The Wayside Grave

One grave, alone, a mile short of the border, with no village near enough to explain it.

Everybody who passes pulls a weed and leaves a pinch of salt on the stone. Nobody founded that, and nobody will stop.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🧂 THE SALT HAS BEGUN GOING DARK

Damp and dark within a day, which it has never done.

The ground has settled. The stone has tilted about four inches.

And under the line where the turf has always been, the lettering is as sharp as the day it was cut.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

📛 THERE IS A NAME ON IT

And there are people a mile east who have walked past it their whole lives.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

🏁 THE LAST STOP BEFORE THE BORDER

And the one that asks what all the tending was actually for.

A 5th-level investigation where the answer is easier to find than it is to carry.

🎲 A 44-page one-shot adventure for D&D 5e — 3 hours, 4 players, level 5.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

📦 WHAT YOU GET — 43 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 5th-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.

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

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

✨ THIS IS FOR YOU IF

▪ You want an investigation that ends in a conversation, not a reveal

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

▪ Your party is 5th level and most one-shots are written for 1st

▪ 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 — 44 pages, colour and printer-friendly

▪ US Letter — 49 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.