The Town

The square

The tavern is one building on a small square, and the way in works both ways: go out through it and you're standing in the town. It isn't big. Four buildings and a stall, which is three more than most villages a party passes through and twice as many as most of them deserve.

Press a building to go in. Every door opens onto something, with one honest exception: the guild hall isn't locked, it just isn't yours until you're in a guild. Press it without one and you're told whose it is — and offered a look round the vacant hall next door, furnished and waiting for whoever founds the next one.

The forge

Bick is the smith. He's at the forge by day and at the tavern counter of an evening. Tue, his apprentice, is at the forge always, six years into seven and trusted with the fire when the smith is out. Whatever you'd ask Bick, you can ask Tue when Bick isn't there.

Press whichever of them is in:

• See what is on the rack — helms, mail, shields, blades and the rest of the metal, for sale. Each piece shows what it does in the cellar before you buy it.
• Have something mended — everything you wear down the cellar wears as it's played, and stays worn between trips. A blow wears what it lands on, a fumble wears what's in your hand, and dying breaks the lot. The rack lists every piece of yours that needs work, across all your characters, with the price beside each. Mend one, or Mend all of it.
• Sell to Bick (or Tue) — old arms and armour, out of the chest or the pack of any of your characters, but never what somebody's wearing. Every piece shows what he'd pay before anything goes; the first press turns Sell into Hand it over, and only the second sells. A piece he won't take says why.

The dog is Bick's, in that the dog is his. He spends his days with whoever is about, his evenings under Alder's chair in the tavern, and goes home to sleep and when it rains.

Mercer's stall

Mercer is in one place or the other. By day, when the weather will let cloth be laid out, he's at the stall in the square. At night, or when it rains, blows, fogs or snows, he packs up and comes into the tavern, and the stall stands bare with a board chalked on it. Indoors he sells from the pack he carried in.

Press him in the tavern and his menu has four things on it: Take a look, Barter, Stand a drink and Talk (he has nothing to say yet). Barter opens his stall, and the stall holds everything he deals in:

• On the boards — what he unpacked today. Pick a thing up to look at it before you pay.
• Ask to see his book — everything else, on its Buy tab, a section at a time, picked from the list at the top. Press any entry to see it before you pay. Clothes, rings, cloaks and oddments, and then the cellar's: Potions, Things to throw and Sundries, straight into your pack.
• Sell, the tab beside Buy at the top of his book — tails, wings, fangs and shell, from the cellar. He'll also take back the sort of thing he sells — the shirt you started in, a ring you've gone off — that the forge won't. Same rule as the forge: never what's being worn.

In the square, the stall is the same stall.

Between the forge and Mercer there's a buyer for everything in your chest. No piece is bought at both counters, and none is left with nobody.

What it costs

Coppers, all of it. Coppers covers where they come from; the short answer is that the cellar pays, and the forge and Mercer are where it gets spent and sold back.