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Feast of the Hollow King

3–5 players2–3 hours

Every harvest, the village crowns a scarecrow king and burns it at dawn. This year it stood up, thanked everyone kindly, and started granting wishes. A D&D 5e one-shot for 3–5 characters of levels 2–4.

Free — copies it into your campaigns with your session tools.

Premise

Harrowgate's harvest custom is four hundred years old and perfectly understood by nobody: build the Hollow King from the last sheaf and the season's worn-out clothes, crown it at the feast, seat it at the head table, and burn it at dawn 'to carry the year away.' This year, between the crowning and the toast, the Hollow King stood up, thanked the village for four centuries of hospitality in a voice like wind through a granary, and announced that this year, as a reward for faithful service, it would grant wishes until dawn — one per household. The party is in Harrowgate for the feast. The village has until sunrise to decide what to do with a suddenly generous god of straw, and half of them have already started wishing.

Stakes

The wishes are real and the price is structural: each one granted unravels a little of 'the year it carries away' — wounds it absorbed, quarrels it soaked up, deaths it was built to take into the fire. By midnight, granted wishes are coming true while old injuries reopen, buried feuds reignite mid-conversation, and the recently dead are remembered as having died differently than everyone recalls. If the Hollow King is not burned at dawn — and it is now very large, very kind, and very much enjoying the party — Harrowgate keeps the wishes and inherits, all at once, four hundred years of everything the burnings disposed of.

Scenes

1
The Toast
The feast green — long tables, bonfire-to-be unlit, and a seven-foot straw figure at the head table being genuinely excellent company
The party witnesses the stand-up and the first wishes: the miller's wife wishes her hands unbent, and they straighten at the table to gasps and applause; a boy wishes his dog back, and something arrives from the direction of the orchard, tail going, absolutely a dog if you don't look at the seams. The Hollow King is courteous, attentive, and speaks to everyone by household ('the Merricks; the Tallows; ah, GUESTS —'). It knows things a scarecrow shouldn't and explains cheerfully: 'You tell me everything, every year. At the burning. That's what it's FOR.' A DC 12 Insight reads the village mood splitting in real time: joy at the front tables, and at the back, the old ones — the ones who remember what their parents put into past Kings — going pale and quietly leaving.
Decision point: The Hollow King turns to the party — guests get a household wish too, it insists, hospitably, publicly, with the whole green watching. Wish, decline (declining is 'discourteous,' and the King's voice cools half a degree in a way everyone hears), or stall with the one move that visibly delights it: asking it questions about itself.
If they go sideways: If the party immediately moves to burn it early, the village physically intervenes — not the King, the VILLAGERS, half of whom haven't had their wish yet, and the party's first fight is a shoving match against grandmothers with unspent miracles. The King watches with what a DC 13 Insight identifies, disturbingly, as sympathy.
Wisdom (Insight) — DC 12 to read the village split; DC 15 to notice the King never gestures — things it grants simply arrive from OFFSTAGE, always from the direction of the old orchard
2
What the Old Ones Know
The back lanes of Harrowgate — Widow Amsel's kitchen, the sexton's cottage, and the church's locked vestry ledger
The village elders, tracked to their kitchens, surrender the custom's real shape a piece at a time. The burning isn't tribute — it's DISPOSAL: every household, by tradition, whispers one thing into the King's straw before dawn ('the year's worst') and the fire carries it off. Four hundred years of confessions, griefs, plagues-averted, and one thing the vestry ledger only calls 'the Harrowgate Bargain, yr. 12' have gone into Kings and into fire. The wishes aren't generosity — they're REFUNDS: the King is handing back the stored year to make room, because something at the bottom of four centuries of whispered-away things wants OUT, and it can only surface when the King stands unburned past dawn. Widow Amsel, ninety-one, says her grandmother's phrase for it: 'the first thing the village ever asked the straw to carry, and it never has put it down.'
Decision point: The vestry ledger's year-12 page is torn out — but Sexton Groat admits the stub matches a page that resurfaces every few generations in the possession of the Pryce family, whose farmhouse sits beside the old orchard, and whose household, notably, is the only one that has NOT wished tonight. Knock on the Pryces' door before midnight, or press the King itself, which answers questions honestly and is becoming more honest as it unravels?
If they go sideways: If the party skips the investigation and preps a dawn burning by force, they arrive at scene four missing the one fact that makes it survivable — burn the King with the year half-refunded and everything still inside comes out THROUGH the fire. The elders will try twice to tell them; after that, dice fall where they fall.
Charisma (Persuasion) — DC 13 to get the elders past four centuries of don't-talk-about-it; DC 12 Intelligence (Investigation) in the vestry to match the torn stub to the Pryce page
3
The Pryce Page
Pryce farmhouse, beside the old orchard — one lamp lit, family awake and dressed like they've been expecting this knock for four hundred years
The Pryces keep the page, the truth, and the office nobody thanked them for: they are the Whisperers' line, descendants of the family that made the original bargain. Year 12: a hungry winter, a thing in the orchard — the page calls it 'the Gaunt' and draws it as a figure of bare branches — that took a child a night. The founders couldn't kill it, so they TRICKED it: bound it into the last sheaf, crowned it, flattered it, and burned it — and learned by spring it wasn't dead, just carried away for a year. The custom is a prison sentence renewed annually with pageantry, and the Hollow King doesn't know: the kindly figure at the feast is the Gaunt's warden-shape, built new each year from straw and the village's trust, and the whispered griefs are its PAYMENT. Tonight's wishes are the King spending down its own wages — because after four hundred years, the warden has decided it wants to retire, and it doesn't understand that when the last whisper is refunded, what's left standing in the straw is the prisoner.
Decision point: Matthias Pryce offers the family's one heirloom besides the page: the First Crown, a circlet of braided year-12 wheat, which can rebind the Gaunt into ANY willing vessel for another year — straw, or flesh. The options land hard: build and crown a new King before dawn (the custom continues, someone must whisper the Gaunt back in — a DC 15 group effort with the King actively, cheerfully unraveling), crown a volunteer (a PC or NPC carries the Gaunt for a year; a real cost with a real face), or the Pryce heresy Matthias has never dared: let the refund finish, face the Gaunt at dawn at its four-century weakest, and END the custom with steel and spell.
If they go sideways: If the party antagonizes the Pryces, the family doesn't fight — they hand over the page, the crown, and a lantern, wish the party luck with visible relief, and start packing the cart their family has kept ready since year 12. Watching the Whisperers LEAVE breaks the village's nerve faster than the Gaunt ever could.
Intelligence (History or Religion) — DC 13 to verify the page's binding rite is genuine hedge-magic, older than the church built over it; a critical also realizes the rite never required the Pryces specifically — just someone who KNOWS, which is why they could never tell anyone
4
Dawn at the Bonfire
The feast green at first gray light — the pyre built, the village assembled, and the Hollow King down to its last few wishes and its last few layers
The endgame the party chose arrives at dawn, complicated by the night's refunds: reopened wounds, re-hot feuds, and a village crowd that is injured, quarreling, and half in love with their generous King. The King itself, nearly spent, is thinner now — straw showing dark at the seams, voice doubling, the kindly warden and something branch-fingered underneath speaking a half-beat apart. Whatever the plan — re-binding, a crowned volunteer, or the heresy — it plays out in front of everyone, because Harrowgate's customs are PUBLIC, that's the whole magic of them: witnessed pageantry is the binding. The Gaunt, when and if it surfaces (use a scarecrow's stats scaled up, with a fear aura and four hundred years of stolen whispers to quote at the party in their own voices), fights like winter: patient, grasping, and aimed always at the youngest person present.
Decision point: Mid-crisis, the Hollow King — the warden-shape, unraveling, finally understanding what it's been all these years — asks the party the question the whole night was building: it can hold the Gaunt in for ten more minutes OR grant one final wish, not per household but for the village entire, and it wants the PARTY to choose, 'because guests owe nothing, and everyone else here owes me.' Ten minutes buys the ritual time. One village-wish, worded well, might solve everything — or refund the last of the year in a single catastrophic breath.
If they go sideways: If everything has gone wrong — no crown, no ritual, no plan — the sexton starts ringing the church bell, and the village does what four hundred years of pageantry actually trained it to do: it improvises the ceremony AROUND the party, thrusting the crown, the torch, and the office of Whisperer into their hands mid-combat. The custom is older than any plan. Let it carry them.
Group Charisma (Performance or Religion) — DC 15 to conduct the crowning rite with the village's belief behind it — advantage if the party spent the feast being good guests, disadvantage if they wished; combat with the Gaunt uses standard initiative, and the pyre, lit or unlit, is the terrain that decides everything

NPCs

The Hollow King

Warden-shape of the Harrowgate Bargain, currently retiring

Seven feet of last-sheaf straw in the village's donated year: the blacksmith's burned glove, a christening gown sleeve, the mayor's funeral cravat. Crowned in braided wheat. Its face is a sackcloth suggestion that is somehow, everyone agrees, SMILING.

Courtly, warm, and drunk on its first-ever evening of being thanked instead of burned. Scrupulously fair with wishes, hurt by discourtesy, and utterly without guile — it answers every question truthfully, including the ones the village really wishes it wouldn't, in front of everyone.

Secret: The King doesn't know it's a prison. Built new each year, it wakes each harvest with only the whispered griefs for memory, and it has concluded — reasonably, from four hundred years of confessions — that it is the village's beloved confessor-god. Tonight's generosity is sincere. The tragedy available in scene four, for tables that want it: the moment it understands its own function, it doesn't rage — it VOLUNTEERS for the fire, and asks only that next year's King be told one thing at the crowning: what it is, and that it did the job well.

Widow Amsel

Eldest villager, keeper of half-remembered rules

Ninety-one, cane of orchard-wood she will not explain, shawl pinned with four generations of harvest brooches. Left the feast at the first wish, walking fast for a woman her age.

Flint dressed as lace. Speaks in her grandmother's proverbs, half of which turn out to be operating instructions. Rations her knowledge — not from spite, but because saying certain things aloud is, in her lived experience, how they hear you.

Secret: Amsel wished once — sixty years ago, at fifteen, out of turn and in secret, whispering INTO the King an extra thing: her drowned brother's name, with a plea attached. The next spring a man walked out of the orchard with her brother's face and lived in Harrowgate eleven quiet years before the Gaunt's warden caught the discrepancy and the man walked back into the orchard mid-sentence at a harvest feast. Nobody else remembers him — the fire took the memory with the year — but Amsel does, because SHE wished it, and the wisher keeps the receipt. She knows exactly what the refunds can return, and she has spent tonight terrified of one particular knock on her door.

Matthias Pryce

Head of the Whisperers' line

Fifty, farmer's build, farmer's hands, and a scholar's stoop earned from one document. Keeps the First Crown in a butter churn and the page in a Bible, on the theory that the obvious hiding places are the ones shame guards best.

Steady, decent, and worn hollow in a specific place: he's the fourteenth Pryce to carry the secret, and the first to have no child willing to take it. Talks about the custom like a man describing a debt he inherited and pays honestly and hates.

Secret: Matthias's daughter Bren didn't refuse the office — she TOOK it, secretly, five years ago, and has been the one whispering the binding-words at each burning while letting her father believe the duty lapsed with her refusal. She's at the feast tonight, positioned near the King since the crowning, and she is the reason it stood up: her last five bindings were subtly kinder than the rite prescribes — she has been talking TO it, not just at it — and the warden's retirement is, in a way nobody will say cruelly, her fault. And her masterpiece: a Gaunt-warden treated as a person for five years is the only reason scene four's volunteer option — and the King's final offer — exist at all.

Sexton Groat

Gravedigger, bell-ringer, keeper of the vestry ledger

Sixty, built like his own shovel, church keys on a ring that could anchor a boat. Has attended every burning for forty-four years and stood, every time, in the same spot: upwind.

Gallows-practical, professionally unsentimental about death and privately meticulous about the dead — every grave in his yard is level, every name legible, on his time and his coin. Trusts documents over memories, having watched the fire edit both.

Secret: Groat's ledger has a private appendix: forty-four years of before-and-after notes, taken each harvest — who the village remembers dying, and how, recorded the day BEFORE the burning and the day after. The discrepancies fill nine pages. He has never told anyone because the appendix proves the fire doesn't just carry the year away, it REWRITES it, and Groat long ago found his own name in an old sexton's hand, in a year he doesn't remember, listed among the taken — and then, the following page, not.

Endings

The Custom, Renewed

A new King is built and crowned before full light, the Gaunt whispered back into fresh straw with the village's witnessed belief as the lock — and this time, at Bren Pryce's insistence and over four hundred years of precedent, the crowning includes one new line: the King is told what it is, and thanked in advance. The old warden-shape goes to the fire at peace, at its own request. The wishes granted keep — the miller's wife's hands stay straight — and the refunded griefs get grieved properly, in daylight, for the first time. Harrowgate's custom survives with one word changed, which is how customs actually improve.

A Crown of Flesh

Someone wears it — a PC, Bren Pryce stepping out of her secrecy, or the volunteer nobody expected. The Gaunt binds into a living warden for a year and a day: the crowned one feels it always, a winter leaning on the inside of their ribs, and gains with it the King's office — every whisper in the village comes to them now, and must be carried. It is playable as a curse, an honor, or both; Harrowgate treats them as sacred and slightly untouchable, sets them at every head table, and begins, quietly, building next year's straw King early. The fire at next harvest will offer a choice: pass it on, or carry it again. Wardens, the Pryce page notes, historically get attached.

The Orchard Settled

The party takes the heresy: the refund runs to empty, the warden-shape collapses into loose straw with something like a sigh, and the Gaunt stands up out of it at dawn — bare branches, four centuries of whispers, and sixty seconds of maximum weakness before it starts re-hoarding grief from the assembled, freshly quarreling village. The fight is won at the pyre, the Gaunt driven or thrown into its own ceremonial fire while the village — coached or improvising — sings the burning-song AT it, pageantry weaponized at last. Harrowgate wakes the next day with no custom, no King, four hundred years of unedited memory settling over it like snow, and a strange new lightness. The feast continues annually. They burn nothing. They tell the truth instead, one household at a time, at the head table, to an empty crowned chair — and it turns out that was the load-bearing part all along.

Sequel hook for D&D 5e campaigns

Groat's appendix lists one discrepancy older than all the others: the village charter names TWO founding families of Whisperers, and the second family's farmhouse — orchard-adjacent, on the OTHER side — has stood empty as long as anyone remembers, except that its chimney, every harvest night including this one, briefly smokes.

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