Party Continues to Avoid Region with Completed Map

"Whatever you do, don't take them through the Saltmarket," the GM said, unrolling a map nobody had requested, with street names nobody would read.

For the measurement desk's purposes, this is a clean test. Since session four I have logged every district the party enters, counted once per session per character present, and divided by sessions held. Call it district entries per session, the denominator is sessions, not characters, because a party that splits up has not gone two places, it has merely argued in two places. Over eleven sessions the eastern quarter has returned a value of 0.0. The three streets the party actually walks returned 4.7, 4.1, and 3.6 respectively, and two of those are the same street turning around.

Meanwhile the eastern quarter has been redrawn four times. It now contains a herring auction with procedural rules, a sewer guild with a fee schedule, a tax code for a district with no residents the party has met, and eleven named inhabitants, four of whom have opinions about the party. At session nine the GM added weather. The party had seen weather.

"The map is finished," the GM told the table, in the tone of someone announcing a hostage had been released. "Now you have somewhere not to go."

The players' route has contracted accordingly. Session ten was a tavern, a market, and the tavern. Session eleven was the tavern twice, once deliberately. When asked why they keep returning, the party's rogue, who has memorized the Saltmarket's entire named population and can name the guildmaster of a guild the party has never visited, said that the tavern is central.

Ada Rourke, quoted more often than she is invited, offered the procedural ruling everyone has now adopted: a region enters play the moment it is inked, and play that does not reach it is a scheduling matter, not a cartographic one. The GM has posted the ruling. It is pinned.

Attempts to move the plot east have failed in ways worth logging. Session seven's missing courier was posted to a box on Dock Street; the party hired a second courier to collect the first. Session eight's hostage note was slid under the tavern door, the party read it aloud there and then held the meeting in the same room. At session ten the GM placed a shop the rogue needed inside the quarter, on the theory that appetite beats aversion. The rogue sent a letter. The shop sent prices. The transaction was conducted entirely by post, which the GM recorded in his notes as the party visiting.

Uncertainty, as always: the sample is eleven sessions, the party is five people, and one member has twice suggested "doing the map thing" as an evening's activity, which would count as an entry if it happened. The claim that the party will never enter the eastern quarter is therefore retired, not asserted. What can be said is narrower and, by the desk's standards, firm: the region has more named inhabitants than the party has met in nine sessions combined, and the campaign's total travel now fits on three streets.

"Nobody is lost," the GM said, rolling the map up from the far edge first, so the eastern quarter disappears last. "That's the problem."