Bottled Memory

You have the lease on a small perfumery for one year. Four times — once a season — somebody comes through the door and asks you for something that is not a smell: a room, a week, a person, or a thing they have decided to stop carrying. You go out and buy what you can afford, you choose three materials, and you write down why each one belongs. Then you roll to find out whether you understood them.

The writing is the roll. Before you touch the dice you write one line for each of your three materials, saying why it belongs in this commission and not in general. Three lines you believe earns 3d6, keep the highest two. One reach and you roll a flat 2d6. Two reaches and you roll 3d6 and keep the lowest two. The system can tell when you are blending from your board instead of for your client, because you just told it.

The tracker is a rack of test strips. Thirty-six real materials — bergamot, orris root, hay absolute, oakmoss, labdanum — sit in Top, Heart and Base columns. Sourcing one inks its strip; every blend fills a pip; the third pip strikes it through and it is gone until you can buy it again. Six sources sell at six different prices, and only the Flower Fields will sell you a heart. By winter the board is a record of a year, in the shape of the year.

What is in the book:

• A d66 Commission Oracle — 36 requests in the client's own words, from bottle my mother's kitchen to something for a stranger; I will never know if it worked - Three d6 client tables: who is standing there, what they will not say, and what they leave on your counter to work from
• Six sources with 36 materials between them, each with what it actually smells of — you need no knowledge of perfume at all
• A five-result Accord table where two outcomes pay a full fee and only one of them is the scent that was ordered
• Four seasonal batch sheets, each with its own Cellar Night reflection space
• A Memory Vial log, a waiting list, a cellar of things still macerating, and a Closing Night page where your first client's request walks back in - A worked example of play, a one-page quick reference, and three variants including a two-player version on one shared board

24 designed pages, A4 and US Letter, in two separate PDFs. One six-sided die, a pen, and about forty minutes a batch.