A Year on the Salt Road

You drive a salt cart down forty miles of road, from the works to the market. People meet you on the road, and you write down what happened. That is the whole game — one die, one pen, and about twenty minutes an evening.

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🌙 WHAT THIS IS

A solo RPG journal — a solo journaling game about one year on a salt road.

You are not a hero and there is nothing to defeat. You have a cart, a horse and a load of salt, and the road brings you everybody who wants something from you. Some of them can pay. Some of them will pay in the spring. One of them has nothing to pay with but a song.

You play one evening at a time:

🎲 Roll for who you meet on the road.

🎲 Roll for what they want.

✒️ Write three or four lines: what you carried, what it cost, and what you did not say.

If the two rolls do not fit together — an old customer who cannot pay this year, who wants everything you have left — that tension IS the evening. You do not reroll. You write your way through it.

⚖️ You never roll to find out whether you succeed.

The die says what happens. You say what you did about it. There is no failure in this game, only what it cost.

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📦 WHAT YOU GET

▪ 162 written entries across 25 tables — every one of them rolled on a single d6

▪ 4 seasons, with 72 entries that belong to the seasons alone, and not one repeated

▪ 12 writing prompts, three per season, for evenings when you would rather write than roll

▪ 3 ending tables — which one you roll on depends on how you worked the road

▪ One day worked through from the first roll to the written entry, so the first evening does not start with a decision

▪ 8 journal sheets, because in a game you play by writing, the writing space is the product

▪ 20 pages · 4 PDFs

Nothing here is a stub. Every table is written out in full.

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🗝️ HOW THE YEAR STARTS

Six rolls and a name, and the road is yours.

Three for you — why the cart is yours, what you are good at, and what you do not say.

Three for the road — the road itself, the cart and the horse, and what needs doing before winter.

Then you give the cart a name. The works knows it by a number, and every stop on the road calls it something else.

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🍂 FOUR SEASONS, AND THE ROAD IS DIFFERENT IN EACH

🌱 SPRING — Mud season

The frost comes out of the ground all at once, the low road turns to soup, and every farm between the works and the market has waited all winter for salt.

☀️ SUMMER — Dust and long days

The road is hard and dry and crowded, the horse wants water every hour, and you can do the whole run in daylight if nothing goes wrong.

🍁 AUTUMN — The fairs

Every market town holds its fair in the same six weeks, every buyer wants salt before the killing season, and every one of them knows exactly what you paid for it.

❄️ WINTER — Salt for the winter

The pigs are killed and every house needs salt for the meat, the road is ice in the mornings, and the people who need you most live at the far end of the worst stretch.

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⚖️ THREE THINGS YOU ARE KEEPING

🧂 Salt 🐴 Horse 🤝 Goodwill

Anything you give away, spill or sell cheap takes a Salt. A day pushed past dark or through weather takes a Horse. Anything kind gives a Goodwill. A day moves one of them, never more, and together they are the reason the year has a shape instead of being a pile of evenings.

Whichever one is highest when the year ends decides which ending you roll on.

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📖 A FEW LINES FROM INSIDE

"A woman who has walked twenty miles to meet the cart, because the price at her own market is double."

"Two children selling water at the top of the long climb, at a price they have clearly just decided."

"You cannot read, and you have been guessing at the dockets for years."

"At the last stop before the works, somebody keeps a fire lit for you every night, and nobody will say who."

"A song about you turns up at the autumn fair, and it is mostly true."

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✨ THIS IS FOR YOU IF

▪ You like old roads, horses and the people you meet along them

▪ You want a cozy game that still has structure and consequences

▪ This would be your first solo RPG and you want one that explains itself

▪ You keep a journal and want prompts that build on each other instead of starting over

▪ You want twenty quiet minutes in the evening that are not a screen

▪ You are tired of combat and stat blocks

▪ You own one six-sided die and nothing else, and would like that to be enough

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🎒 WHAT YOU NEED

▪ This book

▪ A pen

▪ One six-sided die

▪ Somewhere quiet

That is the list. No deck of cards, no second die, no app, and no account.

It is made for one player. If you want somebody else in it, take a season each: read the other person's entries before you start yours, and do not discuss them. The cart is the same cart and the tracks carry over, so you inherit whatever they did to the horse.

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🚫 WHAT IS NOT IN IT

No combat. No monsters. No magic. No stat blocks and no character sheet.

Nothing here is fought. If something arrives that you cannot solve, you cannot solve it, and you write that down.

It is a road, a cart, a horse, and four seasons of people who want something from you.

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📚 THE A YEAR AT… SERIES

This is the fourth book. A Year at the Wayside (an inn on a quiet road), A Year at the Lending Library (a small town library) and A Year at the Ferry (a rope ferry on a wide river) use the same rules with a different place, different people and different things running out. Each book stands on its own, and all four are also sold together as one bundle.

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📄 THE FILES

Two zip files, one for each paper size, so you only download the one you print on:

▪ A4 — colour and ink-saver

▪ US Letter — colour and ink-saver

The ink-saver build drops the tint and the cover painting and keeps every word. Same book, same 20 pages, cheaper to run — and the journal sheets are the ones you will reprint.

⬇️ Instant digital download. Nothing is posted to you.

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🕯️ ONE GOOD EVENING

Games for a table, and for a chair by the fire.