Yet This is Hallowed Ground

It is the year 1153 and shadows lurk beyond the comings and goings in the lands of His Majesty Louis VII, King of the Franks. In Yet This is Hallowed Ground, potent legacies of the pre-Christian past endure as spires rise, commerce expands, trade flourishes and hymns echo across Christendom from the British Isles to Constantinople. You are a group of pious investigators, the finest minds that the Universal Church has to offer. You have been sent to investigate a strange happening as legates of His Most Reverend Excellency, the Bishop of Vyônes. 

The game takes place in your choice of an abbey or nunnery in the blighted region of Averoigne, the creation of weird fiction author and Emperor of Dreams Clark Ashton Smith. Daily life in this house of God seems normal on the placid surface, and you are welcomed as an honoured guest. Everyone seems pleasant, if anxious. As the faithful prepare to sleep after Compline by the warm glow of candles, the illusion ends. Shadows lengthen and monstrous things ooze from the ground. Christ sits like a frost upon the earth, yet the old earth waits below, moist and hungry. You must adumbrate the mystery and purge the horrors before they consume you. 

Yet This is Hallowed Ground is a Rooted in Trophy game by Philipp Doebler and James L. Smith written for the Dark Forest Jam combining elements of Trophy Dark and Gold by Jesse Ross and the Rooted in Trophy game Shadow Precinct by Eric Brunsell, as well as concepts from Brindlewood Bay by Jason Cordova and Cthulhu Dark by Graham Walmsley.  The rules of Trophy Gold are required to play this game.

• New Backgrounds, Skills, Drives and Rituals
• Eighteen Monstrous Entities
• Procedural Generation of a Monastery
• Random Tables for NPCs, Revelations and Investigator Goals

Content Warnings

• profanity
• violence
• body horror

Suggested Safety Tools

• Lines and Veils
• X-Card
• Open Door Policy

GM Note: Ensure that you cover spiritual themes when setting out lines and veils.

Trophy™ is a trademark of Hedgemaze Press. The trademark and “Rooted in Trophy” Logo are © Hedgemaze Press, and are used with permission.

Game images are from Stiftsbibliothek Sankt Gallen MS 1092 (Plan of St. Gall) and British Library MS Additional 37049 (Carthusian Miscellany). All images are in the public domain.