Under the Dome: The Hunt — What You Chase, and What Chases You
Out in the wastes, nothing grows that isn’t trying to eat you.
Under the Dome, it’s not much different.
The Hunt isn’t just about killing. It’s about purpose. About motion. About the thin red thread that keeps you alive one more day while something bigger, meaner, or hungrier circles in the dark.
In a world where the storms reshape reality and scarcity makes monsters of men, everyone is hunting something—food, power, absolution, or just the next breath. The question isn’t if you’re a hunter. It’s what you’re willing to become to stay one.
🏹 1. The Hunt as Survival
The most literal hunt is the oldest one: food.
Rothe herds run thin. Chaos-tainted wildlife mutates faster than you can reload a crossbow. And outside the dome, the landscape itself bites back.
Every hunt under the Dome carries stakes beyond the prey:
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Toxic ecology: Flesh from the wrong beast glows, whispers, or rots before it cools.
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Competition: Other scavengers and gangs follow the same trails—you might not be the only ones with your sights set on dinner.
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The Unseen: Some creatures hunt back, mimicking the shape and scent of what you love most.
For DMs: turn resource scarcity into pressure. Every arrow fired or spell slot spent matters. Every choice of prey says something about your characters.
⚙️ 2. The Hunt as Sport
The Spire elites and the Ganger Lords have turned survival into spectacle.
In the lower domes, they bet grind on trike chases through the ruins. In the upper tiers, nobles release engineered beasts into sealed arenas—half for entertainment, half to remind everyone who can still afford the luxury of control.
For players, the “sporting hunt” is a chance to blur morality:
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Are you hunting to prove something?
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To earn coin?
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Or because killing is the only time you still feel real?
A hunt staged as a game can reveal the thin line between predator and prey—especially when the “beast” learns to speak.
🧠 3. The Hunt as Meaning
In a world this broken, the Hunt becomes metaphor.
Some chase faith. Some chase the memory of a world before the storms. Some chase a name whispered in the chaos.
For your characters, ask: what keeps you chasing when the trail’s gone cold?
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A bounty hunter stalks a quarry that died months ago, unable to stop.
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A scholar “hunts” for the truth about the domes, not realizing that the truth is already hunting them.
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A survivor seeks vengeance on a storm that can’t be killed.
The Hunt is where obsession meets purpose—and where both collapse into tragedy.
💀 4. The Hunt as Horror
Sometimes, the Dome flickers. Sometimes, something gets in.
When that happens, the hunt turns both ways.
You can smell it in the air—the metallic tang before lightning strikes, the silence when even the rats stop moving. The hunters become the hunted.
Use this inversion as a DM’s scalpel:
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Introduce predator tension—sound but no sight, scent but no form.
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Let the players discover themselves in the creature’s tactics: it’s learning from them.
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The longer the chase goes, the less sure anyone is who’s stalking whom.
Because in Under the Dome, even your shadow might have a pulse.
🩸 5. The Hunt as Communion
For some, the Hunt is sacred—a ritual that ties the living to the dead, the survivor to the storm. In certain domes, fleshwarpers and chaos cults perform “Communion Hunts” where hunter and prey merge into one entity, feeding the Dome itself.
A party might stumble into one such rite—a circle of masked figures feasting on their own reflections, chanting to “the Hunger That Remembers.”
Whether your characters stop them or join them depends on how much they’ve already lost to the chase.
⚔️ DM Tools: Making the Hunt Matter
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Make the world alive. The environment reacts—blood draws scavengers, noise calls predators, chaos mutates what it touches.
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Let the prey have purpose. A hunted creature or person should always mean something—a resource, a secret, a reflection.
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Reward risk. A successful hunt might yield rare materials, lore, or allies—but failure should have teeth.
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Turn tables often. The thrill of the hunt dies when it’s predictable. Let the prey turn hunter mid-session.
🕯️ Closing Thought
The Hunt is older than the Dome.
Older than the storms. Older than mercy.
It’s the heartbeat beneath every decision your characters make—the instinct to chase, to conquer, to feed.
But under the Dome, that instinct has nowhere to go.
So the city hunts itself.
And if you listen closely, beyond the grind of gears and the hum of magic, you can still hear it:
The sound of the hunt that never ends.
Thanks for reading. Until Next Time, Stay Nerdy!!
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