The Border Cairns

Every caravan this road has ever lost has a cairn out here, and every traveller who passes adds one stone.

Nobody founded the custom. Nobody keeps a list. A cairn on this ground builds itself.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

⚠️ THE NEW ONE

There is a new cairn at the eastern edge of the field.

It has no name on it. No caravan has been reported lost this year.

And it has grown a foot and a half since the first day of the month.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🌒 SOMETHING OUT HERE WORKED IT OUT

If it covers what it kills, the road will finish the job.

Every stone on that cairn was placed by somebody doing the decent thing.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

💔 THE HORRIBLE PART IS THE CUSTOM, NOT THE CREATURE

Nobody did anything wrong.

The adventure never lets the party off that, and it never lectures them about it either.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🏜️ OPEN GROUND, NO COVER FOR A MILE

The field is flat and featureless on purpose, and both stat blocks are written to make that matter.

🎲 A 45-page one-shot adventure for D&D 5e — 3-4 hours, 4 players, level 4.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

📦 WHAT YOU GET — 44 pages, nothing left for you to invent

▪ 5 scenes, every one written out in full: read-aloud text, what happens if they fail, what to do if they skip it

▪ 2 battle maps in three versions each — DM, player, and a copy with no grid. 70 px per 5-foot square, so it drops straight into Roll20 or Foundry already aligned

▪ 4 ready-to-play 4th-level characters, finished — ability scores, armour class, hit points, attacks, spells and gear. Hand them out and roll

▪ Every character in it, player and NPC alike, has a drawn portrait

▪ A plain-English glossary of the basic rules words — DC, saving throws, advantage

▪ A section for your first time running a game

▪ A summary up front listing every scene with its page and how hard each fight is

▪ 11 secrets, tables and printable handouts

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🧂 PART OF THE SALT ROAD

Sixty miles, sixteen stops, each a day apart. Every one of them has noticed the same thing and not one of them has said so out loud.

This adventure stands completely alone — it needs nothing from any other — but a table that plays four of them starts comparing notes without being prompted.

Ossie Fenn is in this one, and in four more of them.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

✨ THIS IS FOR YOU IF

▪ You want a dnd horror one shot where the horror is a decent custom, not a monster

▪ You want a dnd one shot that fits in an evening and finishes

▪ Your table likes a fight where the ground itself is the problem

▪ You are new to running games and want the read-aloud text already written

▪ You run on Roll20 or Foundry and want maps that import at the right scale

▪ You want to hand out finished characters instead of spending session one building them

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

📄 THE FILES

Four PDFs, plus the maps.

▪ A4 — 45 pages, colour and printer-friendly

▪ US Letter — 46 pages, colour and printer-friendly

▪ 6 map images

🗺️ The battle maps also print at table scale — two extra PDFs, A4 and US Letter, lay every map out at one inch per five-foot square across numbered sheets with a cut line. Print them at home, tape them together and put miniatures on them.

The printer-friendly build is the same book in pure white, nothing removed.

⬇️ Instant digital download. Nothing is posted to you.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

📜 THE SMALL PRINT

Compatible with Fifth Edition.

Made with AI assistance: the text and maps of this adventure were written and generated with AI, then edited, checked and laid out by hand.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🕯️ ONE GOOD EVENING

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