The Smokehouses

A hearth that has not been allowed to go fully cold since before anybody currently alive was born. It is tended in shifts. There has never been a shift where it went out.

Tonight there was.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🔥 THE SITUATION

Two families. Three sheds. One fire.

The nearest fire that counts is a collier's burn two miles up the hill, and the box you carry it home in holds heat for about an hour.

The other family's hearth is forty feet away, behind a door that has been unlocked for two hundred years and has never once been opened.

⚖️ Both endings are written out at the same length. Neither one is the right answer.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

👥 BUILT FOR EXACTLY TWO PLAYERS

Not a four-player adventure with a note about scaling.

The encounters, the pacing and the ready characters are all written for a pair, so nobody is covering three empty seats.

🎲 A 39-page duet adventure for D&D 5e — 2-3 hours, 2 players, level 1.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

📦 WHAT YOU GET — 38 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 no grid. 70 px per 5-foot square for a clean Roll20 or Foundry import

▪ 4 ready-to-play 1st-level characters, finished — ability scores, armour class, hit points, attacks, spells and gear. A pair can pick the two they like

▪ 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

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🤫 A QUIET ONE

Nobody in this adventure is anybody's enemy.

Which is exactly what makes the forty feet hard.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🧂 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.

Sister Wren is in this one, and in five more of them.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

✨ THIS IS FOR YOU IF

▪ You play with one other person and are tired of scaling four-player adventures down

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

▪ You would rather run a problem than a fight

▪ 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 your player a finished character instead of spending session one building one

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

📄 THE FILES

Four PDFs, plus the maps.

▪ A4 — 39 pages, colour and printer-friendly

▪ US Letter — 44 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.