The Winter Toll

Thirty-one soldiers have not been paid since the war ended, and they are coming down the far bank of the Sull to spend the winter at Torvey Landing. Torvey Landing is the only way over that river for sixty miles. Mirren Bask has collected the toll there for nineteen years. She puts a season's tolls on the counter and hires you to stop them. She pays the whole sum on the day, in coin, and there will be nothing else. Whatever you do not spend on the defense, you keep.

The crossing is a flat-bottomed ferry pulled hand over hand along a rope as thick as your wrist. Behind it are forty families, a mill on the weir, and a granary that has to last until the thaw. The company across the water was sixty men once. It is thirty-one now, out of charter and ahead of the frost, and from half a mile off its captain can see a mill, a full granary, forty roofs, and a crossing he could hold and charge people to use. He wants to spend the winter here.

You get one evening before they arrive. Spend it however you want. Hire villagers, dig in at the crossing, or find another way over the water. The smith wants three times what he is worth and will say so to your face. The best fighter in the village is drinking the last of his army pay and knows exactly what he costs. The girl who can walk the drove lane in full dark will work cheap, and nobody in the village will say why.

There are three ways into the Landing and you cannot cover all three. You can also cross the river yourself on the first day, count the camp, watch it, and talk to the men in it. It does not have to end in a fight. At dawn you sit down with Bask and settle up: what you spent, what you kept, what is still standing.

Who this one is for

If you have seen Seven Samurai, you know the setup. A village with a little money hires a few fighters to hold off an army, and there is not enough money and not enough fighters. That is the job here too, except you are the one deciding how the money gets spent.

Every other campaign in the catalog sends you somewhere. This one hands you a purse and a place to defend. How you spend that purse is the game: who you hire, what you dig, which of the three ways in you leave open because you could not afford to cover it. Nobody tells you the right answer. Keep the whole fee and stand at the rope alone if that is your call. You still get paid, out of whatever is left.

You type what you would actually do, in your own words. At dawn the Landing is either still standing or it is not.

Before you start

You start at level 4. You are a professional, and you have a partner who keeps the company's book and an opinion about every coin you spend. You make your own character and decide everything about who they are. Plan on one evening. You get a day to get ready, and then you find out whether you got ready right.

When you want a long road instead of one cold night, the catalog has those too.

Faces you'll know on sight