Daniel (@dungeondive) takes Harlan Peters out of Hoffen for the first time. The hook is the Layer of the Mother side quest pulled from Folklore: The Affliction’s Rumours deck — a woodcutter’s family snatched by the fae after a sacred grove was felled. Reya the half-Shou shaman travels along as utility (healing only, no separate combat tracking).
The session demonstrates the abstracted travel system: four hexes per leg, then a Pixel Loot Overland Travel card resolves how many hours that leg cost. Over twelve hours triggers rations + a forced encounter; under twelve allows a free travel action (search, repair, hunt, or “stop and smell the flowers” — a 100-question character-introspection oracle). The first leg lands on a road encounter rolled from Scarlet Heroes — a jiang-shi hopping-vampire procession led by a Taoist priest. A standard combat would kill Harlan outright, so the encounter is rerouted via the NPC reaction table into a tense pass-by, planting a story hook for later. Night brings a doppelgänger trying to swap places with Reya. Stop-and-smell rolls Harlan a new flaw: trust issues.
Daniel imposes a clever urban/wilderness tax: every week away from the cult investigation, the Slaves of the Judging Cloud bank a victory point for free.
Does rerouting an unwinnable encounter through reaction tables — instead of running combat or fleeing — preserve the danger of solo play, or does it quietly defang the dice?