The Salt Chapel

One room, one keeper, and a blessing every caravan takes before the empty stretch east.

The floor is inlaid with salt in a pattern the masons built around rather than over, because it was already here when they raised the walls.

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📖 NINE HUNDRED YEARS, NO GAP

The guestbook records blessings from ninety years before there was a roof to stand under.

Nine hundred years of that book, and not one gap in it.

This season the pattern started dissolving. No well, no spring, no leak in the roof.

The keeper has stopped taking bookings, will not say why, and has not written it in the book.

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🔍 THE ANSWER IS ON THE PAGE, NOT IN YOUR HEAD

The inlay is a salt pan — a dry sealed layer laid over a brine spring, a technique still used in working salt country. It works precisely because it stays dry.

It has stopped.

Everything the party needs to reach that is written into the scenes, so nobody has to invent the solution at the table.

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⚔️ THE MONSTER IS THE THING THAT WAS KEEPING IT SHUT

Eight centuries of doing one job, standing over the hole, and losing.

Below half its hit points it stops fighting and starts sealing — it cannot do both.

⭐ The best ending in this adventure is hitting it until it stops fighting you, and then backing away.

🎲 A 45-page one-shot adventure for D&D 5e — 3 hours, 4 players, level 2.

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

▪ 6 scenes, one more than the usual five, because an investigation needs two threads

▪ 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 2nd-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

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🧂 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.

Cotter Bray is in this one, and in six more of them.

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✨ THIS IS FOR YOU IF

▪ You want a dnd mystery where the answer is printed, not improvised

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

▪ Your table likes working something out more than fighting it

▪ 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

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📄 THE FILES

Four PDFs, plus the maps.

▪ A4 — 45 pages, colour and printer-friendly

▪ US Letter — 48 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.

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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.