Something Stirs

Something Stirs

A Victorian monster-hunting solo game. One deck. One dying order. One creature you name yourself.

The village has been burning its dead for three weeks. The constable filed his report — fever, almost certainly fever — and went back to the city. No one goes past the old boundary stones after dark.

No one, except hunters like you.

It is 1887. Gaslight and telegraph wire span the cities, and the educated classes have mostly stopped believing in what's underneath. They're wrong to have stopped. The order that once catalogued these things — the Vigil — is dying, its chapters down to a handful of aging members and whatever knowledge still gets passed hand to hand. What's left is people like you: quietly methodical, deeply careful, and unwilling to be more frightened of dying than of leaving the work undone.

Track the sign. Mind your nerve. Get out of this parish with the creature dead and yourself intact.

Most hunters don't last long. You intend to.

What is Something Stirs?

Something Stirs is a solo tabletop game played with a single standard deck of playing cards, powered by the Poker Run Engine — every encounter resolves as a five-card poker hand. No app, no dice, no minis. Just a deck, a pen, and a parish full of half-believed rumors.

You'll:

• Hunt in three-encounter runs, drawing cards to face predators, witnesses, physical evidence, and old investigation sites — each suit its own kind of danger.
• Build a poker hand every time it matters: draw five, discard what you don't need, hope for a pair or better.
• Spend Sterling between hunts on Fittings — reinforced kit, spare silver rounds, a trusted informant — and climb the ranks of Hunter Renown.
• Lean on what's left of the Vigil. Your Vigil Support unlocks passive help in the field, from a sympathetic ear to a steady blade — but it can fail you too, and every subsystem goes quiet the moment your support does.
• Push into deeper Zones as your renown grows, from the familiar Parish out to the Lair itself, where the risk (and the reward) is highest.
• Name your own Quarry. Before your first hunt, you decide what's out there — what kind of thing it is, what sign it leaves, what it wants. The entire campaign builds toward a final confrontation with the creature you invented.

Solo. 10–20 minutes per hunt. Easy Mode included for a gentler introduction.

Why it's different

Most solo hunting games hand you a monster. Something Stirs hands you a deck and a blank page. You are the one who decides what's stalking the parish — and the game's whole back half, from the Weakness you have to find to the final three-Check confrontation, is built to face whatever you wrote down.

What you need

• A standard 52-card deck
• A Field Journal (any paper or notes app works fine)
• This document

That's it.

An Upcomming  Overlay catalog and Community SRD located at https://dragemstudios.neocities.org/

One Deck. Endless Settings. One Resolution System. Unlimited Expeditions. Powered by the Poker Run Engine™

An Official Poker Run Engine Product Compatible with Poker Run Engine Version 1.0

Poker Run Engine™ is a trademark of Bill Heckler.

Pay what you want. If Something Stirs is worth a few coins to you, it goes a long way toward keeping the rest of the Poker Run Engine catalog coming.