The First Playtest — as it first played (the Fenn run). Preserved for posterity; the live Example of Play has since been re-run. ↩ current run
Salt & Thorn · a rules playtest, set down as it happened
Played under the Hedgewise's earlier knack, 2026-09-07 note: at the time, Old Ways gave +1 when a charm's observance was met and nothing when it was forced, and every total below is worked that way. The knack is now observance flexibility -- the hedgewise may meet an observance with a kindred material, time or place, and never pays the -1 for forcing one -- so a met observance today adds nothing and a forced one costs nothing. The rolls stand as rolled.
Nettleden, under Harrow Wood. Three players, five short sittings, one frightened village. Written up by someone who was in the Vigil — who knows the folk-ways and the rules cold, and watched the players' faces as closely as the dice. Every roll here was really rolled (seed 20260718). Nothing was cleaned up for the retelling.
three players who, it turns out, will not play the same game at all
This run was played under the Reckoning as it stood then — fed by rolled sixes, on a four-box track. The Reckoning has since moved to doubles, on three boxes. The dice below are real and the commentary explains them correctly for that night; it is not a guide to the current rules. For those, see the Core Rules.
Character creation, and the village at the brink. A cold bright morning on the green; market day is three days off.
The making of the three tells you who's come to play before a single die is thrown. Margo builds hers like a woman balancing a ledger — Wits at the top (“that's where the game is”), the healer's charms chosen for what they reveal: a hag stone to see through a lie, tea-leaves to read what's coming, rowan-and-thread to ward a door. She names her Hedgewise Aldith Fenn and doesn't look up when she says the surname. Denny takes longer, and speaks quieter, and when he's done he has made a gravedigger — Silas Crake — with his best hand in Craft and his charms all turned toward the dead: salt at the shoulder, a holed stone to see the soul under a horror, and cold iron to bar a named thing from a door. Kit is finished first and grinning: Whin, a poacher with no kin, taken in once at a stranger's fire, charms all about going unseen and reading omens. Three folk of one village, bound to three different griefs.
GM One thing more before we open, and it's the one that matters most. Each of you, name your character's binding tie — the single person, place, or thing they would risk everything for. Keep it inside Nettleden; in a village this close there's nowhere else for it to reach. That thread is what pulls you into the trouble — and what the trouble will make you pay.
Margo “Mother Sloe. Last winter she pulled the killing fever out of my girl and named no price — and a debt with no price is the worst kind of debt. Now the village wants me to carry the rope to her door.”
Denny “My dead. I know every name under that grass by the feel of the ground over it, and I dug my father's own bed two seasons past, when the wood took him. I mean to know why it was ours.”
Kit “The Colliers. They found me half-froze at their fire's edge and never asked what I was worth — so they're mine now. When the mob comes, it comes for my own.”
rules-eyeYou choose a binding tie once, at character creation, and it's the real steering-wheel of the game. Nobody in this Vigil picked a mystery to solve — each one is pulled by what they're bound to: a debt, a grave, a family. Watch the story wire itself together with nobody plotting it: Aldith's tie runs to the old woman in the woods, Silas's to the thing that keens on the dark of the moon, Whin's to the family the village wants to hang. Three ties, three of Nettleden's troubles, one Vigil. The tie never rolls a die of its own — it's a flavor engine and an advancement engine. Act on it in the teeth of the danger, or break it, and you get a full advance at once, and a free new tie. It's the most valuable thing a character owns, and the whole game is built to make you spend it.
Watch what the Vigil just did without being told to: it wired every player into a different corner of the same trouble. The Optimizer will chase the useful truth, the Method Actor will chase his dead, the Gremlin will chase the mischief that saves her own — and each one gets dragged, by the very thing they love, straight at a Fear the others can barely see. Nobody has to agree on a goal. The ties do the agreeing for them. (Keep the gravedigger's line in mind. By the end of the first night it walks him — alone, unprompted — to within a spade's length of a buried answer, and the GM never says a word.)
GM Nettleden, then. A scatter of crofts — small farmsteads — a green, a well, and Harrow Wood standing over the lot of it like a held breath — an old wood no one clears and no one owns, that gives the village its firewood and its dreams and its dead in about equal measure. You are all born of this place; whatever comes out of those trees, there is nowhere for any of you that is not here. It's a cold bright morning three days shy of market day, and the green is busier than honest work should leave it.
GM The knot of them is gathered round Wat Coombe's bench — Wat the cobbler, whose shop opens straight onto the green and whose bench is the nearest thing Nettleden has to a council. His boy was the first to die when the keening started off the treeline this winter, and the grief has gone hard in him and turned outward: he wants a fault, a face, a thing the village can lay hands on. At his shoulder, half-listening and plainly enjoying it, is Gyb the miller — fat, genial, first to every rumor and last to let one go — who has lately been buying up a certain family's scrap of land cheap, as the fear drives its worth down. And the name in all their mouths, said quiet and said often, is the Colliers: charcoal-burners who came three winters back and keep a turf hut out at the wood's edge — soot on everything, odd hours, the mother foreign in her speech. Incomers, still. Someone keeps chalking a mark on their door, a child's hand, an accusation, and it keeps getting scrubbed and keeps coming back. Nobody has yet said the word hang out loud. Wat is saying market day the way a man tests the weight of a stone in his palm. What do you do?
Three people at that bench hear the word Colliers three different ways, and it doesn't take a die to show it. Watch the stakes, not the faces: for Kit, it's personal before the Vigil even knows why — the Colliers are Whin's own people, the fire that took her in half-frozen and never asked what she was worth — the mark on their door is a mark on hers. For Denny, it's a claim he can check against three graves — Silas has buried three of “the Banshee's” dead since the thaw and knows to the inch that no Collier's hand touched any of them. For Margo, it's not the words that matter but who's saying them — Aldith is already reading faces over listening to claims. One green, one word, three different griefs — that's the game telling you, in its first breath, that nobody here chose a mystery. Each of them is pulled by what they're bound to.
Margo “Before I say a word to that crowd I want to know what I'm actually dealing with. I slip the hag stone off the cord, cup it low so it's not a show, and I look through it — at Wat, at Gyb, at the whole chalked feeling hanging over them. Is there an uncanny hand steering this? A glamour, a laid trail? Or is it just people?”
rules-eyeShe keeps the observance — the stone's in her hand — so her Old Ways knack adds +1, and a 10+ means the charm lands full-strength. She gets the whole truth: there's no uncanny hand here. No glamour on Wat, no charm behind the chalk. Just fear. But look at that single 6 — every 6 marks the Reckoning, so Aldith's track ticks up to 1 of 4. Even a clean success feeds the debt.
Watch the Optimizer deflate. Margo spent a charm and picked up a mark on her Reckoning — and what did it buy her? Nothing she can use. “So it's just people,” she says, flat. It's the most honest thing anyone says all morning, and she's annoyed by it.
Denny (setting the spade down where the churchyard dirt shows on it, walking into the middle of Wat's talk, low enough that they have to go still to hear) “Three of ours are in my ground since the thaw. Not one died with a Collier's hand on them — they died on the dark of the moon, with that sound off the treeline. My father did. You want someone to blame come market day, Wat — you come blame it with me, at the wood's edge, where the dying actually happens.”
rules-eyePersuading a crowd isn't a charm — it's an ordinary Take a Risk: 2d6 plus whatever trait fits. Denny leads with Sway 0, his dump stat, so this should be a coin-toss at best. Two fives make a clean 10 anyway. A hit means it lands — and this one matters behind the screen. The Gathering was one bad beat from becoming a mob, and someone who stands against the tide holds the clock. It doesn't advance today. The reprieve is real — but market day still comes.
GM Half the green finds its boots of a sudden, and a few drift toward the churchyard end as if they'd always meant to. But Wat does not move. His face shuts like a door, and he does not look your way again.
The quiet one gets the room — but watch the cost land on the Vigil, not on the dice. Denny led with Sway, his worst stat, and took the room anyway; what it bought him is the job of the man who talked the village's fear down before it was ready to let go, and he knew that when he opened his mouth. The Method Actor plays for the true beat, not the safe one. Even Margo's “nice roll” lands two ways.
Kit (who has said nothing on the green, turning a snared coney — a rabbit — over in her hands at the edge of it all) “I'm not going to the Colliers' door — that's the last place I want to be seen. A man who profits every time a neighbor gets frightened off their land is a man with a reason to keep folk frightened. Come dark, I go over the back way to Gyb the miller's, and I have a look at what a fat man keeps his cheap-bought deeds in.”
GM Then the light goes long and gold and then gray, and the green empties, and a small figure in a coat she can turn inside-out slips down the lane toward the mill. Hold that thought — we'll pick you up there. That's the sitting.
Kit has been patient all scene, which for Kit is a coiled spring. She didn't spend a die — she spent the daylight, scouting a target. The Gremlin isn't here to save the Colliers with a good speech. She's here to find someone the village's own cruelty can be turned back onto — and she thinks she just found him.
Here's one thing none of the three players caught: the healer just gave herself the name Fenn — the same name, though nobody now living in Nettleden remembers it, as the girl the village once turned out to die in the wood. The players don't know that yet. Neither, quite, does Aldith. It sits there on the green all morning, unremarked, like frost on a mild day.
That same night. Three villagers are out in the dark, each pulled a different way by the thing they're bound to — and no two of them are in the same field. Watch how little the Vigil has to agree on to make one story.
GM Kit, you slipped off the green at dusk after Gyb the miller, and you've come the back way over the fields to his mill — the big timber building by the race (the fast water-channel that drives the wheel), one shuttered light burning late in the counting-room (the little office where he keeps his accounts), the water loud enough to cover a careful step. You're at the wall, unseen, in your turned coat. Inside is a fat man, his tally-book, and whatever he doesn't show the vestry (the parish's board of elders).
Kit “I don't go for the door — not yet. I ease up under the shutter of the counting-room, find the gap where the wood's warped, and I put my eye to it before I put a hand to anything. I want to see who's in there, whether that tally-book's open, and where a fat man keeps what he's not showing.”
GM Gyb, alone, shirtsleeved at his desk — and pinned under a stone beside the lamp, a little sheaf of papers. You can read the top one from here: a conveyance (a deed of sale), a Collier name inked shaky at the foot, a price on it that wouldn't buy a goat. Not one deed. A stack. Then a lantern swings round the corner — his man, doing a last round — coming to say goodnight to his master, straight for that door. He hasn't seen you. You've a breath, and he's between you and the clean way out.
Kit (a bit of broken clay already in her hand — old poacher's trick) “I flick it low and hard out past the wheel, into the stacked timber, timed to clatter just as his lantern comes round. Rats, or a cat, or nothing — he doesn't know, but it's away from me. And while his slow feet turn toward it, I go the other way.”
GM It works — a shade too well. The counting-room door bangs open and there's Gyb himself, lamp up, peering out: “Tom? Rats in the cordwood again?” Two men in the yard now, both looking the wrong way — and his counting-room stands open and empty at your back, the deeds on the table, his boots kicked off by the door. One breath before someone turns round.
Kit “One breath — that's a Gremlin's whole life in miniature, and I don't spend it thinking. Three steps over the sill into the warm room. I don't grab the tally-book — too big, missed too fast. I close my whole hand round the stone-weighted stack, stone and all so it doesn't slap the table on the way up — and not the top sheet. All of it. If he's going to miss something, let him miss everything — let him stand over that empty patch of table wondering which neighbor he wronged badly enough to come back for it. Over the sill, into the black, gone the way they aren't looking.”
rules-eyeNo charm here — the Gremlin just arranged the world, which is ordinary play: a plain Take a Risk. A 7–9 means she pulls it off, but a cost lands: she gets the whole stack and gets away, only she's glimpsed — a small quick shape in a turned coat where no honest body should be. Notice what didn't happen: no scuffle, no strike. Her From Cover knack — “+1 harm on your first unseen strike each fight” — never got a fight to fire in, because she out-thought the need for one. (No 6 on the dice, and no charm worked, so her Reckoning doesn't move — only 6s on charm-workings feed it.)
She stops once, three hedges out, the cold stack pressed to her ribs like a stolen egg, and laughs — “quiet and mean.” “Of course it's not clean. Nothing I've ever lifted came without somebody's dog barking after… I took it so there's a debt on his side of the table for once.” She stole the proof to save her family. What she hasn't felt yet is how a frightened village will use “a sneaking Collier thief.” You already can.
GM Denny, cut to you — your churchyard, the one ground in Nettleden you're easy on. Out past the graves, at the treeline, the cold's gone wrong: a ring of frost on the grass on a mild night, the near trees birdless and dead-still, a dog on the green that won't stop its low warning and won't come to the wood-side. It's the kind of wrong you've felt before. The nights your dead were made.
Denny (spade left leaning on the yew; he walks the low wall to the wood-side, closes his fist on the holed stone his mother left him, and lifts it to his eye toward the treeline) “He says nothing yet. If a thing out there has ears, I'll not give it my voice before I've given it my eyes.”
rules-eyeSilas keeps the observance — the stone's in his hand — but he's a Gravedigger, not the Hedgewise, so there's no Old Ways bonus here; it's just +1 Wits. The story is the boxcars: every 6 marks the Reckoning, and two 6s mark two. One charm, and his track leaps from 0 to 2 of 4. The debt isn't the charm-worker's alone — it belongs to anyone in the Vigil who works the old craft. And the clean 10+ shows him true: no monster at the treeline, but a girl, thin as a hard winter, barefoot in the stiffening frost, the face of someone who died cold and wronged and owed. A hag stone shows you what a thing is, though, never what it's called. He gets her nature. He doesn't get her name — and her name is the whole mystery.
He doesn't cross himself. He doesn't call the dog. He turns his back on the treeline and reads his own ground like a page he knows by heart and only now sees a line struck out of — then crosses to the northeast corner, where the turf runs bare and nameless outside the consecrated ground, and lays his palm flat on the cold grass “the way he tests a spot before he opens it.” At his father's stone he kneels: “You kept this ground longer than I have. Did you know her. Did you know what was owed, and whose word it was that never got paid.” He decides to tell no one. And notice: the GM leaked nothing. The player's own binding tie — my father was among the first she took — walked him to within a spade's length of the buried answer, on the first night.
GM Margo, and you — you can't settle. By market day this is a hanging, and the family they're closing on keeps to a turf hut at the very edge of the wood. You take down your bundle — rowan twigs, red thread, shears — and go the hedge-line, not the green, so no one marks that the Hedgewise went to the Colliers' in the dark.
GM At the door you crouch and look at the chalk mark close, the way only you would — and it tells you plain: a child's hand, small and unsure, the chalk held wrong, done quick and scared. Not a conspirator's mark. A frightened child copying its elders. Then you knock, soft, and say who you are. A shape crosses the window — the mother — and the rushlight (a cheap reed candle) is pinched dead. Bolts run home. Nobody opens. Of course they don't: you're the village, come to their door in the dark, three days from a rope.
Margo “I crouch at the threshold anyway. No sense carrying rowan home un-hung. I bind the cross rough against the doorpost — wrong place, wrong properness, no sill, no cradle, just cold wood and colder hands — and work it without its due. If it takes half as well as it should, that's still better than a family with nothing at all between them and market day.”
GM As you twist the thread it snags, knots against itself, and you feel the working start to slip toward spite instead of ward.
Margo “I don't let it. ‘Take the salt, then,’ I mutter to the dark, low enough the house won't hear — ‘the taste of it. Bread, skin, sea-wind — none of it salt to me again, not till this is paid some other way.’ I twist the thread hard through the knot as I say it, like closing an account, and feel the ill-luck turn.”
rules-eyeTwo rules braid together in one roll. She's locked out, so she forces the observance: −1, and no Old Ways. And a die came up a 1 — ill-luck in the making — so she strikes a Bargain: she names a price the GM approves (the taste of salt, forever) and that 1 flips to a 6. The bought six is a real six — it lifts the total to a clean 10+ and marks the Reckoning like any other. So the Bargain gets paid twice: the price now, and a Woe brought nearer later. Her track climbs to 2 of 4. The Optimizer picked her price with care — a permanent loss that costs flavor, not a tool she still needs. But the one cost she can't haggle down is the one the track charges.
She straightens, brushes the chalk-dust off her knees, and heads home “already annoyed at herself for how much that cost — for a door that still won't have her over its threshold.” She warded a house that wouldn't open for her, for people who'll find a rowan cross at dawn and never know whose cold hands left it. It's the kindest thing anyone does all night, and no one will ever thank her for it. That's the whole shape of the game in one barred door.
GM Morning, cold and bright. Gyb throws open his counting-room, finds not one deed gone but the whole stack, stone and all — and roars the mill down. Robbed, in the very middle of the fear he's been feeding; and a small figure in a turned coat was seen. By noon the green has a name for the thief, and it is the one the village was already reaching for: the Colliers' feral stray, the Whin girl.
rules-eyeThe shunning that sat on the family now names her. Shunned is a condition — a standing −1 to Sway, applied with no roll at all. Whin's Sway was already 0; now the one move she was never good at — talking her way clear — sits at −1 and shut. A condition is a rattle, not a wound. But carry enough of them and the next setback cuts. And here's the bitter engine of it: her theft was true — the deeds are real proof — and the village has folded even that into the lie.
She wears it the way she wears everything: “I'll wear it easier than the Colliers wear his chalk mark.” The Gremlin banked real evidence against a real profiteer. The Fears Gathering swallowed the fact and spat back a fresh accusation. That's the trouble with fighting a mob that doesn't need to be right — and it's exactly the wall the Vigil spends the rest of the story trying to get over.
No moon at all — the night the old folk bar the door, salt the sill, and keep a lamp lit till cockcrow (first light), because this is the night she comes down, and a few days later someone is dead. Three of Nettleden won't be behind their own doors tonight. Watch a session where the biggest die rolled is the one a player refuses to roll.
GM Kit, you're not behind any door. You're out past the Colliers' turf hut where the last hedge gives way to the trees, coat turned since before dark, three snare-lines strung across the paths a body would take to come at the hut unseen — not to catch a rabbit, to catch a warning. You watch two ways at once: the black treeline, and the lane back to the village. Because the thing you fear walking up on that hut tonight doesn't have claws. It carries a torch and knows your name.
GM It's the lane that trips your line. A cord jerks and goes slack; then torchlight held low, and voices, drink-brave and hushed — three village men. “…get them gone tonight, before they call it down on the rest of us.” “…say they ran off. Who's to argue with a witch-house stood empty.” Twenty feet from the door and closing, and your family asleep behind the turf wall. You've got the dark, the drop, and the first move.
Kit “I go for the middle one — the one holding the torch — because the dark's worth more to me than his skull. Up out of the bracken behind him, one hand hard over his mouth to eat the shout, and I put the flat of my knife-hilt into the back of his head, not the edge into his throat. I want him down and dark and gone — not dead, not a martyr, not a reason for the whole county to come with rope instead of cudgels. If the wood itself just reached out and took one of them, silent, no face — that's worth more against men who are only brave in a pack than any wound I could open.”
rules-eyeA 10+ on a Trade Blows lands your harm and takes an edge — here, she stays clean and unseen. And this is the beat that's been waiting a session and a half: her From Cover knack — “+1 harm on your first unseen strike each fight” — finally has a fight to fire in. Cudgel-harm 1 + 1 From Cover = 2 rungs, and with no armor the man drops straight to Broken: senseless, down, but breathing, exactly as she chose. And notice why the knack sat dead until now — she'd out-thought every earlier fight. It pays off the instant the threat comes for what she's bound to.
Kit “Then the one thing that costs me nothing and costs him a story he'll never tell right: I turn his coat inside-out on him, same as mine, and drag him off into the black where his mates won't trip over him. Let him wake alone, in the wrong dark, wearing his coat backwards with no memory of doing it. A man can nurse a bruise into anger. He can't nurse that into anything but a fear of ever coming back.”
The other two stand one heartbeat over the empty place where their friend was — no cry, no wound, no face — and then the night does the rest of Kit's work for her: they break and run, one of them sobbing. The Colliers sleep on, never knowing. The Gremlin didn't just win the fight — she turned the mob's own weapon, dread of the dark, back onto the mob. And then she goes still, because a keening has started off toward the church, on no wind, from entirely the wrong direction — and she clocks it, and stays at her post. The tie holds her feet where her gut won't.
GM Denny, the churchyard. You didn't bar your door — your ground is here. You've fixed cold iron over the lychgate, the gate every funeral passes through, a plain ward for the shuttered village; you've salt in your pocket and your mother's holed stone against your chest. You sit on the bare turf of the nameless northeast corner, near enough your father's stone to touch, and you wait — the way you'd sit up with any body the night before you put it in the ground.
GM The cold changes — stops being March cold and takes a shape. It doesn't come down off the treeline. It comes up, out of the nameless turf beside you, the grass whitening in a ring, your father's stone gone to frost under your hand. The keen begins from the ground, rising through the earth you sit on like it's the throat of the thing. She is close: the wronged girl, come up out of her own unmarked bed to stand over the one man who walked out to meet her.
Denny (he does not reach for the salt; he grips the stone, teeth set, as still as he's ever pretended to be over an open grave) “I saw you. Through the stone, three nights past. I know you're owed — I know it wasn't the Colliers, and it wasn't the wood, it was one of ours. I kept them off the wrong door for you. Give me a name to put to it, and I'll see it answered. I dig graves; I don't fill them with lies. Let me hear the whole of it.”
rules-eyeA 7–9: he holds, and gets to be heard — but staying costs him. And here's the horror the roll buys: she has no name to give. They buried her unshriven — with no last rites — and unmarked, and the forgetting worked so well it worked on her: she keens and keens and it never closes into a word, because the word is gone from the stones, the register, the living, and her own mouth. The mystery isn't locked inside her; it's lost, and has to be dug back up somewhere else. Staying to learn that guts him rung by rung — and a rung is a wound, not a rattle.
Denny (going down into the cold, the words pulled out of him before he can finish deciding) “If a name can be taken so clean that even its own owner can't hold it — then let it be a thing that can be given, not just stolen. Take mine, then. Take my name. Leave hers wherever it's got to. I'll keep looking for it without one of my own, if that's the price of looking at all.”
rules-eyeThe Death's Bargain is the one place the rules take the dice away completely: at Dying, you name what something dark will take — years, a sense, a bond, your very name — the GM sharpens it, and you cling to life. It always leaves a Scar, deeper than any condition, that no rest or Wish ever clears. Silas's Scar is The Nameless: strangers now forget his name the moment he gives it, while anyone who already knew him keeps it. He answered the girl's erasure by choosing it for himself — and tied his own fate to the buried name at the heart of everything. Watch how far that goes in the last sitting.
GM Margo, from the hedge at the Colliers' you saw a turned coat drop a torch-bearer into the dark and the others run — and then you heard it: the keening, thin and rising, and not from the treeline. From behind you. From the church. Every dark-of-the-moon of your life it came off the wood; tonight the death-cry is being called down in the middle of the village.
Margo “Whin. The name's out of my mouth before I've decided to let it be — and I file whatever that is away, because chasing a shadow that's already done its work is a fool's use of a short night. The cry's the thing. I'm moving before I've finished thinking — off the hedge, along the field edges, no light on me, because whatever's calling that sound down over the church, I don't mean to walk up to it carrying my own torch. At the yard wall I take the hag stone out. Two marks on the stick or four — this is what the stone's for: a truth plain eyes can't get me.”
rules-eyeThe seeming falls away whole: a wronged girl, no monster and no witchcraft, sinking back into ground with no stone — and Silas broken at her feet, hauled up from somewhere no charm of Aldith's has a word for. It's the same true, useless-for-now answer the gravedigger got: who she is, never what she's called. And the single 6 pushes Aldith's Reckoning to 3 of 4 — one mark from due.
GM The girl's nearly gone; Silas is down, frost-burned, not rising on his own, and the cold still sits in that corner. You've rowan and red thread in your apron. But your tally-stick stands at three of four — and the six that would make a ward hold might be the very one that tips the whole Reckoning over, Wish and Woe both, on the worst night of the year. Do you work it?
Margo “I don't touch the rowan. Three marks is already more than I meant to spend tonight, and I'll not put a fourth into an unknown on a night that's already turned a churchyard into a wood and a gravedigger into a drowned man on dry land. Whatever comes due tastes like, I'd rather learn it on a night I chose. So the charm stays in my apron. I go to hands and main strength instead — arm under his shoulder, knee in the frost, and I haul.”
rules-eyeThis is the loudest thing that happens all night, and nobody throws a die for it. The Reckoning only tips when a charm-worker lets it — and the debt is lopsided: a Wish caps at one of each type (and often goes to waste), while the Woe it mints is uncapped and always the GM's. So a careful player, one mark from due, simply declines to work — and takes the sure, slow, unglamorous option instead: her own two arms in the cold. The most powerful move in this folk-magic game turns out to be putting the magic down. (The debt doesn't vanish. It waits — for a night she picks.)
She drags him out a foot at a time, past where the frost-ring stops, gets him half-sat against the wall, her own shawl off her shoulders and onto his. Only then does she spare the girl a glance — already thinner, sinking — and give her the one thing that costs nothing: “Rest, then,” she says, quiet, not a working, just one woman's word to another. It's the kindest bit of math in the whole parish: a healer who saved a life tonight by refusing to do magic, and spent on a dying spirit only a sentence she could afford. Three villagers went out into the dark of the moon. All three came back changed — one Shunned and unrepentant, one a rung from the grave and a name short, one holding a debt she still, just barely, controls.
A few days later. The death everyone braced for on the dark of the moon didn't come the way they feared — so the dread went looking for another door, and found the old woman in the woods. This is the session where the debt everyone's been dreading finally comes due — on the one night the Optimizer decides is worth it.
GM Margo, the counting and the crossing have curdled. A churn that won't come to butter, laid at Mother Sloe's door; a child gone listless the day after she passed on the lane; and now, on the green, in daylight, someone has said it aloud, and no one has spoken against it — she overlooked my child. There's talk of going out to the hut with a rope, and Parson Cole has stopped staying it. And you are the one soul in Nettleden with a debt to that door: last winter Sloe drew the killing fever out of your daughter and named no price. Half the green calls that kindness. Half calls it a hook. You have never been sure which.
Margo “I don't go to the green to hear the talk out — I know where it ends; I've already watched three men creep up on one wrong door this month. So I go to the wood first, alone, in daylight, while I can still say I came as myself and not as part of a crowd. And I ask her plain, since no one else will: ‘What did you take out of my girl last winter, and what did you leave in its place, and what do you mean to collect? Half the green thinks you set a hook in her, and I've spent five months not knowing which half is right. I'd rather know now than have the village decide it for both of us with a rope.’ And while she answers — or doesn't — I lift the hag stone between us and look at her through the hole in it. Three marks of four be damned. I've hoarded this charm a month for a moment worth the risk. If there was ever one, it's this.”
rules-eyeThe stone strips away the seeming and shows the truth underneath, and the truth is: an old woman. No glamour, no hook, no second face, no cold thing wearing a shawl — just bad knees and forty years of the parish's fevers drawn out of its children. The stone has never shown Aldith anything so plainly, or so terribly: they're about to hang the one mercy the village has. This is a real Ken success on the Crone — the mystery the whole book warns you not to collapse too early, answered by a charm-worker brave enough to look. And the single 6 tips the Reckoning at last. She held at 3 of 4 for two whole sessions, refusing every bad night; she chose this one. Track 3 → 4 → DUE.
rules-eyeHere's the answer to the puzzle the last two sessions set up — why tip at all, if you can just refuse? Because the Woe you mint spends now. Aldith chose a night that looked safe; the instant her debt came due, it bought the GM the worst version of her afternoon. You time the upside; the GM times the downside. The Wish is hers to keep for a good moment. The Woe was never going to wait for one.
Margo (planting herself in the doorway, between the lane and the old woman, talking before they've rounded the last hedge) “Parson Cole. You stayed this talk a fortnight past. Look at me and tell me what changed — because I've just done with my own two eyes what none of you have troubled to do with yours.” (and she spends it, the Wish still warm in her hand — not arguing, making him see) “She took a fever out of my girl last winter and asked me for nothing. I've owed her since and never known if it was a debt or a kindness. I know now. Don't you make me learn it was a kindness by watching you hang her for it.”
rules-eyeThe Wish is powerful precisely because it takes the dice away at the hinge — you don't persuade Cole, you hand him a truth he can't argue with. It feels earned because it was pre-paid: two sessions of hoarding bought this one guaranteed beat. And look at what the resolved tie does — it doesn't end Aldith's story, it re-loads it. A fulfilled tie is an advance and a new binding; the engine that pulled her into the trouble hooks her straight into the next.
Margo (the lane emptied, the stone gone cold and spent in her hand) “We're square, then. Whatever it was between us, it's paid, both ways — and I'd like it very much if you never needed me to do that again, because I don't think I've a second one of those in me.”
GM Mother Sloe gives her no gratitude back — that was never her voice. “You've done a foolish, costly thing, Aldith Fenn, and a right one, and the village will not forgive you either part of it. They'll come looking for a witch again before the year's out. Only now there's a door in the village itself they can knock on, instead of walking all the way out here to mine.” A dry pause. “Mind whose door that is.”
And Aldith, alone in the empty lane, already knows what it cost: a dozen people watched her eyes do a thing no eyes should do. The fear she denied the Crone will go looking for the nearest open door — and the newest one in Nettleden is her own. Her old tie is paid; her new one is her daughter — “mine to lose now the way Mother Sloe was never anyone's to lose but her own.” The healer saved a life today by putting the magic down — and to do it, she spent the exact anonymity that kept her family safe.
GM Denny, meanwhile — you're mending, slow. A stretch of rest and tending has bought back one rung of you.
The cold from the graveside hasn't left his chest and his hands still won't fully steady — but he's dug graves with a fever on him before. What scares him more than the ache is the tic the Bargain left behind: he's stopped offering his name to anyone this week. He just nods, and lets folk call him “gravedigger,” because watching it slide off a stranger a third time was worse than the cold. The Scar isn't a number on a sheet. It's a man who has quietly stopped introducing himself.
GM He goes to Hob the sexton — forty years' keeper of that nameless northeast corner — not as the parish, but gravedigger to gravedigger: picks up a billhook (a brush-clearing blade), works the brambles alongside him a while, lets the silence go comfortable, and only then asks it plain. Whose grave is it, Hob?
Denny “Forty years you've kept that corner tidy and never told a soul whose it is. I'm not asking as the parish. I'm asking as the man who'll have your job when you're the one going under it. Whose grave is it?”
rules-eyeA 6−: it goes wrong, and the GM makes a move. Hob won't break — “Don't. I keep it tidy so it stays down. You don't want its name, and you don't want to be the one carrying it round asking. Leave it lie.” — and he flees toward the church, his forty-year fright now loose and hunting for someone to make it stop. No name. But watch the shape of a good miss: it didn't just deny Silas the answer, it hardened the next door. Hob will pour his terror into Parson Cole — exactly the man Silas needs next for the parish records. And look at what Hob let slip by refusing: he never said he doesn't know it. He said don't. There's a name down there, and it's bad enough that a deaf old man has kept it forty years out of fear.
GM Kit spends the days before market not on Gyb — she's Shunned; he'd read her face before she got within ten feet — but on his habits. And she already knows the one that matters, because she watched him do it the night she robbed him: the man kicks his boots off the second he sits, table or no table, like the world owes him the comfort.
Kit “So I don't work hard for this one — I make sure it's seen. I find where he takes his morning ale on market day: the Plough, same corner, same habit as every fat man who's never once had to watch his own back. And I set myself to loiter there, unseen, turned coat ready — so the instant those boots come off and land on that table, in front of God and the green, I can be the one who says it loud before he thinks to laugh it off: a death, or a bitter quarrel, on whoever puts his shoes on the table. Let the crowd do the rest — they've had all season's practice reading ill luck onto somebody. I keep salt in my own pocket in case someone's quick enough to ward it off him. And once the green's decided Gyb's luck has turned ugly — that's when the deeds go walking. Not from my hand, not my mouth; nobody credits the mill-thief. I leave that stack where Wat Coombe can't help but find it, and can't help but read a Collier's name signed shaky under a goat's price.”
She stops at the setting of the trap, because the trap is a market-morning thing and market morning isn't here yet. But look at what the Gremlin has built: no charm, no roll, no lie — just a fat man's own careless habit, a taboo the whole village already believes in, and a truth planted where the one voice they'll still listen to has to trip over it. She's taken the season's weapon — read the ill luck onto somebody — and aimed it back up the hill at the man who's been paying for the fear all along. Whether it fires is next market's business. And next market is the last of these five sittings.
Market day — the day the village always meant to come for the Colliers — and then, on the dark of the moon after it, the last thing left to do. Five sittings' worth of threads all pull tight at once, in one churchyard, around one word cut out of a book a generation ago.
GM Kit, the green is full and the mood is a held breath, and Gyb the miller is in his element — fat, pleased, crowing to anyone who'll listen about being robbed in the night by the same sneaking folk who've cursed the fields, turning even the theft into fuel. By mid-morning he's at his usual corner of the Plough, warm and full, and — sure as sunrise, in front of God and half the parish — he kicks his boots up onto the table. Your moment: unseen in the press, salt in your fist against an aversion, the deeds already planted where Wat Coombe's walk must take him.
Kit (not stepping out, not showing a face — pitching her voice low and hard so it goes sideways into the crowd-noise, from everywhere and nowhere, the way a rumor does) “Shoes on the table… brings a death. Or a bitter quarrel.” (and she's already moving — eyes on the two or three faces near Gyb going from laughing to not-laughing, on any hand that darts for the boots, to knock them to the floor before the omen can set)
rules-eyeA taboo has no roll of its own — you can't work one; you can only arrange the world so a chosen person trips it, which is ordinary play: a Take a Risk to pull it off. And here's the aversion, the folk counter — a sharp-eyed wife next to Gyb lunges to knock the boots to the floor before it can take — but on a hit Whin jams her (a stumbled elbow, “beg pardon, missus”) and the omen sets. The 7–9's cost: one face really did see her hands. Now watch what a set taboo actually pays: Shoes on the Table is a Woe-kind taboo — no condition lands on anyone; instead the GM banks a Blight Woe, the world's ill-will fed by the breach. The ruin that falls on Gyb is the green's own belief that his luck has turned — pure fiction, and it needs no sheet. And notice what the whole campaign just quietly proved: the players aimed every taboo outward — at the profiteer, at the mob — so the backlash never touched them. But even aimed outward, the folk-law arms the world.
Kit (she doesn't go near the evidence a second time — she'd left the stack two days gone under a scrap-sack at Wat's bench, cord run back through the fence, a snare built to spring the wrong way: not to catch, to show) “I find the cord in the crowd-press, feel for the second knot the way I'd feel for a trip-wire in the dark, and when Wat starts his morning walk to his own bench, mug in hand, mind half on the noise from the Plough — I give it one clean pull.”
The sack slides; the deed-stack tips into plain sight in Wat's path, like it's been waiting there all along for him and no one else. He stops. Bends. Reads a Collier's name signed shaking for a goat's price under Gyb's own hand — and Wat's not a shouting man; he just turns, slow, toward the Plough's noise about a miller's bad luck, and holds the paper up: “Somebody best come and look at this.” The two stories fuse exactly the way she built them to: a cursed miller and a thieving one. The mob that woke up meaning to hang charcoal-burners spends its afternoon turning its back on Gyb instead. The Colliers aren't hanged today, or ever, for this. “I built a trap with no name on it,” Whin thinks from the edge of the crowd, unclaimed at her own family's rescue, “and it worked because it has no name on it.” The cost is the one she takes on the chin: a face saw her hands, and this village pulls threads.
GM Denny, the parish records are in the chest in Cole's hall, and Cole's out front working the market — you've the quiet and the time. You pick the old lock the way you open a swollen coffin-seam, patient, not forcing, and you're in, going through the christening leaves — the baptism pages — for the winter a girl was put in the ground unmarked.
rules-eyeA 6−, and the wrongness the roll turns up is worse than a locked door: the page is cut out — a clean knife-line down the gutter, the browning of the cut edges saying it was done a generation back. They didn't just let her be forgotten; someone reached into the parish's own book and scrubbed her out of it, to make sure. The paper will never give up her name. It was made not to. (And a bad miss carries a cost: Cole's step is on the path.)
Denny (he doesn't hide it — he lets Cole walk in and see exactly what he's done) “I broke your lock, Parson; I'll answer for it. But look at this first. Somebody cut a girl clean out of your own book, years back, so no one could ever put a name to what's under the turf in my northeast corner — and it's cost this parish a life every dark of the moon since, because nobody living will say who she was. Come with me to Nan. Gentle it the way only a man in your collar can.”
GM Cole reads the cut, and something in him gives all at once. “I didn't know,” he says — and it's true; the cutting was done a generation before his collar. Whatever he walked in meaning to say, he sets it down. “Show me where. I'll come myself.”
Honesty does, for free, what a Wish once had to buy: it makes Cole see. On Mother Sloe's doorstep it took a charm and a held breath to force his eyes open for one moment; here a cut page and a plain confession do it on their own, and it holds past the moment. The obstacle becomes the accomplice, and nobody spent a die to get him there.
GM Margo, you catch it all from Wat's bench — Gyb going down, the deeds surfacing, and then the gravedigger, gray as ash, bearing down on Bess Rowan's little Nan with a terrible purpose. You get to him three strides before the child.
Margo “Silas. Not like this. Not in front of the whole green, and not to the child first. Whatever you've come to tell them, tell me — I'll see it lands soft.” (and she takes Bess aside, away from every eye already hunting its next uncanny thing, and does the thing she is good at: makes it safe. She doesn't ask Nan to relive anything. She asks the mother, gently, whether the girl ever gave a name.)
rules-eyeThe name the knife couldn't cut out of a nine-year-old — because children aren't afraid of the thing the grown folk can't look at. Nan gives it plainly — “Alys. She keeps trying to tell everyone but they run. The cold lady. Her name's Alys.” — and Cole, ashen, supplies the surname his own book was scrubbed of, like a man confessing his church's oldest sin: Alys Fenn. The whole mystery — the thing that's cost a life a month all season — given up by the one keeper the erasure never thought to check.
And it lands on Aldith Fenn like cold water — because it's her name, the one she chose for herself at the very start of all this and said without looking up. First comes grief, real and sudden, for a girl her own blood turned out to starve and then agreed, as a village, to un-know. Then recognition, which is worse, because it isn't shock: a corner of her grandmother's churchyard never walked on a Sunday; a name started in that house and swallowed before the second syllable, more than once, when she was small enough that nobody thought she'd remember. “Some buried, unlettered part of me has known the shape of this hole in the family a long time,” she thinks, “and picked the name up anyway — the way you'd pick up a stone you already knew was heavy, because somebody had to, and everyone else had put it down a hundred years ago and walked off.” Only a Fenn may have the right, or the power, to lay her down. There are two Fenns left breathing in Nettleden, and one is nine and sorting rowan-berries into a bowl. Which means it's hers.
GM The days before the dark of the moon aren't spent on dread — they're spent on work, the only prayer Silas has ever trusted. He and Cole go to the chest in daylight and Cole writes her back into the book in his own hand beside the knife-cut — Alys Fenn — the first true thing said of her in the parish since the cutting. Silas opens her grave gentle, lays fresh linen where there was none, cuts a plain stone himself and carves her name into it letter by careful letter, and sets by bread and salt — the debt-payment that should have been left the first time and never was. And the dark of the moon comes round.
GM The cold climbs up out of the nameless corner as it did before. But this time they came ready, and this time they have the one thing a generation of warding never did: her name.
rules-eyeIron Over the Door's foul face bars a named being — and for a generation it held only weakly, because no one alive had the name to pin it to. Now Silas says “Alys Fenn” over the cold iron and it holds absolute, for the first time in living memory. The name was the whole mystery; it's also the whole of the charm's power. And notice how he uses it — not to wall her out, which is the very wrong that made her (“barring her is what was done to her the first time”), but to hold her at her own grave for the one rite that lets her leave it for good. (The book has since named the law this Vigil felt its way to — Working Charms on Foes, the ward-gate: the uncanny answer only to the ward their entry names, and the wrong charm gets no purchase however the dice fall. Hers was the threshold-iron — and it held absolute only once it had her name to hold.)
Margo (stopping his spade with a hand on his arm) “Not this part. You've paid plenty already, and paid it clean. But this piece was never yours to spend yourself on — it's blood-owed, and mine's the only blood left standing that can say it and have it mean anything.” (she kneels at the turned earth, a lock of her daughter's hair plaited in her fist, and doesn't dress it up, because dressing it up is what got Alys erased the first time) “Alys Fenn. I know what my blood did to you — turned you out into a starving winter and then agreed, every one of them, to forget you'd ever been born. I'm sorry. Not the way the book's sorry, written after — sorry the way you pay a debt, in full. I've come to take you home. There's room in this family for you now. There's a girl asleep at her aunt's tonight who carries your name and will grow up knowing it. Come in out of the cold, Alys. It's done. You're ours. Go home.”
Margo “And to whatever this working means to take — I know what I'm offering before it asks. Take the eyes, then. I've spent this whole year using them to see through everything but myself. Take it out of me — not my girl, not Silas, not this village that's bled enough. I'm the last grown Fenn. It was always going to be me.”
rules-eyeThe great working is the deepest thing in the rules, and it takes the dice away completely: name the old wrong, earn the charged night and place in play (they did — the recovered name, the unearthed grave, the dark of the moon), then spend an advance and pay a dark toll to match the death you're cheating. It's the one door back from a Scar — here it undoes Silas's and lays a great dead thing to rest in a single rite. And watch what the players did with the open-ended toll: they split the payer from the healed — the rite gave the outsider his name back and cost the kinswoman her sight, because the fiction said the Fenn blood owed it, not the man who'd already given everything. No Vigil could have priced that. They did.
The cold goes out of the corner slowly, like a held breath let go, and doesn't come back. A young woman four generations wronged is named, given her last rites, and buried proper under a stone with her name cut plain — and she's gone. Not barred, not turned aside to take another door, but laid to rest, home at last in the only family left to have her. The New-Moon Banshee won't keen off Harrow Wood again. It cost a gravedigger his name and gave it back; it cost a hedge-wife the sharpest thing she owned, forever; and it was paid, in full, by a woman who never met the girl and shared only a surname she'd picked up blind, because some part of her already knew the weight of it.
GM Epilogue. Three of the village walked out into the dark five sittings ago, each pulled a different way by a different love, and not one of them came back the person who left. The Colliers keep their croft; the chalk is scrubbed off for good, and Gyb the miller wears the season's curse and the reeve's questions (the reeve being the local law) besides. Mother Sloe is let be — feared still, but alive to be feared. And the thing that keened off the treeline has a grave with a name on it.
But Nettleden doesn't forgive being shown its own face. Whin is Shunned still, and somewhere a man remembers a turned coat and a jostled elbow, and threads get pulled. Silas has his name back and can't say what it cost him to lose it without his voice going strange. And Aldith Fenn walks home to her daughter through a green that watched her stand in the witch's doorway and now knows her for kin to the wood's own ghost — the newest open door the fear can knock on, seeing the world a little dimmer than she used to, holding her girl's hand a great deal tighter than the crowd has any reason to notice. The troubles are laid to rest. The village that made them is the same village still. That's the whole of Salt & Thorn, set down as it happened: the old charms are real, they cut both ways, and the debt always, always comes.
Five sittings, twenty-nine beats, one seed (20260718). Every die above was really rolled and nothing was smoothed for the telling. The run was played under the Reckoning as it stood then; the rules have since moved to doubles, so the log is a record of that night rather than something today's engine would deal again. Here's the rules signal the play threw off: not bugs, but the shape the system takes in real hands.
Put the plainest way: three players who wouldn't play the same game at all were each handed, by the one thing they loved, a different corner of the same old wrong — and between them they spent a name, a sense, and a standing to set it right, and the village they saved is the same village still. The charms were real. They cut both ways. The debt came.
Since this was played (set down 2026-07-20) — the playtest did its job. Within hours the taboo system grew the teeth these findings asked for: taboos that wound, aversions you can roll to snatch, and gathering dooms that tally a village's dread on a clock. The engine learned to write a toll on another's sheet (addScar — the primitive this finale had to improvise), the book has since named the ward-gate the graveside rite leaned on, and the catalog has grown to 68 charms and 36 taboos — including a whole tranche against the witch this village so badly wanted to find. The debt still comes; there is simply more folklore to owe it on.
The same cold green, the same three days to market — but this Vigil opens by asking, not by walking in on a speech already spoken, and leans hard on the charms whenever a question needs a truer answer than a person can give.
Everything below is a construction, not a second night with the same Vigil — an illustrative pass over that identical morning, deliberately charm-heavy and player-driven, run off its own seed (226) so every number is real. It sits beside the canonical run above; it is not part of the single-seed playtest the findings are drawn from.
GM Nettleden, cold and bright, three days off market. Wat Coombe's bench has a crowd round it, and the crowd has one word in its mouth: Colliers. What do you want to know?
Denny (to the bench, not the Vigil) “Four dead in my ground in one season, and every one of you says the wood took them. Took them how? What did folk hear, the nights they went?”
GM (as Gyb the miller, who's been waiting all morning to be asked) “A keening.” He says it the way you'd hand a child a coal to hold. “A woman's cry, off the treeline — only ever on the dark of the moon, when there's no light to see by and no wind to carry it. Starts thin. Then it climbs. And come the morning there's your body, in its own bed, not a mark on it — cold clean through, and the face gone wrong, like the fright of the sound stopped the heart before the cold could get there.” (lower, savoring the hush he's made) “Began the very winter the Colliers came up from wherever it is they came from. Make of that what you will. Everyone else on this green has.”
GM (as Wat, and the bench goes quiet) “My boy was the first. I heard it come, and I heard it go, and I lost him in between. I'll not need it explained to me.”
rules-eyeThis is exposition the Vigil pulled, and it comes out of NPC mouths, not the narrator's. One plain question, and the village hands over the true shape of the horror — a keen off the treeline, the unmarked dead — welded to the false story stitched onto it (and it began when the Colliers came), both in the same breath, from the same man. Telling the real omen from the aimed lie is the whole game; here the GM voiced two villagers and narrated none of it. When your world has a mouth of its own, let it do the explaining.
Open spare and the Vigil's first move is to orient itself — so the ground gets laid before a single die: it isn't wolves and it isn't winter fever, it's a death-cry with no killer behind it. Gyb tells it half like a fireside ghost-story, because to him it very nearly is one — the dread that's quietly driving the Colliers' scrap of land into his hands, cheap. Wat tells it in two sentences that shut the whole bench up. Same keening; one man feeding on it, one man gutted by it — and the players have the shape of the thing without the GM ever stepping out from behind a villager to say it.
Margo (to Wat, gentle, after that) “That boy of yours — I remember him. What was he to you, before the grief went hard? Before he was the first name on all of this?”
GM (turning it back on her) You tell me, Aldith — you've drawn the fever out of half the children on this green. What was he to you?
Margo “...One of the ones I didn't reach in time to matter. I remember which bed.”
Denny “And my own father's in that ground — I dug his bed myself, two seasons past. Same row as the winter's dead? Same way they all went?”
GM Same row, same way, and every one of them in the ground you keep. You've known that longer than anyone on this green — you've just never had cause to say it aloud.
Kit “And who on that green actually knows I'm as good as Collier blood myself?”
GM Nobody says it to your face. But Wat's dead boy used to run messages between here and their hut — and grief has a long memory for who a dead child loved.
rules-eyeNotice there's no die anywhere in that exchange either. Asking a straight question and getting a straight answer — sometimes turned back on the asker — is a GM move with nothing behind it but honesty. It's cheaper than a roll and does more work: three questions just planted a grave, a debt, and a bloodline into the same green the dice haven't touched yet.
This is the version of Session 0 where the Vigil writes the village before anyone reaches for a charm. Nobody asked “what happens next” — they asked “what's true,” and the GM just told them. Watch how much darker the ground gets before a single d6 is picked up.
GM Say the tie plain, then — the one thing each of you would risk everything for.
Margo “Mother Sloe. A debt with no price ever named on it.”
Denny “My dead. Four rows, one season, and I mean to know why it was ours.”
Kit “The Colliers. When the mob comes, it comes for mine.”
Margo “Before I put a word to that crowd I want to know what I'm walking into. Hag stone to my eye, on Wat, on the whole chalked feeling over them — is there an uncanny hand steering this, or is it only people being afraid?”
rules-eyeObservance met — stone in hand — so Old Ways adds its +1, and 11 is a clean 10+: the charm answers in full. No glamour on Wat, no laid trail, no hand behind the fear. Just people. No six on these dice, so the Reckoning doesn't move at all this time — a full-strength answer, for once, at no cost.
Aldith gets the truth she asked for, full-strength this time, and it still buys her nothing to act on. “So it's only people,” she says, flat. Knowing the fear is honest doesn't make it any less dangerous.
Denny (stepping into the middle of Wat's talk, low and even) “Four of ours are in my ground since the thaw, and not one died with a Collier's hand on it. Wait for market day. Don't carry this to their door on a rumor.”
rules-eyeSway is Silas's dump stat, and a 6 is a clean miss on any move. The GM gets to make a move of their own here — the crowd doesn't scatter, doesn't even quiet. It hardens. That's the setback this Vigil is now carrying into everything that follows.
GM Nobody drifts off toward the churchyard end of the green this time. Wat doesn't so much as look at him — the calm voice just told a frightened crowd to wait, and a frightened crowd does not want to be told to wait. The gravedigger tried the quiet play and the room stayed loud.
Margo “Then I want more than is — I want what's coming. Tea leaves, settled and read, right here, for the Colliers. What does the shape in the cup say is bearing down on that hut?”
GM The leaves settle wrong — a shape you don't like, half-formed, the kind that wants a price before it'll finish itself.
Margo (working the cup anyway) “I don't stop for that. ‘Take the taste of it, then,’ I say under my breath, to whatever's listening, ‘the sweetness gone out of every cup I ever read again — so long as this one reads true.’ And I finish the working.”
rules-eyeOne die comes up a bare 1 — a false or spoiled omen in the making — so Aldith strikes a Bargain: she names a price the GM takes (every cup she ever reads again, a little less sweet) and the 1 flips to a 6. That bought six is a real six for every purpose after, including the Reckoning — so this single charm marks the track twice, not once. Her track jumps straight from 0 to 2 of 4. The Bargain gets paid twice, same as it always does: the price now, in the fiction, and a mark banked toward the debt later.
She gets her omen — true, sharp, and aimed right at the Colliers' hut — and gives up a small permanent pleasure to buy it clean instead of leaving it half-spoiled. It costs her nothing she needs today. The track doesn't care that it was a fair trade.
Denny “If she's reading what's coming, I want to know what's already here.” (lifting his own hag stone toward the wood, working it grim and quick) “Hag stone to my eye. What's actually out past that treeline tonight?”
rules-eyeNo Old Ways for Silas — that knack belongs to the Hedgewise, not the Gravedigger — so it's a bare +1 Wits. Still a clean 10+. One six in the dice means one mark: his track climbs from 0 to 1 of 4. The debt isn't the charm-worker's alone; it belongs to anyone in the Vigil who works the old craft.
GM He doesn't say what he sees out there. He just goes quiet in a way his neighbors have learned to read as worse than shouting.
A hit is a hit — Silas gets a true answer, same as Aldith did with the leaves. What he does with it is off the table for now; the charm only promises the truth, not comfort. And the debt doesn't care whose knack is missing: one six is one mark on his track, same as it would be on hers.
Kit (watching the magpies wheel over the green, counting under her breath, the old rhyme running) “One for sorrow — I want to know whose. If this fear's got to land on somebody today, the magpies can tell me who it should actually land on.”
rules-eyeWhin's knack is From Cover, a harm bonus, not a roll bonus — so it's a clean +2 Wits and nothing else, still enough for a 10+. One six marks her track from 0 to 1 of 4. Three charm-workers, three separate debts, all climbing the same cold morning.
GM The count lands on Gyb — not Wat, not the crowd, the fat man at Wat's shoulder who's been buying frightened land cheap. Whin says nothing of it yet. She only remembers it.
The Gremlin didn't ask is there sorrow coming — she asked whose, and the charm hands her a name instead of a feeling. Watch who she's already circling before the others have even picked a target: not the mob, the man who's been profiting from it.
Margo (slipping away from the bench while the others talk, a loaf still warm under her shawl) “I don't knock. I set it on the Colliers' step, where they'll find it and no one on the green will see me leave it.”
No charm, no die — just a woman putting bread where a family with a chalk mark on their door can find it. It's the smallest move anyone makes all morning and it costs her the most: if anyone on that green turns and sees her, the Hedgewise is a Collier-lover before noon.
Margo “Whin's magpies said Gyb. I believe them.” (turning the hag stone on him now, deliberate, not hiding it this time) “Let's see who actually profits every time a neighbor gets frightened off their land.”
rules-eyeBoxcars — both dice land on six, and every six marks the Reckoning, so this one charm adds two at once. Aldith's track was sitting at 2; this pushes it to 4 of 4, and a full track tips right there at the table: a Ken Wish lands on her, and a matching Ken Woe banks to the GM, and the track resets to 0. She gets the clearest answer of the whole morning — Gyb's hand is all over the fear, plain as the ledger he keeps hidden — and the debt she's been building since the second roll comes due in the very same breath.
This is the whole shape of the system in one working: the truer the charm, the harder the debt bites, and Aldith just bought the sharpest truth of the day and the Reckoning's whole bill in the same handful of dice. She doesn't flinch. She's been spending toward this since Read the Leaves.
GM Wat hears “Gyb” pass between the three of you — not loud, but not quiet enough — and something in the crowd's mood finally finds a direction to run in. One of the drink-brave men off Wat's bench shoves forward at the Collier boy sent out for water.
Denny “Not today.” (already moving, spade left behind, putting himself in the gap)
rules-eyeA 4 on a Trade Blows to-hit is a clean miss — half a step too slow. The GM's move lands instead of Silas's: the shove that was aimed at the Collier boy catches the gravedigger, who put himself in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong speed.
GM He doesn't go down. It's one open hand off a drunk man's shoulder, not a fist — but it's enough to knock the wind sideways and put him on one knee in front of the whole green.
rules-eye1 harm − 0 armor = 1 rung. No Scar, nothing near Dying — just Hurt, the first mark on a sheet that was clean a moment ago. Note what this beat doesn't do: neither the miss on Take a Risk nor the miss on Trade Blows moves the Reckoning by so much as a box. Only a charm-six ever feeds that debt.
Kit (already easing back from the knot around Silas, unhurried, the coat's collar already half-turned) “I've got what I came for. I go find Gyb before dusk finishes — and I don't knock either.”
GM The light goes long and gold and then gray, and a small shape in a turned coat slips off toward the mill. Hold that thought. That's the sitting.
GM Noon bell, and the green is still standing — nobody hanged, nobody hunted down, and a great deal more known than the morning started with.
Aldith — Reckoning: 0 → 4 → tipped (a Ken Wish to her, a Ken Woe to the GM) → reset to 0
Silas — Reckoning: 1
Whin — Reckoning: 1
Compare the two mornings. The canonical run spent two rolls and left the green with a reprieve and a secret nobody had caught yet. This one spends seven — five of them charms — and buys a whole Reckoning cycle, a name for the man actually profiting, and a rung of harm on the man who tried to stop the mob with his voice instead of his charm. Lean on the charms and the charms answer — but the debt they're built on doesn't wait for a good reason to come due.