The Beast Above Aldwyn

Aldwyn is a hill town that lives off the high summer pastures above it. This season something came down out of the crags and took the sheep, and then it took Bertran, the shepherd who worked the highest slopes. No flock will climb now, the good grass sits empty, winter is doing the arithmetic, and the elders have scraped together a bounty they can barely afford.

You take it. There is one road up that mountain. Bertran's daughter Nella has walked every foot of it since she could walk at all, and she asks to come with you.

If you have never done this before, start here

This is the front door, and it was built to be one. One town, one road, one mountain — you should never be sitting there wondering what you are supposed to do next, because the world points at the next thing every time. Along the way you will do everything this game asks of you: talk to someone who knows more than you do, take a job, bring someone along, follow what you find, get past a problem a sword does not solve, roll dice when it actually matters, and finish a story you started. That is the whole loop, once, cleanly. An hour from now you will know how to play.

You type what you would actually do, in your own words. There is no menu to learn and no rulebook to read first.

Before you start

You start at level 2, and you should finish around level 3 — one honest step of growth, not a treadmill. You make your own character and choose everything about who they are; the module decides how strong they begin, so the adventure and the character always match. You and Nella make two — if you want a third, ask someone in town. Asking is a real move here, not a menu option. It runs about an hour, in one sitting.

Aldwyn does not stop when you walk back down the mountain. Stay, and the village keeps living and changing around you, day by day. But it was built small, for this one story — when you want more than that, there is another world in the catalog, or a whole one of your own to raise.

Faces you'll know on sight