The Far Post

You run the post office at the foot of the range. Four towns depend on you: Millhaven by the mill, Brackenford at the ford, Highcairn over Kestrel Pass and Greywater on the lake. Between them sit huts, a quarry, a copper mine and a ferry, fifteen places joined by eighteen legs of road, track, forest, river, pass and scree.

Each season three delivery cards come in. A wedding cake for Millhaven in two days. Blasting caps for the quarry, Fragile. A doctor's bag for Highcairn that only goes to a courier the village trusts. You load what fits in your pack, plan a route on the map and walk it leg by leg, rolling a pool of d6 against the terrain and the weather. Fail a leg and the mishap table decides: a lost day, a ford running too high to cross, a snapped strap, a cake that won't survive the fall.

There is no combat. The mountains, the deadlines and the upkeep are the whole fight. Writing is optional. Every table gives a one-line result, and the short questions on some lines can be answered in a word or ignored.

• Four skills (Pathfinding, Packing, Haggling, Mending) rank up when your rolls fail, or with lessons you pay for at the Post.
• Coin pays the upkeep. Miss it twice and the Post closes.
• Reputation with each town fades if you skip it for a season. Three towns at 2 after season twelve earn you the Grand Delivery: the Charter, all four towns, one trip, ten days.

What's in the book (45 pages)

• Eight pages of rules and a worked trip
• The route map, every leg and its difficulty, and the districts
• 36 delivery cards to cut out, or roll for with two dice
• Courier sheet, trip sheet, gear, upkeep and a ledger
• Weather for four seasons, terrain mishaps, breakdowns and roadside sights
• A page for each town, twelve season logs, the Grand Delivery, four endings and a two-page quick reference

You need five or six d6 and a pencil. A trip takes fifteen to twenty minutes and a full run is four to six evenings. The rules were checked over 5,000 simulated runs: about three in five reach the Grand Delivery, about one in five goes bankrupt, and no starting skill wins more often than the others.