The Debt of Salt Hollow
investigation / dungeon delve, regional
"Twelve years ago the crops failed and my people ate stone soup and prayed. Something answered. Now it's come to collect its due, and the price is every child born since. I need it stopped, or I need it paid — I honestly don't know which anymore."
The entity collecting the debt is bound by the exact wording of a pact none of the party has read. Breaking it outright may trigger a worse clause — the town itself was pledged as forfeit if the agreement is voided by force rather than fulfilled or formally renegotiated.
Patron
Reeve Ansgar Thorn, magistrate of Salt Hollow. States he wants the entity destroyed to save the children. Actually wants the original pact exposed and burned before anyone learns he signed it himself, in his father's name, to save his own harvest first.
Failure stakes
Every child born in Salt Hollow since the famine — eleven now, aged newborn to eleven years — is claimed and vanishes in a single night. The town's population collapses within a generation, and the pact renews itself with the next famine, seeking new terms.
Likely creatures
Night hag
Shambling mound
Ghost
Cultist (commoner statblock, fanatic variant)
Reward
The Reeve's seal, granting the party legal standing to interrogate any citizen of Salt Hollow without consequence — a favor few outsiders are ever given — 2,500 gp and a deed to the Hollow's salt mine (worthless unless the town survives)