simply has to be present enough to access it.
:::callout Lant in Lucidity
Things that help bring Lant to lucid moments: bringing food, talking about farming in specific practical terms, showing him the second parish register. In lucidity, he speaks in a steady and precise voice completely unlike his usual state — as a man reciting something learned by heart and carried for fifty years. He knows the complete ritual calendar, the precise locations of all seven boundary markers, what happened to the missing persons, and the specific thing the Deep Warden requires to resume the conversation peacefully. He uses the word peacefully with some emphasis.
:::
The Children of Eldmere
Fourteen children were born in the village since 1918. They are clean, quiet, well-behaved, and have never been in any trouble. They do their lessons without complaint. They do not play in the way that children play. Their games have rules that no adult has successfully asked about. They help with farm work willingly and efficiently beyond their years.
A successful Psychology roll during any conversation with them will identify what is wrong: there is no performance of childhood in them. Children perform helplessness, ignorance, and randomness unconsciously as part of growing into understanding the world. These children do not perform anything. They engage from behind something that looks like childhood the way a very good mask looks like a face.
:::callout The Key Child — Nell Lease
Edmund’s niece, five years old. Small for her age. She has never spoken to anyone outside the village. She speaks to Edmund in short practical sentences. She occasionally speaks, very quietly, to the soil. She will, at two key moments in the scenario, say something to the investigators that is entirely accurate and entirely wrong-sounding from a five-year-old. The Keeper should not underplay these moments.
:::
Session One: The Flat Land
Scene 1-A Arrival: The Village of Eldmere
:::example
The drive across the fens approaches Eldmere from a direction that the map calls east but which the landscape refuses to confirm. The fens do not have horizons in the ordinary sense — the sky comes all the way to the ground in every direction, and the land between sky and viewer is a black and green horizontal that barely registers as terrain. The clouds here cast shadows you can watch move across the fields in real time.
Eldmere appears gradually: the church tower, then the mill, then the dark huddle of buildings around the green. The road runs along a dyke bank, six feet above the surrounding fields. From the road, looking down, the crop in the field nearest the large mere at the parish centre is wrong. Taller than it should be. A colour that isn’t quite right. Standing perfectly still on a day when everything else moves in the wind.
:::
The village green is quiet. Three or four people are visible — they stop what they are doing and look at the investigators without expression for a period slightly longer than comfortable before resuming. The war memorial on the green carries thirty-four names on fresh-cut stone. For a village this size, that is most of the working men who were alive in 1914. The grass at its base is freshly tended.
The Reverend Dalloway will appear within the first hour, drawn by the arrival of strangers, and will be visibly relieved.
:::callout Clue — The Memorial
Among the thirty-four names: four Leases, two Crays, three Lants, two Tofts. The Fen Warden families, heavily represented. The toll the war took on the custodian lineages is legible here to anyone who later learns the family names. An investigator who makes a note of the names and later cross-references them with the parish register will find that they represent every male Warden of working age.
:::
Scene 1-B The Drover’s Rest
The pub is the right place to gather preliminary information. Landlord Bill Prentice is not a Warden and not in the secret — he is simply running a pub in a strange village and keeping his head down. He will tell investigators:
- There’s a man from the drainage board expected soon (this is the investigators, if they are the survey team; if not, the resulting confusion is useful)
- The previous schoolteacher left in September. There’s been no replacement since.
- Edmund Lease hasn’t been in since April. Used to come on Fridays.
- The harvest off the central fields has been “something remarkable, the board will want to know about it”
- The mill is working double time. The flour has been “a bit grey — Frank’s been adjusting the stones”
:::callout Clue — The Missing Surveyor’s Room
The missing county drainage surveyor, Charles Morrow, was billeted here for his first week. His belongings are still in his room — Prentice has been holding them, expecting return. The room contains: a leather briefcase with drainage charts (last one annotated: “something wrong with reading at Site Seven — instrument error, or is the ground genuinely rising? Recheck”), a personal diary, and an unused return railway ticket to Cambridge.
The diary’s last entry: “Went out to the central mere today. Cray was watching from the dyke bank. Didn’t approach. The water in that mere is the wrong colour. Not the peat. Something else.”
:::
Scene 1-C The Post Office
Agnes Toft will establish the investigators’ purpose, credentials, and likely duration of stay within four minutes of conversation without appearing to ask about any of these things. She will then decide how much she trusts them. On a first meeting: enough to be courteous, not enough to be honest.
First meeting — voluntarily offered or easily obtained:
- Edmund Lease is “keeping to himself, which is his right, but his sister’s girl is with him and it’s been a long time since anyone’s seen Nell”
- The Reverend is “a decent man, a bit out of his depth, which isn’t entirely his fault”
- Old Mr. Lant is “not well”
- Of the missing persons: “people come and go through the fens, it’s easier to get lost out there than you’d think”
She will not discuss the central field on a first visit. Her tell: she tidies the counter when information is approaching the line of what she is prepared to share.
Scene 1-D The Central Field: First Approach
The central field is visible from the village but separated from the road by a quarter-mile walk along the dyke bank. Investigators can approach in the first session. Aldous Cray will watch from the bank but not intervene — until they try to enter.
:::example
The dyke bank gives five feet of elevation above the field surface. From it, the central field is clear: roughly twenty acres of standing wheat in a colour that registers as wheat-coloured until you look at it beside the ordinary fields and understand that the ordinary wheat is amber and this is something more golden, almost luminous — as though the light comes from inside it rather than falling on it.
There is no wind. In every other field, everything moves. In this field, nothing moves at all. The wheat stands with the perfect stillness of painted wheat. At the far end, perhaps four hundred yards, the land dips toward the mere. The surface of the water is visible: black, flat, absolutely still.
:::
Spot Hidden at the field edge reveals a dead crow at the margin — not attacked, not diseased in any obvious way, simply dead on its back with feet in the air, in the precise posture of something that fell straight down. A successful Medicine or Natural World: no obvious cause. The bird’s eyes are open. Its expression, insofar as a crow can have an expression, is one of arrested attention.
Natural World on the smell at the field’s edge: an organic, deep, cold smell — like turned earth in winter, amplified to eye-watering intensity. Not peat, which has its own distinct character. Something beneath the peat.
:::callout Clue — The Boundary Marker
Walking the full field edge (roughly one mile) reveals a worked stone at the northeast corner, sunk almost flush with the soil, roughly the size of a large cat. A hollow has been worn in its top surface. It has been used recently — the hollow holds a dried residue: plant matter, something dark, something that crumbles when touched. A successful Occult roll: a votive deposit site of considerable age and regular recent use. The deposit is approximately two weeks old.
:::
Aldous’s Intervention. If investigators attempt to enter the field, Aldous descends from the dyke bank with more speed than his age suggests and places himself between them and the field edge. He says, flatly: “Not without preparation. Come to the house.” He will not explain what preparation means. But this is the first crack in his reserve.
Scene 1-E Aldous Cray’s Farmhouse
The farmhouse is one of the older buildings in the parish, built on a slight rise that was, before the seventeenth-century drainage, an island in the marsh. Well-kept in a practical sense; untended in an aesthetic one. The garden is all utility. He makes tea with deliberate care.
He will talk around the subject for some time. He will ask careful questions about what the investigators have seen, heard, and — this last category embarrasses him — felt near the field. He is specifically interested in whether they experienced anything that might be described as peace, or recognition, or a sense of being addressed.
If they have found the boundary marker, mentioned the smell, or used any word that signals genuine attention to what they observed, he will make a decision and begin to talk.
:::callout Aldous’s First Disclosure — Session One Ending
“There’s a thing in the ground here. Has been since before any of us or any of ours. Not evil — I want you clear on that, because if you think it’s evil you’ll approach it wrong and then it will be worse. It’s old and it’s large and it has an arrangement with the land and the families on it that goes back further than anyone alive can read. My family has been the custodians — stewards of the conversation — for three hundred years. The war took the men who knew what needed doing. I’m too old and not complete enough and it’s been too long.
It’s waking up now. It’s confused and it’s hungry the way a field is hungry when it hasn’t been tended in a season. It’s reaching up through the soil, finding what it can. Edmund Lease works the field above where it sleeps deepest. He’s been there every day for five years. I don’t know anymore how much of what’s in Edmund is still Edmund.”
He will say nothing more that night. He will tell the investigators to keep their windows shut and not go out after eleven.
:::
Session One Night Scene — The Dykes
Between midnight and three, any investigator awake or making a Listen roll (difficulty: Hard) will hear: something moving in the drainage channels. Not a surface movement. A displacement from below — a pressure moving along the dyke network from the direction of the central mere, passing under the village and continuing east. It does not stop.
Investigators who go outside and stand on the dyke bank while the displacement passes beneath them will feel the bank vibrate. Very slightly. Not enough to be certain.
SAN Loss — Hearing the displacement: 0/1.
SAN Loss — Feeling it pass underfoot: 1/1D4.
Session Two: The Long Roots
Scene 2-A The Church and Its Records
The Church of St. Etheldreda sits on land that had a religious function before Christianity arrived in the fens. The churchyard is well-maintained in the new parts. The old section, behind the church, is covered in vegetation slightly different from the surrounding grass — greener, denser, faintly smelling of what investigators may have encountered at the central field. No grave in this section has been tended in some time. No grave here carries a stone later than 1880.
The new dead of Eldmere are not in this churchyard.
Dalloway’s Discovery
The Reverend has found a note in the 1643 register, in the hand of the then-incumbent, one Jeremiah Fosse:
:::handout
“Mem. — The Wardens have spoken to me plainly this winter on the matter of the old Obligation. I have set down what they told me in the other book, which is kept at the Cray house. I am not glad of what I know. But I have sat in this parish for eleven years and I have seen what the land gives and I have buried fewer children than any incumbent in the county and I know what the Obligation costs and what it returns.
God forgive me for what I do not prevent. The thing below is not the Devil. The thing below is simply old. I am not sure this makes it better.”
— Jeremiah Fosse, Incumbent, Eldmere, December 1643
:::
:::callout Clue — The Other Book
A second parish register, begun by Fosse in 1643 and maintained intermittently by his successors, is at Aldous Cray’s house. He has never shown it to anyone. He will show it to the investigators if they bring him Fosse’s note. The book contains: a partial description of the Deep Warden (“a patient darkness, not hostile, which requires address as one might address a landlord — with regularity and appropriate tribute”), the ritual calendar in coded form, notes from various incumbents, and a final entry from 1918: “Henry Cray and John Lant fell in France this April. Three more of the Lease family at the Somme. God knows how we are to manage.”
:::
SAN Loss — Reading the other book in full: 1/1D4.
Scene 2-B Visiting Joseph Lant
Finding Lant at home is inconsistent. When found, he may or may not be able to communicate. He is often somewhere on his fields, moving with apparent purpose along routes with no agricultural necessity.
Approaches that can bring Lant to lucidity:
- Bringing food (he is intermittently forgetting to provide for himself)
- Talking about farming in specific, practical terms — the land itself seems to anchor him
- Showing him the second parish register, which produces a complex emotional response
In a lucid moment, Lant will provide — in a single concentrated burst, as though the information has been waiting under pressure — the complete ritual calendar and forms. He speaks as a man reciting something learned by heart and carried for fifty years. His voice, in these moments, is steady and precise.
:::callout Lant’s Critical Information
“The Midsummer address is the central one. The others maintain the relationship. Midsummer renews it. Without a proper Midsummer in — what is it, five years now? Six? — the understanding degrades. It doesn’t know us anymore. We’re shapes moving on the surface of its land. It’s trying to learn us again. Through the soil and the water and the things that live in both. Through Edmund. Through the children. It doesn’t know it’s doing harm. It doesn’t know what harm is. It knows deficit and restoration. That’s all it’s ever known.
The Midsummer form requires three voices and a descent. You go to the bottom of the Warden’s Shaft at the central mere. You go at first light on the longest day. You speak the address. You leave what’s required.
The longest day is in seventeen days.”
:::
Scene 2-C Meeting Edmund Lease
Edmund will not come to the village. He must be approached at the farm, along the dyke bank. The walk is instructive: the fields grow odder as the farm approaches, the silence deepens, the central field does its wrong golden thing.
Edmund receives the investigators with genuine courtesy and complete detachment. He offers tea. He answers questions. He does not ask questions back.
Nell Lease is present throughout. She is five years old, small for her age. She has her uncle’s habit of looking at the ground. She does not speak to or acknowledge the investigators. She is eating an apple with complete attention.
:::example
He talks about the field the way a man talks about something good that happened a long time ago and that he has been living off ever since — with a quietness that is not quite distance, but a different kind of closeness than the ordinary kind. When you ask him about the nights in the barn, he doesn’t understand why you ask. “It’s closer,” he says. “Easier to sleep.”
:::
Things Edmund will describe if gently asked:
- Working the central field is “peaceful. The best working I know. I feel sorted out after a day there.”
- He dreams about the field — “deep dreams. Like being in water. Not bad.”
- He has found old objects while ploughing and placed them at the field edge. They are gone the next morning. “Someone collects them, I suppose.”
- He has been sleeping in the barn nearest the central field because the farmhouse feels too far away.
A successful Spot Hidden or Psychology: when Edmund speaks about the field, his fingers press rhythmically against whatever surface he is touching. He does not notice this.
Nell’s contribution. As investigators are leaving, Nell looks up — directly at them, which she hasn’t done before — and says, in a conversational tone: “It knows you’re here.” Then she looks back at her apple.
SAN Loss: 0/1.
Scene 2-D The Mere and the Warden’s Shaft
The central mere is at the lowest point of the parish — a body of open water half an acre in extent, surrounded by reed-beds in a slightly wrong colour. The water is black. Not the peat-black of fen water but a deeper black, a colour that absorbs light in an unusual way.
The Warden’s Shaft is a stone-lined vertical descent at the mere’s north edge, barely wide enough for a person. Iron rungs descend approximately fifteen feet before meeting the water table. The bottom is submerged. The water at the base moves in a current with no hydrological explanation.
:::example
The reed-beds begin thirty yards from the water’s edge and close behind you as you approach. At some point you are in them and cannot see either the water ahead or the field behind. The reeds here are taller than a person and stand with the same unmoving quality as the central field’s wheat.
Then the reeds part and you are at the edge. The mere is very still. The sky above it is reflected in it perfectly — not as a moving reflection of a moving sky, but as a fixed image, like a photograph of a sky taken at some other moment and displayed here. The clouds in the reflection are not the clouds above you.
:::
SAN Loss — Observing the reflection: 0/1.
SAN Loss — Looking into the shaft and seeing the current below: 1/1D4.
:::callout Clue — The Shaft Carvings
Visible by lamplight: carved marks on the shaft walls, all the way down. The upper sections correspond to the coded script in the second parish register. Below them the script changes — older, simpler, worn almost smooth. At the waterline: something that might be a face, or a hand with too many fingers, or a root system rendered abstractly. A successful Cthulhu Mythos roll on studying it: +1D4 Mythos. SAN Loss: 0/1D4.
:::
Scene 2-E The Death in the Field
On the second night — or the morning of the third day — the following occurs. Choose based on investigator activity:
The Less Active Version: Agnes Toft appears at the investigators’ lodgings at six in the morning. She has been running. Peter Farrow, a tenant farmer with a field adjacent to Edmund’s, went into the central field last night to check his drainage channel and has not returned. His wife found his drain stop at the field edge. Nothing else.
The Active Version (if investigators visited the mere or spent time near the central field): They hear from the direction of the fields a modulation in the silence — a pressure change, not a sound. In the morning, Peter Farrow is missing.
:::callout What Happened to Peter Farrow
He is in the central field. Standing approximately two hundred yards from the edge in the pre-dawn darkness, perfectly still, in the posture of someone listening. Not injured. Eyes open. Breathing slow and regular. He will stand here until physically extracted — an opposed STR roll against effective STR 80 (the field’s hold on him). Once out, he returns to himself over several hours with no memory of the previous night. He is physically healthy. Agnes will observe that he is “a bit settled-looking. Sort of peaceful.” Edmund Lease, told about this, shows no surprise. “It’s a good field to stand in,” he says.
This event ends Aldous Cray’s incremental disclosure. He will call on the investigators that evening and tell them about the Midsummer form.
:::
Session Three: What the Ground Requires
By Session Three the investigators should have: the full picture of the Fen Wardens and the Obligation, the complete ritual form from Lant, understanding that the Midsummer ceremony is three or four days away, a working relationship with Aldous and Agnes, uncertainty about Edmund, and real unease about the children.
Scene 3-A The Grey Bread
Two families in the village have baked bread from the harvest flour this week — the first to use this year’s yield. By the morning of Session Three’s opening day, both families’ children have not woken up.
They are not dead. They are in the standing-in-the-field state — eyes open, breathing, unresponsive. Four children across two households. The village is aware. For the first time, Eldmere’s composure breaks.
Agnes comes to the investigators before anyone else: “Whatever is going to happen needs to happen now, not in seventeen days.”
:::callout Medical and Scientific Investigation
A successful Medicine: the children are in normal physical health. No fever, no poisoning symptoms, normal vital signs. They will drink water if it is introduced. They are simply elsewhere.
Analysis of the grey flour (Pharmacy, Chemistry, or Natural World with a magnifying glass): the grain has been altered at a cellular level. Structures in the pollen have no botanical classification. This is not external contamination — it grew from inside the grain.
SAN Loss on microscopic examination: 0/1D4.
:::
Scene 3-B Aldous’s Full Disclosure
Aldous Cray, facing the sleeping children, makes his final decision.
He tells them the full history: the Obligation, the Wardens, the quarter-days, the nature of what lives beneath. He tells them what it has been to the village — “not kind, that’s not the word, it doesn’t know kind. But consistent. You give it what it needs and it doesn’t reach up. It gives the land back what you’ve given it and more.”
:::callout The Complete Picture — What Aldous Reveals
The Midsummer form requires three voices who have been on the land. A descent to the Warden’s Shaft at the central mere. The address in the old form — known to him, known completely to Lant, written in the second register. A sacrifice of something living, placed in the moving water at the shaft’s base. In three hundred years of Warden records, the sacrifice has always been agricultural — a sheaf, a bird, something of the land’s own produce. The Deep Warden does not require human blood.
He does not think it wants Edmund. He thinks it is holding Edmund because Edmund is the nearest available anchor and it does not understand the damage it causes — like a large animal that has leaned against something and doesn’t understand the something cannot bear the weight.
“If we perform the Midsummer form properly — three voices, the shaft, the address, the tribute — it should hear us. It should recognise the conversation and respond to it. The children should come back. Edmund should come back, I think. The field should be quiet again.”
“I need the investigators. I need people who have been on this land long enough that it can hear them.”
:::
Scene 3-C The Vigil with Joseph Lant
The complete Midsummer vocalisations are not written in the second register — they were transmitted orally, warden to warden, as a safeguard against the ceremony being performed without understanding it. Lant has them.
The investigators must spend the evening before the ceremony with him, drawing the complete form out in a period of relative lucidity — writing it down as he speaks.
Keeping Lant on task requires: grounding questions (“what comes after the third address?”), practical details he finds easy to hold (“what is the tribute for this year?”), and patience.
:::callout The Complete Midsummer Form
Lant says, at the end of the session: “The thing to remember is that you’re not commanding it. You’re not placating it. You’re talking to a very old, very large thing in its own language and reminding it that you’re here, and that you’ve always been here. That’s all. It’s a conversation. It’s always been a conversation.”
The form consists of: the Three Addresses (in the old English of the seventeenth-century ceremony, readable from the register), the Response Waits (a silence held at specific points for the Deep Warden to acknowledge receipt), the Descent and Tribute placement, and the Withdrawal — leaving the shaft without turning back, without speaking again until clear of the mere.
:::
Scene 3-D Edmund at the Threshold
The night before the ceremony, the investigators should find Edmund Lease. He needs to know what is going to happen. And the investigators need to know whether there is enough of Edmund left to consent.
:::example
He listens without interrupting. He looks at the field while they talk — not dramatically, not evasively, just at the field, where he has looked every day for five years. When they are finished he is quiet for a long time. Then he says: “I don’t know what comes back. What’s there now — it’s peaceful. It’s the first peaceful I’ve known since 1915. I don’t know if there’s a me left who wants what I wanted before.”
A longer silence. “Nell needs someone. She’s five. She needs someone who’s actually here.”
He looks at his hands. “Do the ceremony.”
:::
As investigators leave that night, Nell is in the doorway. She watches them go. She says: “Don’t be afraid of it. It’s just hungry.” Then she goes inside.
Scene 3-E The Midsummer Ceremony
Dawn on the longest day. The investigators, Aldous Cray, and — if he had a lucid night — Joseph Lant approach the mere.
The morning is cold for June. Mist off the water. The sky is the pale nothing of pre-dawn fen sky, without colour, without feature. It is the largest sky any of them have ever been under.
:::example
The first light comes across the flat land like something being poured rather than something arriving. You can watch it cross the fields — it reaches the reed-beds before it reaches you, turns them from grey to dark green in a matter of seconds, then it is on the water, then on your hands. The mist begins to move.
The mere is changing. Not dramatically — nothing here is dramatic in an ordinary sense. The reflection of the sky is correcting itself, becoming the actual sky, and the water is becoming water. Whatever was wrong about this place is attending to something. To you. It knows you are here. In the same way that a field knows it is being ploughed — not awareness exactly, but orientation, adjustment, the beginning of transaction.
:::
The Three Silences
The addresses are read aloud from the register. Each is followed by a Response Wait — forty seconds of genuine silence, without speaking or moving. This is harder than it sounds.
During the First Silence: The ground vibrates. Not an earthquake — too specific, too local. The vibration is under the investigators’ feet only. SAN Loss: 0/1.
During the Second Silence: Something moves in the water at the base of the shaft. Enormous and patient, attending to the surface in a way it has not attended in a long time. The water rises six inches in the shaft without overflowing. SAN Loss: 1/1D4.
During the Third Silence: The correct response occurs. The investigators will feel it rather than see or hear it — a quality of recognition, deep and slow, like a vast mind registering that what it is hearing is familiar. The mist stops moving. The reeds fold back from the mere. The golden quality in the central field dims and normalises.
The Descent
One investigator must descend the shaft and place the tribute — grain from this year’s harvest — in the moving water at the base.
:::example
At the bottom of the shaft, the water’s current is warm. In the current, something — not a shape exactly, but a quality of depth. The sense of looking into water with no bottom, or a bottom so far below that the concept of distance stops applying. You place the grain in the current. It dissolves immediately. And then, for approximately five seconds, you experience the subjective sensation of being known. Recognised. Filed, in the way a farmer files a field — its dimensions, its quality, its history, its potential. It is not unpleasant. It is the most inhuman experience a human being can have.
:::
SAN Loss — The descent: 1/1D6.
Cthulhu Mythos Gain: +1D6.
The Withdrawal
Climbing back up. Leaving the mere. Not speaking. Not looking back. This is the most important part.
The investigators will want to speak. They must not.
The Aftermath
One hour after the ceremony: The grey flour from the central field’s harvest is ordinary flour again. The sleeping children wake. They remember nothing. They are hungry and confused. Agnes observes, privately, that they will be “a little less strange from now on. Not ordinary. But less.”
Edmund Lease sits up in his barn and sits for a long time. Then goes inside, sleeps in the farmhouse for sixteen hours. When he emerges, he is Edmund again — or the version that remains after five years of gentle occupation and an abrupt restoration. He is thinner than he should be. He goes to the field that afternoon and works it until dark. When he comes in, he washes his hands and sits with Nell and eats supper and says, to nobody in particular: “Right then.”
The village after: The central field’s yield remains extraordinary — the Obligation has been renewed. The animals return. The birds land in the central field again, which initially seems like a relief. For the investigators, after a moment, it seems like it might not be.
If the Ceremony Fails
If the investigators refuse the ceremony — if they attempt to destroy the field, drain the mere, or expose the situation to outside authorities — the Deep Warden’s response escalates. More people stand in the fields and do not return. The grey flour spreads to adjacent farms via cross-pollination. The drainage channels block inexplicably at points corresponding to the boundary marker sites. The children of the 1918 cohort become progressively less available to ordinary conversation.
The central mere, previously still, begins a slow deep circulation driven by no current the drainage engineers would recognise.
This is not the beginning of an apocalypse. The Deep Warden is not able to destroy humanity — it is not that kind of entity. But it is able to make the three hundred acres of Eldmere parish quietly uninhabitable, without drama, over the following year. The village will empty. The land will revert to fen. In two generations no one will remember why.
Epilogue
Aldous Cray will live another three years. He spends them training Reginald Farrow — Peter Farrow’s eldest son, who was standing in the field that night and has been, ever since, slightly different — as the new Fen Warden. He does not know if one man will be enough for the next generation. He is seventy-one. He has done what he can.
Joseph Lant’s lucid periods increase slightly after the ceremony, as though something pressing on him has stepped back. He dies in the winter, peacefully, in his own bed, which Agnes had not expected.
The Reverend Dalloway returns to Cambridge, where he accepts an appointment that never quite fits him. He writes two academic papers on pre-Christian religious practice in East Anglian communities that are well-received and contain, encoded in their scholarly framing, a fairly complete account of what he witnessed. No one reading them will understand.
Edmund Lease stays in Eldmere. He works the field. He knows, now, what is beneath it, and he works it anyway, with the knowledge. This is different from working it without knowing. It is, he would tell you, a little lonelier. It is also, he thinks, the right thing. Nell starts talking to strangers in the spring. It’s a small thing. It matters.
The Deep Warden – Mythos Entry
The Deep Warden is not classifiable within the standard Mythos taxonomy. It predates the Outer Gods’ involvement with this solar system. It is not a servant of any named entity. It is simply a thing that has been in the peat and chalk of what is now Cambridgeshire since before the last ice age, and has developed, over geological time, something approaching preference.
It prefers this land inhabited and worked. It prefers the address of the Wardens to silence. It prefers the feel of the plough to standing water.
It is agricultural in the deepest possible sense: it thinks in the terms of reciprocal exchange — seed and harvest, what goes in, what comes out. It is not malicious. It does not know human individuality. It knows the Lease family the way a farmer knows a particular field: as an entity with characteristics, history, and productive relationship. Edmund Lease is not a person to it. Edmund Lease is a field it knows.
This is not a comfort. But it is not the same as being evil.
:::stats The Deep Warden (Manifest Form)
STR — CON — SIZ — DEX — INT 150
APP — POW 160 EDU — SAN — HP —
Movement: Does not move in a conventional sense — manifests as a pressure displacement through soil and water.
Impossible to harm with physical weapons. Fire has no effect on peat that has been burning slowly underground for ten thousand years.
Presence: All living things within 60 feet lose 1 MP per round. Within 20 feet: 3 MP per round.
Draw (opposed POW): Any creature failing loses 1D6 POW and stands motionless for 1D6 hours, in the same state as the sleeping children.
The Ritual Address is the only effective intervention.
:::
SAN Loss — Direct manifestation encounter: 1D6/1D20.
Mythos Knowledge: +1D8 Cthulhu Mythos.
SAN Cap Reduction: 1 per Mythos point gained.
Handout 1 – Fosse’s Note (Church Register, 1643)
:::handout
“Mem. — The Wardens have spoken to me plainly this winter on the matter of the old Obligation. I have set down what they told me in the other book, which is kept at the Cray house.
I am not glad of what I know. But I have sat in this parish for eleven years and I have seen what the land gives and I have buried fewer children than any incumbent in the county and I know what the Obligation costs and what it returns.
God forgive me for what I do not prevent. The thing below is not the Devil. The thing below is simply old. I am not sure this makes it better.”
— Jeremiah Fosse, Incumbent, Eldmere, December 1643
:::
Handout 2 – Charles Morrow’s Diary (Final Entry)
:::handout
14th September, 1923
Went out to the central mere today. Followed the Site Seven readings — the ground level there is genuinely rising, not instrument error. Something underneath is shifting.
Cray was watching from the dyke bank the whole time. Didn’t approach. I waved. He didn’t wave back.
The water in that mere is the wrong colour. Not the peat. Something else — a darkness that doesn’t move the way dark water moves. I should note this in the official report.
I’m not going to note it in the official report.
Tomorrow I’ll go back with a depth gauge and the camera. If the readings confirm what I think I saw today, I’ll take the next train to Cambridge and let the board decide what to do.
Tomorrow.
:::
Handout 3 – A Page from the Second Parish Register
:::handout
“On the Nature and Requirement of the Obligation, as set down by H. Cray and transcribed with his permission, 1741:
The thing below is not hostile to the living and has not been since first address was made in the time of our grandfathers’ grandfathers. It requires of us the address at the appointed days — not worship, but acknowledgement. Not prayer, but conversation. It has no name that we speak aloud. It is not concerned with us as persons, but it is concerned with this land and with the families that have worked it.
In return it gives the land back more than it takes, and the children here live when children elsewhere die, and the harvest does not fail.
This is not an arrangement we chose. It is an arrangement we inherit. It is also an arrangement that, on examination, we would choose.
The Warden who performs the Midsummer form descends to the Shaft. He is known by it. He is not harmed. This is the Warden’s whole task and his whole privilege. That he is known by something so old and so large. That the land knows he was here.”
:::
