#90: Quakes | A 5e Survival-Horror One-Shot Adventure for Small Groups

The town of Dustborn has gone silent. No smoke, no screams — just doors hanging open, and something moving under the street that hunts by the sound of your footsteps.



Quakes is a complete, ready-to-run survival-horror one-shot for fifth edition — a creature-feature nightmare where the ground itself is the monster. Your players ride in as hired muscle for a supply wagon and find a frontier town under siege from below. Livestock pens are torn open from underneath. The dry well has swallowed half a family. Drag marks lead down into the dirt instead of away. And out past the last fence line, the earth is breathing.

Read the Review: https://anvilnink.com/quakes-underground-monster-one-shot/

Get the Paperback: https://amzn.to/4wOYpQp

The things doing the taking are blind. They hunt by vibration — every footstep, every dropped pack, every panicked shout draws them up through the soil. To live until dawn, your players have to learn the one rule the survivors already know: get off the ground and stay quiet. They will climb to the rooftops, scavenge a ruined forge and a flooded mine for the tools to fight back, bait the worms into the open, and turn the whole valley into a weapon against the broodmother sleeping beneath it.

A Living Clock of Dread.

At the heart of Quakes is the Shudder Count — a simple, visible tension track that climbs with every noise the party makes and every risk they take. The louder they get, the more the brood wakes, until the broodmother herself erupts for the finale. It turns "do we run or do we hide?" into a real decision in every scene, and it puts the dread in the players' hands, not just the GM's. No fiddly bookkeeping — it runs itself with the read-aloud cues built into every scene.

What's Inside:

• A complete 80-page adventure for 2–3 players at levels 2–3 — playable start to finish in a single 2–3 hour session, with zero prep required
• Four acts and sixteen scenes, including a branching middle where the party choose their own route to the finale — every path fully written, nothing left for you to improvise
• The Shudder Count tension system, with read-aloud cues and clear triggers so it manages itself at the table
• Six encounters that escalate from a tutorial ambush to a three-phase boss fight — each one built and stress-tested so it never one-shots a hero, even at a two-player table
• Four original monsters with full stat blocks — no monster manual required to run a single fight
• Four ready-made characters, balanced so any two of them make a viable party, each with a one-page sheet and roleplaying notes
• A cast of frontier survivors to root for: a hard-bitten marshal, an unhinged inventor, an old prospector with a secret, and a fearless kid who knows every rooftop in town
• Five battle maps plus a regional overview, six ready-to-use opening hooks, and three distinct endings your table chooses for itself

Perfect For:

• Busy Game Masters who want a full night of play without the prep grind

• Duos and small groups — designed and stress-tested from the ground up for just two players

• Newer GMs who want a tight, self-contained adventure with everything included in one book

• Fans of creature-feature horror, pulp monster movies, and white-knuckle desert survival

• Any fifth edition table hunting for a one-shot they can drop into an evening and never forget

Everything you need to run a complete session tonight — maps, monsters, characters, and three ways for it all to end. Grab your dice, and whatever you do, don't stand still.