init new campaign

campaigns/the-hollow-between/npcs/brother-hale.md

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+---
+type: npc
+campaign: The Hollow Between
+role: shrine keeper
+status: alive
+---
+
+# Brother Hale
+
+> [!info] Quick Reference
+> **Role:** Keeper of the roadside shrine
+> **Location:** [[campaigns/the-hollow-between/locations/briarcross]]
+> **Public face:** Gentle, apologetic, scholarly in a small-town way
+
+## Appearance
+
+Thin, soft-voiced, and perpetually damp at the hem from the marsh paths. He keeps prayer ribbons tucked into his sleeves and smells faintly of lamp oil and rosemary.
+
+## Personality
+
+Hale listens longer than most people can stand. He is kind without being weak, and his caution often reads as indecision until the moment he finally chooses a side.
+
+## Goals & Motivations
+
+- Learn what the waking place truly is before anyone tries to destroy it
+- Preserve the oldest records and customs of the village
+- Keep the dead from becoming tools in the living's arguments
+
+## Connections
+
+- Shares uncomfortable fragments of old lore with [[campaigns/the-hollow-between/npcs/mara-thornfield]]
+- Respects [[campaigns/the-hollow-between/npcs/ysa-of-the-reeds]] more than he admits publicly
+- Believes [[campaigns/the-hollow-between/npcs/tam-rowan]] has been chosen for something
+
+## Secrets
+
+Hale found an older record suggesting the buried bell is not a warning, but an invitation to witness a judgment that was never completed. He has hidden this because he fears what the village would do with it.

campaigns/the-hollow-between/npcs/mara-thornfield.md

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+---
+type: npc
+campaign: The Hollow Between
+role: village headwoman
+status: alive
+---
+
+# Mara Thornfield
+
+> [!info] Quick Reference
+> **Role:** Headwoman of Briarcross
+> **Location:** [[campaigns/the-hollow-between/locations/briarcross]]
+> **Public face:** Practical, unsentimental, deeply tired
+
+## Appearance
+
+Broad-shouldered, mud-spattered, and always carrying a ring of keys she never lets anyone else touch. Her clothes are plain and durable, but she wears a silver ferry token on a cord at her throat.
+
+## Personality
+
+Mara is steady, guarded, and sharper than she first appears. She dislikes panic, hates performative courage, and trusts competence more than charm.
+
+## Goals & Motivations
+
+- Keep Briarcross intact through the current crisis
+- Restore the old customs strongly enough to quiet the bell
+- Prevent outsiders from turning the village into a story people tell elsewhere
+
+## Connections
+
+- Relies on [[campaigns/the-hollow-between/npcs/brother-hale]] for ritual knowledge she does not admit believing in
+- Distrusts [[campaigns/the-hollow-between/npcs/ysa-of-the-reeds]] even when Ysa is correct
+- Feels protective anger toward [[campaigns/the-hollow-between/npcs/tam-rowan]]
+
+## Secrets
+
+Mara's family has quietly maintained one part of the old bargain for generations: someone in her line must carry the bridge keys and keep the western hill path closed after the first bell. She has recently failed to do this twice.

campaigns/the-hollow-between/npcs/tam-rowan.md

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+---
+type: npc
+campaign: The Hollow Between
+role: ferryman's child
+status: alive
+---
+
+# Tam Rowan
+
+> [!info] Quick Reference
+> **Role:** Young villager touched by the waking place
+> **Location:** [[campaigns/the-hollow-between/locations/briarcross]]
+> **Public face:** Restless, curious, trying not to be frightened
+
+## Appearance
+
+Lean, sharp-eyed, and usually carrying a pocketful of pebbles, rush knots, or stolen nails. Tam's boots are always muddy, even when they should not be.
+
+## Personality
+
+Tam is brave in the unhelpful way children sometimes are: drawn toward what adults keep trying to hide. They are quick to trust anyone who treats them seriously.
+
+## Goals & Motivations
+
+- Understand the dreams that keep leading them toward the hill
+- Prove they are not cursed
+- Find out why the buried bell gave them a key made of root and peat
+
+## Connections
+
+- Protected by [[campaigns/the-hollow-between/npcs/mara-thornfield]]
+- Confides in [[campaigns/the-hollow-between/npcs/brother-hale]]
+- Fascinated by [[campaigns/the-hollow-between/npcs/ysa-of-the-reeds]]
+
+## Secrets
+
+Tam has already opened the hidden western door once in a dream and returned with a phrase they do not remember saying awake: "the road is waiting to be named again."

campaigns/the-hollow-between/npcs/the-listeners-below.md

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+---
+type: faction
+campaign: The Hollow Between
+status: rising
+---
+
+# The Listeners Below
+
+> [!info] Quick Reference
+> **Type:** Informal devotional faction
+> **Base:** [[campaigns/the-hollow-between/locations/briarcross]]
+> **Public face:** A loose circle of villagers, ferrymen, laborers, mourners, and drifters who believe the buried bell is calling Briarcross to become something truer
+
+## What They Believe
+
+The Listeners Below are not united by doctrine so much as by mood and need.
+
+They believe:
+
+- the waking place is not an invader but the oldest truth of the region
+- Briarcross has grown small, fearful, and dishonest by clinging to rules no one understands
+- the buried bell is choosing who is willing to hear
+- change will hurt, but the hurt is part of becoming rightful again
+
+Some members speak in mystical terms. Others simply want the old order shaken hard enough to break.
+
+## Why They Are Growing
+
+The faction grows because it offers explanations and belonging.
+
+- grieving people hear the bell and think it offers reunion
+- frustrated locals see the old customs as burdens without benefits
+- those pushed to the edges of village life are flattered to be treated as chosen
+- the waking place produces real signs, which makes belief easy to feed
+
+## Methods
+
+- midnight gatherings to hear the bell and compare dreams
+- collecting removed bell clappers, toll marks, and scraps of forgotten ritual
+- quietly breaking customs to test which taboos still matter
+- recruiting through sympathy, not force
+- treating every strange event as confirmation
+
+## Current Shape
+
+The Listeners Below are still small enough to deny they are a faction at all. That makes them harder to confront.
+
+Most villagers think of them as:
+
+- grieving fools
+- dangerous romantics
+- useful scapegoats
+- or the only people asking whether the old bargain was just
+
+## Internal Tensions
+
+- some members want understanding and renewal
+- others want upheaval for its own sake
+- a few are less interested in the Sleeper than in the power vacuum a crisis creates
+
+This keeps the faction from feeling monolithic and gives the party room to split, sway, or infiltrate it.
+
+## Faces of the Faction
+
+- **Eda Vale**, the ferryman's widow, who says the bell lets her hear her husband apologizing
+- **Corin Ash**, a roadwarden's son who wants Briarcross free of inherited obligations
+- **Sister Wren**, a former shrine acolyte who believes the interrupted judgment beneath the hill must be completed
+
+## Relationship to the Main Conflict
+
+The Listeners Below add pressure to every approach:
+
+- **Containment:** they undermine the customs and expose anyone trying to restore them
+- **Understanding:** they help open doors that should stay closed, but may know things no one else admits
+- **Bargain:** they might become witnesses, sacrifices, negotiators, or spoilers depending on how the party treats them
+
+## Secrets
+
+- The Listeners Below did not start the waking, but they are accelerating it.
+- One of their early dream-rites worked well enough that the Sleeper now recognizes them as a channel.
+- If treated carefully, the faction can split between reformers and zealots instead of hardening into a single enemy block.

campaigns/the-hollow-between/npcs/ysa-of-the-reeds.md

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+---
+type: npc
+campaign: The Hollow Between
+role: marsh spirit
+status: other
+---
+
+# Ysa of the Reeds
+
+> [!info] Quick Reference
+> **Role:** Spirit of crossings in the Hushmere
+> **Location:** [[campaigns/the-hollow-between/locations/the-hushmere]]
+> **Public face:** Elusive, amused, older than any local custom
+
+## Appearance
+
+Ysa usually appears as a woman-shaped form made of reeds, ferry rope, and wet gleam, with a face that is never the same twice. Her voice often arrives from the wrong direction.
+
+## Personality
+
+Playful, exacting, and patient in the way marshes are patient. Ysa is easier to offend through carelessness than hostility.
+
+## Goals & Motivations
+
+- Ensure the waking place is treated as a relationship, not a monster
+- Recover names, promises, and offerings carelessly lost to the marsh
+- See whether the party can become trustworthy stewards of a threshold
+
+## Connections
+
+- Remembers making terms with what lies beneath [[campaigns/the-hollow-between/locations/the-hollow-bell]]
+- Finds [[campaigns/the-hollow-between/npcs/mara-thornfield]] too rigid and [[campaigns/the-hollow-between/npcs/brother-hale]] too timid
+- Has quietly protected [[campaigns/the-hollow-between/npcs/tam-rowan]] from worse attention
+
+## Secrets
+
+Ysa helped design the old settlement bargain that put the Sleeper under toll. She now believes the agreement has expired, and that refusing to renegotiate it may be more dangerous than waking the hill fully.