The Toll Road

Put this road between two places your party already has to travel between, and the trip becomes the session. The road is older than the kingdom it runs through, and over time it grew six things that collect from whoever uses it.

Each of them shows up first through what it leaves behind. There's a posted list of rates with no tollhouse anywhere near it, a milestone that reads a different distance on the way back, and a fresh grave with a living person's name cut into the stone. The six run from CR 1 to CR 9, one for each job a fight needs: a brute, a skirmisher, a stalker, a warden, a voice, and the calamity that is the road itself. They share one place and one cause, so they play as linked problems and a short arc. Even the CR 1 Ford-Hound stays useful late, since it goes after your crossing and can still turn a river against a fifteenth-level party.

Every creature has one weakness, and it's an errand. Read the right name off a walking cairn, pay the ford before you cross it, or settle a two-hundred-year-old debt at the bridge, and the fight changes, sometimes completely. Each place on the road has a feature a fight can turn, and the hooks and the three-session arc tie everything to one problem, a town gone quiet because a mile of road stopped going there.

WHAT'S INSIDE

• 6 original creatures with full 2024 stat blocks, CR 1 to 9, one per encounter role
• Lair and terrain notes for the five places along the road
• 6 adventure hooks and a connected three-session arc
• A sign for every creature, to foreshadow it before the party meets it
• Illustrated throughout in the house ink-and-wash etching style
• Screen edition plus a plain-white table edition, US Letter, and the full text as plain text for VTT import.
• Bookmarked PDF with no lock on it.

Compatible with the 2024 rules for fifth edition. Includes material from the SRD 5.2 by Wizards of the Coast LLC under CC-BY-4.0. Full statement in the PDF. Unaffiliated with Wizards of the Coast.

Every creature here was built with the six-step method from The Monster Workbook, and the Tollgrim, that book's own worked example, gets its finished stat block in these pages. Tables Vol. II, Monster Motives & Tactics, can run any of the six once the talking stops.

We'll Pick Up Next Week, the free letter: sleepersartifice.substack.com