GM Completes Tax Code for Optional Village, Central NPC Still Nameless

The notice taped to the head of the table ran to nine points and closed with a comment period that expired at session start. Beneath it sat four single-spaced pages: the complete fiscal code of Weller's Crossing, a hamlet of eleven households that the campaign map itself marks as optional.

Section One covers the grain tithe, ten percent in season, fifteen in blight, with the reeve's discretion noted in the margin twice. Section Two levies a toll on the east bridge that the party has never crossed. Section Three, headed "On the Assessment of Cattle Newly Acquired From Adventurers," occupies a page and a half.

(logged 19:42) The GM presented the document as a finished object, which it is. Eleven households have names, trades, and disputed boundaries. The reeve has a mother, a mother-in-law, and an opinion about turnips.

The contact scheduled for tomorrow's session does not have a name. On the prep sheet he is listed as "guy at the door," a role, not a person, and he is the reason the party is meeting anywhere at all.

"We'll know it when he speaks," the GM said, when a player asked what to call him.

"You know the reeve's tax year," the player said, "but not the door."

Public comment on the code lasted four minutes. One player noted that the party's established route bypasses Weller's Crossing entirely and that the encounter it funds may never be visited. The comment was received, read into the record, and filed. The GM observed that reserve assets appreciate quietly, and that a village is only optional until someone asks about the bridge toll.

Ada Rourke, who files procedural rulings on tabletop matters the way a building inspector files violations, offered a standard: "A tax code is not prep until it can be audited." The document, she added, could be audited. The door contact could not.

From the kitchen, where the game's sound carries better than its logic, housemate Ada Gable asked one question of the session and did not take it back: "What's the door man's name?" The table went quiet in the way tables do when a cheap question has found an expensive answer.

Tessa Caldwell, who runs the backchannel where this table's campaigns get discussed between sessions, reported that Weller's Crossing has begun appearing in other groups' plans, not as a destination, but as a cautionary example of a GM whose hamlet is worth more than his party's destination. She declined to say which side of the comparison she meant.

(logged 21:15) Work continued after the players left. A levy on spilled ale was added. Appendix C, on the reeve's succession, was begun.

The stranger at the door arrives tomorrow. His sheet has a class, a motive, and a disposition toward the party. It does not have a name, because the name is, per the campaign ledger, "to emerge from the bylaws," and the bylaws are still in public comment. The grain tithe, by contrast, was ratified 4–1, with one abstention on the matter of cattle.

Weller's Crossing remains unbuilt, unvisited, and fully funded.