A muddy mountain village street under grey peaks: a clerk writing at a table beside a loaded wagon and team of horses, a cloaked woman standing with her arms folded, and a second woman with a ledger under her arm watching from a doorway opposite
← All campaigns A long campaign · a whole valley to live in

The Shut Vale

The only pass into a mountain valley has been shut for sixty years. It is open now, and a road company is hiring at the gate.

Start at level 2Level 12 territory, if you see it throughA couple of weeks of eveningsYou arrive alone. You pick up company on the roadClassic high fantasy, serious register
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Somebody shut the only pass into the vale sixty years ago, and nobody outside has ever had a straight answer about why. The people inside stayed. Twelve settlements of them, farming and quarrying and burying their dead under their own law the whole time, while everyone outside told each other stories about the place at market.

The pass is open now. The Cartway Company is cutting a real road through it, and the crews are hiring at Threap on the near side. You arrive the way everyone arrives: on foot, at the gate, with whatever you can carry. The company factor is Ossian Rede. He pays honest coin for honest work and he is the most reliable employer in the valley. The work he pays for is dangerous.

You can take company work and stay at the roadhead, or you can follow whatever you turn up as far into the valley as it goes. Work finds you fast. So does trouble, because the merchants, the boat guilds and everyone who is owed money came up that road behind you.

Who this one is for

This is the long campaign. It gives you a whole region to work in and no single job at the end of it. Five different kinds of trouble are running in the valley at the same time, none of them waits for you, and the road you help cut decides who gets to whom first. People remember what you did, and the valley you leave behind is the one you made of it.

You start alone and you won't stay that way. The first hour on the road puts a companion beside you, and the valley is full of people you can win over, hire, or give a reason to walk with you.

Before you start

You start at level 2, and the valley holds level 12 territory if you see it through. Plan on a couple of weeks of evenings. This is not a one-sitting job. You bring your own character; the world does the rest.

Faces you'll know on sight

Ossian RedePerrin Dole
How it opens

For two generations the Vale kept its own counsel, sealed behind the rockfall that choked the Hasp, and it fed itself and buried its own and told stories about the world beyond the ice as if it were a country of the dead.

The opening of one playthrough, unedited.

More ways in

Elsewhere in the catalog.

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