The First Cart

Every year, when the mud on the valley road finally sets hard enough to take a wheel, Marrowdown sends the first cart up to Coldstile.

Beer, flour and salt fish. Nobody hurries it, and the whole village watches it go.

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🌟 THIS IS THE ONE TO START WITH

Written for somebody who has never sat behind the screen — and for a table that has never played.

🎲 A 43-page one-shot adventure for D&D 5e — 3 hours, 4 players, level 1.

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🛡️ NOTHING HERE CAN KILL A NEW CHARACTER BY ACCIDENT

The encounters are built for a first table, and every one of them has a way out that is not a fight.

Every check tells you what happens when they fail. There are no blanks and no homework.

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📦 WHAT YOU GET — 42 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

▪ 3 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 1st-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

▪ Full stat blocks printed beside the scene that uses them

▪ 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

▪ Secrets, tables and handouts, plus written help for when the party does something you did not plan for

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🗓️ PART OF THE LOWMERE YEAR

Sixteen adventures in one valley, spring to winter, collected in one campaign book with a finale that is not sold on its own.

This adventure stands completely alone — it needs nothing from any other — but a table that plays four of them starts seeing the year take shape.

Hallow Coyne is in this one, and in two more of them.

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✨ THIS IS FOR YOU IF

▪ It is your first night as DM and you want the whole evening already written down

▪ Your table has never played D&D and you do not want to spend session one building characters

▪ You want a beginner dnd one shot where nobody dies because they did not know the rules yet

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

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

▪ You would rather read a page aloud than improvise a whole village

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📄 THE FILES

Four PDFs, plus the maps.

▪ A4 — 43 pages, colour and printer-friendly

▪ US Letter — 47 pages, colour and printer-friendly

▪ 9 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.

📁 Because this one has three maps rather than two, the download arrives as four items: a zip with the four books, a second zip with the nine map images, and the two table-scale PDFs on their own. Unzip both and you have everything.

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

⬇️ Instant digital download. Nothing is posted to you.

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📜 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.

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🕯️ ONE GOOD EVENING

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