The village of Aldwyn at dawn: thatched cottages and green field walls below a steep hillside, with a dark cave mouth open in the rock above, and three villagers waiting by a notice board
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The Beast Above Aldwyn

A shepherd is missing on the mountain above a hill town. The town is paying a bounty it can barely afford, and there is one road up.

Start at level 2Finish around level 3About two hours, one sittingYou and Nella (a third is askable)Classic high fantasy, heroic
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Something came down out of the crags above Aldwyn this season and took the sheep, and then it took Bertran, the shepherd who worked the highest slopes. Aldwyn is a hill town that lives off those high summer pastures. No flock will climb now, the good grass is sitting empty, and winter is coming whether the town can afford it or not. The elders have scraped together a bounty they can barely pay.

You take it, and you go up the mountain to find out what is up there. There is one road up. Bertran's daughter Nella has walked every foot of it since she could walk at all, and she asks to come with you.

If you have never done this before, start here

This is the beginner's campaign and it was built to be one. One town, one road, one mountain. You should never be sitting there wondering what to do next, because there is always something obvious in front of you. Along the way you will do everything this game asks of you once: talk to somebody who knows more than you do, take a job, bring somebody along, follow what you find, get past a problem a sword does not solve, roll dice when it counts, and finish a story you started. An hour from now you will know how to play.

You type what you would actually do, in your own words. There is no menu to learn and no rulebook to read first.

Before you start

You start at level 2 and should finish around level 3. One step up, in about two hours of play. You make your own character and choose everything about who they are. The module decides what level you begin at, so the adventure and the character always match. You and Nella make two. If you want a third, go and ask somebody in town. Asking is a real move here, not a menu option. It runs about two hours, in one sitting.

Aldwyn does not stop when you walk back down the mountain. Stay, and the village keeps living and changing around you, day by day. But it was built small, for this one story. When you want more than that, there is another world in the catalog, or a whole one of your own to raise.

Faces you'll know on sight

NellaElder Marn
How it opens

This year the high slopes stand empty. Something denned in the crags above Aldwyn has taken sheep, and then a man, and no shepherd will drive a flock past the terrace track while it hunts. The granaries are already thin. Whatever grazing season Aldwyn has left will be won or lost on that mountain.

The opening of one playthrough, unedited.

More ways in

Elsewhere in the catalog.

A grey wet morning at the edge of a hill town: a man with a barrow and a woman in black stand beside a stack of plain wooden crates on the grass outside a churchyard wall, the church tower behind them, and an open stone doorway cut into the hillside across the muddy lane

The Ossuary Under Marrowgate

A town paid for an ossuary thirty-one years ago and it has been empty ever since, and you are being paid by the crate to find out why.
A lamplit vaulted salt market at dusk: a weathered fence seated at a table with brass scales and a coin purse, a braided woman leaning across it toward him, and beyond the arch a causeway running out over white flats to a lone tower

Thieves of the Salt Tower

A fence is paying for one night's work, and the tower he wants opened stands three miles out on the salt.
A lamplit garrison room at night: a soldier cleaning a longsword, an archer standing watch with her bow, a grey-haired woman with her hand flat on an open chained book, and a man counting coins out of a satchel

The Unburied

A garrison held the crossing three nights ago. Nobody was left to bury the dead, and something has been coming out for them ever since.

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