The Winter Toll

For sixty miles there is one way over the Sull: a flat-bottomed ferry hauled hand over hand on a rope as thick as a wrist, at a place called Torvey Landing. Forty families, a mill on the weir, a granary that has to last to the thaw, and a toll Mirren Bask has collected for nineteen years.

The war on the far side ended in the summer, which was good news for everyone except the men paid to fight it. The company coming down the far bank was sixty strong once and is thirty-one now — unpaid, out of charter, ahead of the frost. Across half a mile of water their captain has seen a mill, a full granary, forty roofs and a crossing he can hold and charge for. He means to winter here.

Bask hires you the way she buys anything else: the whole sum, on the day, in coin, in the hand, and there will be nothing else. What you do with it is the job. The smith wants three times what he is worth and will tell you so himself. The best sword in the village is drinking through the last of his pay and knows exactly what he costs. The girl who can walk the drove lane in full dark will come cheap, and nobody in the village will say a word about it.

You get one evening to walk the ground and learn the ways in — there are three, and there are not enough of you to hold them all. The far bank can be crossed from the first hour: the camp across the water can be counted, watched, spoken to. It can come to a fight. It does not have to. At dawn you settle with Bask either way: what it cost, what is left, and what is still standing.

Who this one is for

Every other job on the shelf sends you somewhere. This one hands you a purse and a piece of ground that is already yours to lose. The spending decisions are the play — who you hire, what you dig, which approach you leave open because you could not afford all three — and the module never tells you the right answer. A player who pockets the fee and stands alone at the rope has made a real choice. So has the one who spends every coin. It pays out either way, in whatever is left.

You type what you would actually do, in your own words. The village answers what you actually did, and so does the ledger.

Before you start

You start at level 4 — a professional, with a partner who keeps the company's book and an opinion about every coin you spend. You bring your own character and choose everything about who they are. Plan on two evenings: one to prepare, one to find out whether you prepared right.

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

Faces you'll know on sight