Six Seconds — a free 5e-compatible one-shot

Every sack of grain in the valley goes through one wheel. Six nights ago that wheel stopped turning for six seconds and then started again.

Nobody heard it but the miller. He has told nobody, because a wheel that stops is a wheel that can stop again, and the whole autumn is stacked in his loft waiting its turn. He has not slept in six days. He wants somebody to go down into the wheel-pit and come back up saying it was nothing.

It was not nothing.

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

A complete evening, written short on purpose. This is not a sample chapter, a quickstart, or a paid adventure with the good parts taken out. It is its own thing, and everything it needs is in it.

WHAT IS IN IT - 31 pages

- Five scenes, each with read-aloud text and what to do when a check fails
- One battle map, top-down, 70 px per five-foot square so a VTT import lines up exactly (DM copy, player copy, and a copy with no grid on it)
- Four ready-to-play characters, so nobody has to build anything
- Eleven secrets belonging to no scene, to hand over wherever the players dig
- Nine things that go wrong and what happens next - they refuse the job, they run, they befriend the thing, they kill somebody who mattered
- A real choice at the end with no correct answer, and the adventure does not have one either
- Two rollable tables and three handouts, one of them the thing they find on the gate

WRITTEN FOR A DM WHO HAS NEVER RUN ANYTHING

One fight. One map. No branching. Every skill check says what happens on a failure, so the evening never stalls waiting for somebody to invent something.

Set in Lowmere - the free valley 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.