Villagers

The Villagers are enemies encountered early in Fear & Hunger: Termina.

Lore
The inhabitants of the old town outskirts of Prehevil, and currently do not reside within the city itself. They are malformed and twisted, as seen on their malformed faces. They seem to be affected by the Festival of Termina, as caused by the Trickster Moon God, Rher. It seems the Old God might have had a hand in their transformation and hostility towards anyone entering the old town, to the point of feeding any trespassers' remains to their pigs, whom they have seemingly trained to eat anything, including live humans (or perhaps is it due to the Old God's influence that the pigs see live humans in their pens as live feed?).

Strategy
They are all hostile to the player characters and they will attack and kill them on sight. One cannot outrun them for long, though one can dodge and weave through them and lose them within the houses. Fight them when necessary as they don't drop much worthwhile loot. Do not get surrounded as the old town parts of Prehevil is crawling with them.

Several villagers will congregate by the path leading up to the basement access area and two pipe villagers and a knife villager will search the basement once the player has gone through it. This can pose a risk to an unprepared player, but the proximity to the sacrifice pool in the basement makes it easy to farm soul stones from them.

Each villager can be defeated with two solid strikes to the torso, although this obviously gives them quite a bit of time to damage the player with their own attacks. The villagers have the following attack patterns:


 * The sickle villager will strike the player with his sickle, dealing moderate damage and potentially cutting an arm off. They will lay bear traps with their off hand, which will force the player into a coin toss to avoid taking damage/losing a leg. They will tackle the player with their torso if the fight goes on for too many turns.
 * The pipe villager operates similarly, but the pipe deals significantly more damage and can stun.
 * The knife villager will stab at the player with both knives for about 15 damage.

Having an additional intelligent character in your party will allow you to strike the torso twice in one turn, ending the encounter without any risk; it may be worth it to target the weapon hand in case one of these attacks miss. The knife villager is a greater threat than the other types to a lone character because she'll be able to attack with at least one knife after the first turn.

The arms and legs of villagers are quite weak, falling to an unarmed strike or attack from Black Kalev. This is less efficient than aiming for the torso, but having a ghoul or Black Kalev in your party will still help to disable the villager's attack capabilities.

Firearms and bear traps will reliably cripple a villager's arms and both legs respectively, although that may not be the best use of such limited tools.

Special Death Sequence
If the player is defeated by the pipe-wielding villager, their body will be thrown into a pig pen, visible before at the center of the village. The player can still crawl around, but the pigs will soon come toward him and eat his flesh off in a gruesome manner. It is possible that these pigs were moonscorched aswell, though they do not show signs.

Trivia

 * The villagers have their faces twisted by the moonburn, and all have a clear partition in the middle of the face that resembles Rher's half moon depiction in his Skin Bible or Needles's face paint.
 * The Sickle wielding villager seems hesitant to fight, but still does it.
 * The pipe villager won't speak to the player as it seems the moon burn affected him the most. Leaving him completely crazy and unhinged.
 * The sickle wielding villager can cut off your arms even if you take 0 damage.