The Salt Road

A printable one shot campaign for D&D 5e: sixteen adventures along sixty miles of working road, each one a complete evening, with the maps, the stat blocks and the ready characters written out.

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🛣️ THE ROAD

Salt comes out of the hills at the western end and goes to the border markets in the east. Everything in this book happens in between.

A ford. A tollgate. Three smokehouses. A horse fair. A chapel. A cutting. A row of warehouses. A quarantine house. A ferry. Two lamp-towers. A field of cairns. A drovers' camp. An auction floor. A bridge. A grave — and the works the salt comes out of.

Each stop is one evening. Sixteen of them, west to east.

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🤫 THE THING NOBODY SAYS

Something that used to keep has stopped keeping.

Every stop on this road has privately decided it is their store, their scales or their ground, and none of them has mentioned it to the next stop along.

No adventure requires you to point at it. Do not point at it. Somewhere around the fourth one a table stops asking the GM and starts comparing notes with each other — and that only works once.

🔒 The sixteenth has never been sold on its own and will not be. The First Boiling is the salt works at the western end, it is the last thing in this book, and it says what has been happening. Fifteen stops ask. Only this book answers.

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📦 WHAT YOU GET — 694 pages

▪ 16 adventures, each rendered exactly as it sells on its own. If you already own one, the pages match

▪ 34 battle maps, 68 images in all — a DM copy and a player copy of each, at 70 px per 5-foot square, aligned for Roll20 and Foundry

▪ A 21-page gazetteer of the whole road: sixteen places, fourteen people, the year, the tables, and twelve things currently wrong that have no adventures attached to them

▪ A bestiary gathering every creature invented for this road into one place, so nobody is hunting through six hundred pages at eleven at night

▪ 64 finished character sheets — the same four heroes, Bez, Wren, Sorrel and Fennow, reprinted at the level each stop is played at, with ability scores, armour class, hit points, attacks, spells and gear

▪ Every character across the sixteen, player and NPC alike, has a drawn portrait

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📈 THE ROAD DOES THE LEVELLING

No experience points. No downtime. No calendar to keep.

The party levels by getting further east — one level per three stops, because the further the salt travels the more it is worth and the worse the trouble around it gets.

Four level-ups across sixteen sessions, and the whole system fits on one page, because a road only has one axis.

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🎲 THREE WAYS TO USE IT

▪ One stop — a Tuesday night

▪ Four or five — a short campaign that ends somewhere the party has never been

▪ All sixteen — a party that walks out at 5th level having watched one thing go wrong the length of a country

Or take it apart. Sixty miles of working road bolts onto almost any map you already run, and the last page of the gazetteer is about exactly that.

👥 Two of them are written for two players. The Smokehouses and The High Cut are built for a pair rather than a party and say so on their own covers. In a full run, split the group for a session and give those two the night.

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✨ THIS IS FOR YOU IF

▪ You want a dnd one shot campaign you can start on any Tuesday and stop whenever you like

▪ You are tired of tracking experience points and want the story to do the levelling

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

▪ Your group is unreliable and a sixteen-week commitment would die in week three

▪ You want something prepared, not a box of ideas you still have to build

▪ You would rather your players work something out than be told it

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📄 THE FILES

Four PDFs plus the maps.

▪ A4 — 694 pages, colour

▪ A4 — printer-friendly

▪ US Letter — 732 pages, colour

▪ US Letter — printer-friendly

▪ A zip of all 68 map images, one folder per adventure

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

⬇️ 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 book 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.