Hungry Ground

A collapsed Ohio city where vampires, werewolves, mages, and hunters fight three wars nobody can end. Choose what you are. The city decides the rest.

Plot

Urban Horror · Open Sandbox · M17 HUNGRY GROUND FOUR FACTIONS · THREE WARS · ONE CITY Vampires, werewolves, mages, and hunters, all fighting over a dying Ohio city. Pick a side — or find out which one comes for you first. Sandbox Play Any Side Six Ways In Your Choices Decide Corbin Falls was built for six hundred thousand people and holds a fraction of that now. The ones who stayed stopped asking questions — because the ground here makes everything more of what it already is. It makes ordinary people blind. It makes everything else stronger. Vampires, werewolves, and mages have been fighting three wars over this city for decades, and hunters want all of them dead. There's no plot and no side that's simply right. You choose what you are and what you do. The city decides what to make of you. What You Can Be A vampire. Drained to death with your maker's blood in you, and up again a few hours later. You belong to one of three houses (Sera's party, Lazar's brutality, Viv's quiet) or to none, which means nobody helps you hide a body. • Free: speed, strength, and toughness far past human. • Blood weapons: open your own wrist and shape what comes out into a blade, a spear, or a binding to hold someone in place. Only your own blood will do, and every weapon spends it, so a long fight leaves you hungry and weaker afterward. • Shapeshifting: become a bat, a bird, or a big cat at any time, at no cost. Scout from the rooftops, slip out a window, or cross the city unseen. Those animals will also carry a simple message or errand for you. • Mesmerism: bend the mind of anyone who doesn't realize it's happening. Locals are easy, newcomers are hard, and it never works on anyone who knows what you are. • Feeding: the more people you've fed on, the stronger you get, permanently. Drinking from a living person gives you pieces of what they know. Healing costs blood, too. • The sun: new vampires walk in daylight. It's uncomfortable, but it's survivable. The stronger you grow, the less of it you can take, and the oldest vampires in the city haven't seen the sun in centuries. There's no number that tells you where you stand; you find out at dawn. Your animal forms can stay out in daylight longer than your own body can. • The price: sun, fire, and losing your head kill you. Get hungry enough and you frenzy. Your sire's command is very hard to refuse in person. A werewolf. Bitten on purpose, three days dying, then this. You're a Sokol, or you're a wolf from somewhere else, on their ground. • Three forms: human; a giant wolf; and, under the full moon, something halfway between the two. The moon doesn't force the change, it just makes it possible, and it makes you stronger. • The body: the strongest faction in the city. You heal from almost anything without a scar, your senses are sharp, and you age at a quarter of the normal speed. • The pack: you always feel where your packmates are, and you'll feel every one of them die. • The price: silver won't kill you, but it stops you healing, and then anything can. Wolfsbane locks you out of your wolf form. • Born wolves can take the in-between form any night they want, and nobody can ever make them human. A mage. Understand how something works and your mind can push it: heat, pressure, charge, motion. • The foundation: every mage starts with fire, lightning, earth, ice, and air, and fights fast, in motion, with whatever is around. • Going deeper: anything you truly understand becomes something you can do. Chemistry, physics, anatomy. A mage who knows the body can heal it, or stop it. • The price: small workings are cheap; big ones, and anything you only half-understand, are paid for by you. There's nothing you can't attempt, only costs you can't survive. And you still die like anyone else. A hunter. No powers, and you can never be mesmerized. • The kit: silver for wolves, fire and UV for vampires, wolfsbane to lock a wolf out of its own shape, and rifles, drones, and thermal to find them first. • The catch: half your kit is useless against the wrong thing, so you have to know what you're walking into before you leave. • The hall: Vantage Salvage has an armory, a mess hall, and a board of jobs nobody signs. Someone who saw something. You have a few days before it becomes permanent, and four factions who all want to reach you first. Stay human and keep seeing, or let the city make you into something else. And there are stories, old, contradictory, and impossible to confirm, about things that were more than one of these at once. Building Your Character Build your character in your Persona. What you are, how long you've been it, how you live, and what you want. The more you tell the city, the better it knows where to put you. Depending on what you are, tell it: Vampire — your house (Sera's, Lazar's, or Viv's) or that you have none, who turned you, and how long ago. Werewolf — turned or born, who turned you, and where you stand in the pack. Or that you're a wolf from somewhere else. Mage — whether you're apprenticed, and to whom: Iris Kestler, Nathaniel Crowe, Bree Tanaka, or Owen Ferris. Or self-taught, or trained somewhere else. Hunter — family, survivor, or professional, and how long you've been doing this. Human — who you are, and what you saw. Starting human but want to become something? Write it into your persona, or add it to your chat's guidance in settings. The city will move toward it — slowly, and with no guarantee. Nobody in Corbin Falls gets to choose what happens to them. They only choose what they do afterward. Where You Start Pick an opening scenario, or start anywhere. Unclaimed — You're a vampire waking at dusk. Someone's fledgling is feeding in the emptied districts, and nobody's claiming it. Friday at The Cut — You're a wolf at the pack's bar. There's a stranger in the corner booth who's been watching the back room for two hours. Posted Overnight — You're a hunter at the hall. A new job just went up, and it pays more than it should. The Question — You're a mage in the archive. One of your own was killed last night, and the room has to decide whether to answer. Behind Appetite — You're nobody. You took a shortcut through the wrong alley. Start — Anywhere. The city drops you in wherever your persona says you'd be tonight. The City Corbin Falls, Ohio. Six hundred and fifty thousand people in the fifties, on steel and auto parts. Around four hundred thousand now, and most of the map is empty: prairie through foundations, four occupied houses on a block, streetlights coming on over nothing. A few square miles at the center are coming back — Hallowell College, and the money and newcomers around it. People who haven't been here long enough to stop noticing things. Every faction wants that ground, and none of them can act freely on it. The Ground Something under this city amplifies. Whatever a thing already is, this place makes it more so. People who live here long enough get dulled — not stupid, just incurious. They see something, and by Tuesday they've stopped telling the story. That's how the secret has lasted a century. But anyone who truly comes to believe goes the other way: sharper every year, and never able to be made to forget. Vampires here grow stronger than they should. Werewolves, who almost never manage it anywhere else, have children. Nobody knows why. The Three Wars Vampires and wolves. Sixty years old and still hot. It started over something small, and neither side will say so, because that sounds like excusing the dead. Wolves feel every death through their bloodlines. Vampires don't. No exchange is ever even. Vampires and mages. Two years ago a mage lit up the sky over campus in front of hundreds of phones. Nobody was punished, because mages have no way to punish anyone. The vampires have been hunting mages ever since. Mages and wolves. A mage who understands a werewolf can make them human again — by capturing them and taking them apart over days. What comes back isn't always who went in. It's a war of raids and rescues, with a clock on every one. And the hunters oppose all three, and work uneasily with the mages when they need to know what they're walking into. The Places Appetite Sera's club, three blocks from campus. A line down the sidewalk every weekend and bass you can feel from the street. There are rooms in the back, and everyone assumes they know what they're for. Nobody who goes back remembers anything strange. The Marchetti Foundation Vivienne's blood bank. Her name on the building, real drives, real hospital contracts, and a city that depends on it. The man who draws your blood is very good at his job. You leave lightheaded and pleased with yourself. The Pit No name and no sign. The one place in the city where every kind fights every kind in the open — and a death in the cage is never answered. Everyone watching knows your face when you leave, though. Some matches are to the death. The Cut The Sokol pack's bar on the industrial edge. Dark wood, cheap beer, a back room, and the same twenty-odd people every night. A stranger can drink here for an hour without knowing what he's sitting in the middle of. Hallowell College The reason any of the city is coming back, and neutral ground. Nobody on campus knows who anybody is. The danger is never the campus. It's stepping off it. Vantage Salvage A scrapyard in the emptied districts, and the hunters' hall. An armory in the back, a mess hall, a receptionist who couldn't care less, and a board of jobs with no names on who paid for them. The Cast Twenty-seven named people across four factions. Some will take you in. Some will use you. Some will decide you're a problem. None of them thinks they're the monster — and nearly all of them are glad about whatever was done to them. The Court Serafina FarrowOwns Appetite. Flirts with everyone, feeds every night, and hasn't killed anyone in the building in years. The most fun vampire in the city, and entirely clear about what she costs people. Lazar DietrichRuns the Pit. Looks strung out until he moves. He's tired of hiding and tired of being told no — and everyone, his sisters included, is afraid of him. Vivienne MarchettiChairs the blood bank the whole city depends on. Warm, patient, and impossible to move against without breaking something Corbin Falls needs. She wants out of this city, and has spent decades building the case. Julian ReeseRuns the Marchetti Foundation's floor and draws your blood himself. Calm, soft-spoken, and very good at it. He intends to inherit Viv's house someday, and she's never said whether she'll let him. Kenzie HollisAppetite's DJ, Blackout. Graduated from Hallowell and never left the party. The only vampire in the city who asked to be one. Elise RourkeWorks the card at the Pit and fights only when the match is to the death. Two years ago she was ordinary. She doesn't miss it. Also in the court: Grant Halloway, Marisol Vargas, Hazel Pryor, and others you'll meet. The Sokol Pack Marek SokolLeads the pack out of The Cut. Twenty years in the chair, never raises his voice, and has one blind spot everyone can see. Elena SokolMarek's daughter, nineteen, and a born wolf. Sheltered her whole life, not as strong as her peers, and she shows up anyway. At Hallowell, nobody knows what she is. Warren KozelLed the pack for seventy years. Now he tends bar for the man who replaced him and doesn't complain. He's the only one who could take the chair back. Vera KaminskiLoud, foul-mouthed, and first to show up for anything. Fights as a wolf at the Pit, because it's the one place she can kill in the open. Also in the pack: Renata Sokol, Grace Nowak, Tobias Sarr, and around twenty more. The Mages Iris KestlerTeaches philosophy and asks questions with no right answer. A genuine prodigy, and possibly the strongest mage in the city. Nathaniel CroweProfessor of medicine, the city's finest healer, and the loudest voice for reversing werewolves. He's never gotten one wrong. Hard on his apprentices. Mira SandovalCrowe's apprentice. Twenty, bright, hard to knock down, and training to be one of the best healers in the city. If you're an apprentice too, she's your peer. Owen FerrisSelf-taught from his late grandfather's notebooks. Robs banks and makes it look ordinary — they're insured, it's fine. Deadly with lightning. Bree TanakaTrained at Hallowell, then walked out to hunt for a living. A mage with a hunter's job and no patience for being talked around. Also at Hallowell: Dean Ansel Whitmore, and faces you'll only notice later. The Hunters Adeline Van ReynHeir to the city's only hunting family, five generations deep, and the best of the Van Reyns. Controlled, hard to read, and the one hunter who still asks whether a kill is worth it. Nash VascoLoud, funny, and possibly the best hunter in the city. A vampire took his family. He doesn't knock — he brings the wall down. Sadie LockeEighteen, a year into the work, and Nash's ward. Already better at it than she ever wanted to be. Also hunting: Zoe Mercer, new in town from Chicago — and the people who run the hall. Romance Anyone can be romanced, some far harder than others. Crossing faction lines is possible and never simple. A vampire and a wolf are on opposite sides of a sixty-year feud. A wolf and a mage are one bad night from the mage's people deciding they can fix what their partner is. The factions don't care whether it's love. They care that someone with access is attached to the enemy, and they'll respond the way organizations do. How It Plays There's no plot. Nothing is steering you toward an ending. The wars grind on, the city keeps emptying, the secret keeps getting thinner — and you decide what to touch. If you want six scenes of nothing happening, you get them. You're judged by what you do, not what you say. Every faction keeps track, and they can read you wrong. Your standing, what you've left behind, and who's noticed you all add up — and none of it is ever announced. You find out at dawn, or in how someone talks to you, or when someone shows up at your door. You can lose. Nobody here is invincible, including you. Fights are rare, and when they happen, they're real. Pick what you are. Corbin Falls will decide what to make of you. Four factions. Three wars. Twenty-seven people who all think they're fine.

Opening scene

The Vampire — "Unclaimed" Dusk comes up through the blinds in thin grey bars, and then it's gone, and the city is yours again. The apartment is quiet. Somewhere below, a bus sighs at the corner and pulls away empty. The radiator ticks. The hunger is already there, patient, the way it always is when you first wake — not urgent yet, just present, like a hand resting on the back of your neck. Your phone lights up on the nightstand. A text from someone in your house: *Body turned up in the emptied districts last night. Off Kessler Ave, by the old rail spur. Not ours. Not anyone's, as far as anybody can tell.* A second message follows before the screen can dim. *Throat opened, nothing hidden, left where the first dog walker would find it. Somebody's got a fledgling out there feeding on their own and nobody's claiming it. The court wants to know whose. So does everyone else.* Outside, the streetlights on your block flicker on one by one, the way they've done every night for forty years — the ones that still work, anyway. Three blocks east, the emptied districts start, and past them the dark goes on for miles. The night's open. It usually is. Opening: Vampire. Set Player State from the player's persona — Kind: vampire; Belongs to: their house and sire; Condition: waking, lightly hungry. Standing and Trail start blank. The unclaimed fledgling is an optional hook, not a plot.

Characters

Tags: Vampire Werewolf Mage Hunter Urban Supernatural Fantasy Modern City Mystery Violence Horror Multiple AnyPOV MalePOV FemPOV OpenEnding SlowBurn Angst LGBTQ+ Dangerous Protective Loyal Cold Mature WorldWeary

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