Nine Miles — a free 5e-compatible one-shot

A caravan is stopped nine miles short of the auction with a cracked axle, and the weighing closes at first light.

The salt can wait. The tally-stick cannot. Unweighed salt is not sold, and forty people are paid out of the sale. So somebody walks - nine miles, in the dark, carrying a notched stick worth more than everything else on the road tonight.

The trouble is what the notches say.

TWO HOURS. FOUR PLAYERS. FIRST LEVEL. ONE FIGHT.

A complete evening, written short on purpose. Not a sample, not a teaser, and not a paid adventure with the good parts removed.

WHAT IS IN IT - 34 pages

- Five scenes, each with read-aloud text and what to do when a check fails
- A route choice with two real answers and a stated cost on each, and neither is the right one
- One battle map of the pan bank, 70 px per five-foot square, DM and player copies
- Four ready-to-play characters
- Eleven secrets, nine ways it goes sideways, two tables, three handouts - including the tally-stick itself, so the players can read it before anybody explains it
- Six people at the end who want the thing you are carrying and not you, and who will say so

THE CHOICE IS THE POINT

The stick shows a shortfall. The shortfall is three tolls paid in salt by a head drover so that two of her people were not left at a gate at midnight. Telling the truth puts her name in a book for the first time in twenty years. Saying nothing puts a mark against a man who has run this road for forty years. There is no correct answer and nobody at the scales will tell you which one they wanted.

WRITTEN FOR A DM WHO HAS NEVER RUN ANYTHING

One fight, one map, no branching, and every check says what a failure costs.

Set on the Salt Road - the free setting, also here, also free. You do not need it to run this.

If you run this, I would like to know what went wrong at the table. Not whether you liked it — what stalled, what you had to invent on the spot, what your players did that the page had no answer for. Comments are open below and I read all of them.

Compatible with Fifth Edition. Made with AI assistance: the text and maps were written and generated with AI, then edited, checked and laid out by hand.