The White Silence
An Expansion for the Black Meridian
North of the last survey stake there is fur enough to buy a state, cold enough to close an account, and a quiet so large it has opinions. The Company calls it inventory. The trappers call it the White Silence. Neither name has been accepted.
Go NorthRequires the Gravesmoke core rules
Chapter I — The Pitch
The Black Meridian ends at a line of spruce so dark it reads as a wall, and most people have the sense to treat it as one. Past it lies the fur country: the trapline kingdoms, the frozen posts of the Harrow Bay Company, the drowned mines of the Shield, and a silence that has been getting closer to the fires every winter for nine years. This book is about going up there anyway, on purpose, for money.
The White Silence is an expansion about work. Trappers, hunters, skinners, smiths, and the fur trade that turns frozen misery into silver — the new Trades system makes professions a load-bearing part of your character, with pelts to grade, gear to forge, and prices to argue. Around that living, the book builds the country that makes it dangerous: six regions ranked by how likely they are to keep you, full exploration and weather rules where the cold itself is the oldest monster in the book, and a complete Delve procedure for crawling into the mines, ice caves, and buried company cellars that honest people bricked up for honest reasons.
The horror is not the North. The horror is the arithmetic. Per the core book's law and the Land Remembers' example: the peoples of the north country are not the monsters here, and nothing in this book stats a real nation, being, or ceremony — the Sable Lake people, the Silence, and every rite in these pages are inventions of the Black Meridian. The monsters are the Company's ledgers, the rendering fires, the waste piles of skinned carcasses, the expeditions that went up proud, and the cold that collects on all of it. If your table brings real northern cultures in, do the reading and treat them as living neighbors, not weather.
Everything up here is a transaction, and the ledger is older than the Company's. Take a pelt, leave a courtesy. Take a life, leave a use for all of it. Take more than the line can bear, and the line starts taking back — quietly at first, a trap sprung empty, a cache gone sour, a partner who walked out for wood and came back almost right. The Silence is not empty. It is a creditor with excellent records and no fixed schedule of collection.
Chapter II — The North Country
Every region below carries a Tier, from I to IV. A region's Tier sets the target numbers for survival up here — foraging, navigation, enduring the weather — and tells the Guide how hard to lean on the events tables. Tier I wants your money. Tier IV wants the rest.
| Tier | Forage / Navigate TN | Weather Roll | Events |
|---|---|---|---|
| I — Charted | 6 / 6 | 1d12 each day | Travel Events only |
| II — The Margin | 8 / 8 | 1d12, weather lingers 1d3 days | Travel Events; Deep White on a 6 |
| III — Deep White | 10 / 10 | 1d12 with a Bane's pessimism — roll twice, Guide keeps the worse | Travel Events and Deep White Events daily |
| IV — The Hush | 12 / 12 | The weather is a character. The Guide plays it. | Deep White Events only. There is no ordinary day. |
The last chain of posts, forts, and river towns with mail service and a hanging judge on circuit. Fort Harrow anchors it. Every lantern on the Line is kept lit all winter by Company ordinance, and the ordinance does not say what the lanterns are for, and nobody has ever asked twice.
It holds: the prices, the scrip, and the only warm beds for four hundred miles.Timber without end, snowed to the shoulders, veined with traplines that pass down through families like debts. Sound behaves badly in it: an axe two valleys over lands beside your ear, and a voice beside your ear arrives from two valleys over. Trappers navigate by blaze marks, and repaint them yearly, because something repaints them wrong.
It holds: the fur. All the fur you could ever bleed for.A granite plate scraped bare by old ice, pocked with the Company's dead mines and things older than the Company's charter. This is delve country: Shaft Nine, the Ice Church, the Bone Cellar, and forty diggings with boards over their mouths and prayers painted on the boards. The moonstone up here comes out of the ground already cold in a way smelters cannot fix.
It holds: everything that was buried, in both senses.The one pass through the ice mountains, walked single-file between avalanche slopes that answer loud noises and, occasionally, quiet ones. Cairns line the trail, one for every party the Throat kept. Travelers add a stone going in and take one coming out, so the Throat can see at a glance who still owes.
It holds: the way through. Its arithmetic on tolls is nonnegotiable.Tundra and lake-ice to the horizon, polished by wind until the ground shows your reflection walking under you, slightly behind, catching up. The white bears out here are the honest hazard. The reflections are the dishonest one. Sun-blind travelers report a low green light that leads to shelter; about half of them are ever seen again, and those ones stop reporting it.
It holds: the horizon, and it is farther than it looks by exactly one day, always.Nobody agrees where it starts. You know you are in it when your own footsteps stop making sound and the cold stops hurting, which the old hands will tell you is the Silence being polite before dinner. Compasses spin, fires burn white and give no heat, and the Company pays a standing bounty of one thousand silver for a verified map of any part of it. The bounty has been claimed twice. Both maps were of somewhere else, drawn in the claimant's handwriting, which the claimants deny to this day.
It holds: whatever it has taken. It is not holding it for ransom. It is just holding it.A fur charter older than most nations it outbids, cousin to the charter cities of the Gaslight Charter and creditor to half the Combine's board. Its factors buy every pelt north of the Meridian at prices set in a boardroom that has never seen snow, and it pays in scrip. Company men do not say the Silence is growing. Company men say yield in the outer districts is trending downward, and they say it while checking the window.
They keep: the books. The books are the only map the Company trusts, which is the whole problem.Voyageurs, free trappers, and river families who haul by canoe and sledge, sing to keep time and keep courage, and sell to whoever pays silver instead of paper. The Company calls them poachers. They call the Company a fence with a flag. Their brigade songs name every rapid, every portage, and every place you do not stop singing, and the songs are updated more often than the Company's charts.
They keep: the rivers, the songs, and the grudge. All three run deep.The nation of the north country, kin in old covenant to the Bitterroot nations of the Land Remembers, who have kept the manners of this land since before fur had a price. They trade with the Brigades, tolerate the Line, and post no warnings about the Hush because, as one of their wardens told a Company surveyor, warnings are for things that might not happen. Their trappers take less than the line can bear, every year, without exception, and the North has noticed which fires it leaves alone.
They keep: the manners. The North extends them credit accordingly.Poachers organized into something with meetings: strip crews who take every pelt on a line in one ruinous season, render what is left for tallow and glue, and move on before the country can answer. They are efficient, they are financed by parties unnamed in three cities, and they are the reason the Tallow Man walks. They know this. They have priced it in.
They keep: nothing. That is the business model, and the North has begun issuing corrections.| d12 | Rumor |
|---|---|
| 1 | The Company is paying triple for white fox this season and will not say why it wants them alive. |
| 2 | Shaft Nine has been unbricked. Nobody at the fort will say by which side of the bricks. |
| 3 | A Free Brigade came down the river singing a song with a verse nobody taught them, about a portage nobody knows. |
| 4 | The Widow's Line is still producing. Prime pelts, every trap, every week. The widow has not rebaited it in two years. |
| 5 | A Tallow Ring crew went silent in the Black Spruce. Their camp was found rendered. The kettles were full. |
| 6 | The lanterns on the Line went out for one full minute last month, all of them, together. The Company docked the lamplighters' pay. |
| 7 | A Sable Lake warden bought every fishhook at the post, paid in old silver, and advised the factor, kindly, to winter elsewhere. |
| 8 | Something has been adding stones to the cairns in the White Throat. The count is now higher than the number of lost parties. |
| 9 | A survey expedition is offering foolish wages for guides into the Glass Barrens. Their last guide came back alone, rich, and mute by choice. |
| 10 | The ice on Sable Lake froze clear as glass this year. Fishermen have stopped looking down. |
| 11 | The Company factor at Fort Harrow keeps a second ledger he weighs every night. Just weighs it. It is getting heavier. |
| 12 | The Hush moved. Ask the trapline families that used to be four days outside it what they are now. You will need a shovel and a good reason. |
“The Company measures the North in pelts per season. The North measures the Company in seasons per man. Both sets of books balance, eventually.”— A Free Brigade steersman, counting paddles out of habit
Chapter III — New Rules: The Trades
The Trades are professions: a second track of advancement that runs beside your Calling, open to every character in any Gravesmoke campaign. A gunfighter who cannot skin a beaver starves up here exactly as fast as a skinner who cannot shoot — the North is refreshingly even-handed about it.
Each Trade is held at a Rank: Hand +1 Journeyman +2 Master +3. Your Rank adds to every roll the Trade covers: 2d6 + Attribute + Rank vs. Target Number
Every character may take one Trade at Hand rank for free at creation — the work you did before the story found you. Further Ranks are bought in downtime with a teacher, a season of practice, and coin: 25 silver to reach Hand, 100 to reach Journeyman, 300 to reach Master. A character may hold any number of Trades, but may only advance one per season. Masters are rare, employable anywhere on the Line, and worth robbing, which is the traditional retirement notice.
In any settlement, a week of downtime plying a Trade earns 1d6 silver × Rank, no roll needed. Rolling 2d6 + Attribute + Rank vs. 10 against the local Tier's appetite for trouble can double it — on Snake Eyes, the job goes wrong in a way that becomes an adventure, which is the Guide's wage.
Why professions, in a horror game? Because the pelt in your pack is a reason to be out past the lanterns, the forge is a reason the town needs you alive, and the debt at the Company store is a reason you cannot simply leave — and the core book was very clear that every town needs one of those. The Trades exist to make the money matter, so that the North can charge you properly for it.
The Guide's ledger. Trade rolls are honest work, and honest work should mostly succeed — save the dice for when the light is failing, the buyer is lying, or the carcass is wrong. A Devil's Grin at the workbench produces the best thing the character has ever made. Snake Eyes produces something that works perfectly and should not exist, and the Guide should write down who buys it.
Turning a kill into value without ruining it. Skinning covers flaying, fleshing, stretching, grading, and knowing at a glance whether a pelt will grade Prime or shame you at the counter. It also covers the other harvest — the parts of the North's stranger kills that certain buyers pay silver not to discuss.
Reading country, setting steel and snare, and running a line in weather that wants your fingers. A trapline is a relationship: it produces for those who tend it and testifies against those who strip it. Trapping also covers the defensive art — snares and deadfalls set for things that walk on two legs, or more, or none.
Forge work, gun work, trap work, and repair — the trade that keeps every other trade in tools. North of the Line a smith outranks a mayor, because a town can elect a new mayor but cannot elect a new axe. Cold iron worked up here takes an edge the uncanny respects, when the smith knows the old quenching words, and most pretend they don't.
Tanning, sewing, and building the gear that is the actual difference between a winter and a body: blanket coats, fur-lined boots, snowshoes, sledge harness, canoe skins. Every stitch is a small promise about the weather, and the Hidework trade is the discipline of not writing promises the coat cannot keep.
Rendering, smoking, caching, and stretching food across a season — the quiet trade that decides expeditions before they leave. A good provisioner can read a larder like a calendar and tell you the day the party dies; a great one moves the day. It also covers using the whole of a kill, which up here is not thrift. It is manners, and the North checks.
Appraisal, haggling, credit, and the reading of markets and men. Trading is the trade that converts all the others into silver, and the only one the Company respects, because it is the only one the Company understands. A good trader knows what a pelt is worth. A great one knows what the buyer's situation is worth, which is a different and better number.
| Pelt | Base | Country |
|---|---|---|
| Muskrat | 1 | Everywhere wet |
| Beaver | 5 | Black Spruce waterways |
| Fox, red | 6 | The Margin |
| Marten | 8 | Black Spruce, deep timber |
| Otter | 9 | Rivers, under the Brigades' eye |
| Wolf | 10 | Anywhere. It decides, not you |
| Lynx | 12 | Black Spruce, bad-luck country |
| Bear, black | 20 | The Shield's edges |
| Fox, white | 25 | Glass Barrens |
| Moon-elk | 40 | White Throat, high meadows |
| Pale wolf | 50 | The Hush's border. It knows why you came |
| Bear, white | 60 | Glass Barrens. See above about deciding |
| d6 | Grade & value |
|---|---|
| 1 | Ruined — worthless. Somebody used a shotgun. |
| 2 | Damaged — half base price. |
| 3 | Fair — base price. |
| 4 | Good — base price, and a Boon on the haggle. |
| 5 | Fine — one and a half times base. |
| 6 | Prime — double base. The counter goes quiet when you lay it down. |
Add +1 to the quality roll for a trapped or snared kill, a clean headshot, or a Skinning rank of Journeyman or better. Subtract −2 for shotguns, fire, mauling, or anger. A result above 6 is Flawless: triple base, and word travels.
Every post wants something. On arrival, roll 1d6 on the Demand table — the named goods fetch double here this season. To haggle, roll 2d6 + Presence + Trading vs. 8 — success moves the price a fifth in your favor; a Devil's Grin moves it half; Snake Eyes and the buyer now knows exactly how badly you need this, and the price knows it too.
| d6 | In demand, paying double |
|---|---|
| 1 | Beaver and muskrat — the cities want hats again. |
| 2 | Marten and lynx — somebody important is getting married. |
| 3 | Meat and rations — the post's caches went bad. Ask the factor how, watch his hands. |
| 4 | Iron goods and repairs — every tool at the post is failing at once, which is not what tools do. |
| 5 | White fox and pale pelts — a buyer down south wants things the color of the Hush, and pays like it is urgent. |
| 6 | Monster parts — quietly, in the back room, no receipts, and the factor calls them specimens. |
The Company pays in its own paper. Scrip spends at face value at any Company post and store, and at half anywhere honest — the Free Brigades take it for kindling rates, and the Sable Lake people do not take it at all, which should tell you something about paper. Debts at the Company store accrue against your name in the ledger at Fort Harrow, and Chapter VIII has opinions about what the ledger does with names.
Harvesting the uncanny. Monsters can be skinned. Roll 2d6 + Weird + Skinning vs. 10 — success yields 1d3 parts worth 25 silver each to the right buyer, or usable by smiths and witches as components. On any failure take +1 Doom: you kept a piece of something, and something keeps accounts. Prices double for parts of anything from Tier III country or deeper. The core book's warning about desecration was not decorative.
Run a week on the trapline and see what the country coughs up. Uses only the rules on this page: 1d3+1 takes, quality per pelt, prices from the ledger.
Trapped kills already include the +1 quality bump. Haggle it yourself — the Press is not licensed to lie to factors on your behalf.
“The store will credit you warm all winter and own you by spring. See those lamps? Prettiest light on the Line. You will pay for every drop of oil in them, with interest, in fur.”— Posted over the bar at the last house on the Lantern Line
Chapter IV — New Rules: Exploration & Weather
Travel in the North uses the core book's trail rules with the thermostat removed. Each day on the trail, the Guide rolls a Travel Event and the day's Weather, and every soul outdoors keeps one more score beside Blood and Nerve: Cold. The Cold is the oldest monster in this book. It has no stat block because it does not need one.
Cold runs from 0 to 6. You gain Cold from weather, from wet clothes, from a night without fire, and from certain things that touch you. You shed 1 Cold per watch spent at a real fire with hot food, or all of it with a full day warm indoors. Gear matters: a blanket coat, dry boots, and bear grease are worth more than any gun north of the Line, and the price list in Chapter VII agrees.
The Cold Track — tap your current Cold
Warm, for now. The North regards this as a temporary clerical error.
Resisting the day's weather is a 2d6 + Grit vs. the region's Tier TN roll, made once per day outdoors — failure means gaining the weather's listed Cold. Proper gear grants Boons; wet clothes, exhaustion, and pride grant Banes.
Each night at camp costs each character 1 ration and the camp 1 fuel. No fuel means no fire: everyone gains +1 Cold and nobody sheds any, and the camp's watch rolls take a Bane because the dark up here leans in. No rations means a Grit roll against the region's TN or lose 1d6 Blood to hunger, and hungry rolls to resist Cold take a Bane, and the Guide should start describing how good everyone's dogs are starting to look, because that is historically accurate and horrible.
Foraging and hunting are camp actions against the region's Tier TN — a success feeds the party for a day; a hunter with the Trapping or Skinning trades can turn a good day into pelts besides. In Tier III and deeper, fires must be fed all night: one extra fuel, or the fire goes out at the hour the Guide finds most interesting.
A sledge and team hauls what four people can (Carry 32), triples daily distance on snow, and costs 1 ration per dog per day — a standard team of six is its own mouth to feed and its own early-warning system: dogs take a Bane on nothing and they notice everything. When the dogs stop and stare at the empty trail behind you, that is the North extending you a professional courtesy. Roll the What Your Dogs Know table in Chapter VII once per team, and treat the result as load-bearing.
| d12 | The day |
|---|---|
| 1 | The Silver Cold. A killing snap. +2 Cold on a failed Grit roll, +1 even on a success. Fires gutter and give half warmth. Metal burns bare skin. Travel is a decision you explain to the survivors. |
| 2 | Whiteout. Snow and wind erase the world. No travel without a rope line; navigation TN +4; anyone separated rolls on the Deep White table alone. +1 Cold. |
| 3 | The Widowmaker. Wind that fells trees and tents. +1 Cold, and each camp structure or top-heavy load needs a Might roll against 8 or it is simply elsewhere now. |
| 4 | Heavy snow. Half travel pace, tracks erased behind you — yours and, note, everything else's. +1 Cold on a failed Grit roll. |
| 5 | Ice fog. Visibility to a spear's length. Sound arrives without direction. Ambush and accident both take a Boon today, and they know it. |
| 6 | Bitter and clear. Beautiful, murderous. +1 Cold on a failed Grit roll. Sun off the snow: travel without goggles or soot-blacking means snow-blind, a Bane on sight until a day's rest. |
| 7 | Grey and holding. A working day. The North is busy elsewhere. |
| 8 | Grey and holding. Same. Do not remark aloud on your luck; it files remarks. |
| 9 | Soft thaw. Warm enough to sweat, which kills: wet clothes mean +1 Cold at sundown unless changed. River and lake ice becomes a rumor of itself. |
| 10 | Rime. Freezing mist silvers everything. Pretty as a postcard, slick as a scaffold: Quick rolls to move fast take a Bane, and every branch drops its load on whoever the Guide likes least. |
| 11 | False spring. A day of impossible mildness, birdsong, bare ground. It is a lie. Anyone who sheds gear, dries out, and relaxes takes the next weather roll at a Bane, and the next weather roll has been waiting for this. |
| 12 | The lights. Aurora by night, green and patient. Weird rolls take a Boon under them; omens arrive unrequested; and anyone who whistles at the lights — the trappers are unanimous on this — should not. |
| d6 | Travel event |
|---|---|
| 1 | No event, but the silence today has a texture, and everyone notices it separately and says nothing. |
| 2 | The weather turns: roll again on the Weather table; the new result arrives by afternoon with no warning shot. |
| 3 | Sign: tracks, a blazed tree, a sprung trap, blood on snow, a cache marker, a cairn with one stone too many. |
| 4 | Human encounter: a Brigade, a Company patrol, a Sable Lake hunting party, a Tallow Ring crew, or one person, alone, walking the wrong direction, warmly dressed, smiling. |
| 5 | Uncanny encounter: roll on the Deep White table, or the Guide reaches for Chapter VIII. |
| 6 | Discovery: a delve mouth, a dead camp, a full cache, a wreck in the ice, a hot spring, or an impossible place. In Tier II or deeper, roll on the Deep White table as well — discoveries up here are rarely unattended. |
| d12 | Event |
|---|---|
| 1 | Your own tracks cross your path ahead of you. They are fresher than yours. |
| 2 | A fire in the distance at dusk. It keeps pace with you all night. It is always at the same distance, which is not how distance works. |
| 3 | The dogs refuse a stretch of clean, open, perfect trail. The detour costs three hours. Take the detour. |
| 4 | A voice you know calls one party member's name, once, from off the trail. Everyone heard it. It used the name their mother used. |
| 5 | A dead trapper sits against a tree, frozen, well-preserved, facing your camp. He was not there when you made camp. His pack is full of prime pelts, and Chapter III told you what taking them costs. |
| 6 | Every trap in the party's line is sprung and empty, closed gently, in order, with nothing in them and no tracks around them. A courtesy call. |
| 7 | Snow-shapes in the treeline at the edge of sight, standing the way people stand when they are waiting to be counted. Counting them costs 1 Nerve. The count is different each time. |
| 8 | The party crests a rise onto country not on any map: a valley, green-lit, windless, warm. Roll Wits against 10 to notice there are no animal tracks entering it. Any tracks leaving it are your own, from the future, and they are running. |
| 9 | A cache, full and well-made, with a name carved on it. The name belongs to a party member. None of you built it. The supplies are excellent. |
| 10 | The Snowblind Choir, faint, upwind. Nerve against 8 or take 1d6 Nerve; on a Devil's Grin, one character can pick out words, and the words are coordinates. |
| 11 | For one hour your footsteps make no sound, the cold stops hurting, and the dogs walk with their ears flat. You have brushed the Hush's hem. +1 Cold that no fire sheds tonight, and something now knows your gait. |
| 12 | An omen of the Powers — the North keeps the old manners too. Roll on the Land Remembers' signs table if you have it, or the Guide sends the aurora down to the treetops, just over your camp, in a shape everyone recognizes and nobody will name at breakfast. |
Whiteout separation, the short rule. When the party is split by weather, do not track positions on a map — track voices. Each lost character rolls Wits against the region's TN each scene: success rejoins a rope line, a shout, a fire. Failure and they hear a voice leading them, and the Guide rolls 1d6 in the open: on 1–4 it is a companion. The dice being visible is the horror. Use sparingly, like everything that works.
“White smoke, the stove is drawing. Black smoke, they are burning the furniture. No smoke, you turn the team around and you do not tell the dogs why. They know why.”— The mail carrier of the Lantern Line, still making his rounds
Chapter V — New Rules: Delves
The Shield is honeycombed with the Company's dead mines, ice caves under the Barrens, and cellars older than the charter. A Delve is any dark place you enter on purpose with a light source and a reason. These rules make the crawl itself the fight: turns, light, heat, and a country overhead that remembers you went in.
Underground time runs in turns of about ten minutes. In a turn, each character does one thing: move carefully through an area, search one thing properly, listen at a passage, force a door or obstacle, work a Trade, or rest (see below, and reconsider). Hurrying does two things in one turn, loudly, at a Bane, and the Delve hears the Bane.
A torch burns 6 turns and counts as a fire for shedding Cold while you hold it. A lantern burns a full delve on one oil but warms nobody. In the dark, everything you attempt takes a Bane, you gain +1 Cold per hour in the ice country, and things that live in the dark stop being careful around you, because why would they be. When the party's last light goes out, the Guide should let the table sit in the silence for exactly as long as feels unprofessional.
Every second turn, the Guide rolls 1d6: on a 1–2, roll on the Delve Events table. Each level below the first adds +1 Depth: add Depth to the d6 (a 1–2 comes up more often than you would like at the bottom of anything), and multiply found treasure by Depth. The North's rule of exchange holds underground: the deeper the delve, the better it pays, and the more precisely it remembers your face.
Stuck doors and falls of rock are Might against 8, or 10 if frozen; each attempt is a turn and a noise. Resting underground restores as camp does, but the event roll during a resting turn is made twice. Sleeping in a delve is not a rule. It is a decision, and the Guide is invited to treat it as a confession.
| d12+ | Event |
|---|---|
| 1 | Bad air. Lights burn low and blue. Grit against 8 each turn you linger or take a Bane on everything until fresh air. |
| 2 | Groaning timber, trickling grit. The Delve is deciding. Any loud action this turn risks collapse: Might against 10 to shore, or run. |
| 3 | Old works: tools downed mid-task, a meal frozen on a table, a coat on a peg. Everything arranged as if its owners stepped out one minute ago, sixty years ago. |
| 4 | Water where water should not stand, black and unfrozen and perfectly still. It does not reflect your light. It reflects a light. |
| 5 | Scratching from inside the near wall, patient, rhythmic, at the height of a working pick. It stops when you stop. It resumes when you do. |
| 6 | A vein of moonstone, live and cold, worth 2d6 × 10 silver × Depth to cut. Cutting it is a turn of noise, and noise is a promise. |
| 7 | Sign of another party: fresh boot prints, a warm lantern, a dropped glove. The prints are your party's sizes. You have not been here. |
| 8 | Something crosses your light at the edge of its throw — low, quick, wrong-jointed. The dogs, if the dogs are with you, sit down and refuse the rest of the level. |
| 9 | A door of Company iron, padlocked from this side, with fresh oil in the lock and a chalk tally on the frame. The tally is one short of your party's number. |
| 10 | The cold turns local and intentional: +1 Cold to everyone, and frost flowers bloom across the walls toward one character in particular. The Guide knows which. |
| 11 | A voice down the passage, conversational, in a language nobody knows, pausing where laughter would go. Nerve against 8 or take 1d6 Nerve. Answering it is an action with consequences, and the consequences take notes. |
| 12+ | A monster from Chapter VIII, or worse, or the Delve simply closes the way you came in — not violently. Administratively. |
| d12 | Found |
|---|---|
| 1 | Rations and fuel, sound and sealed — a week's worth. Underground, this is treasure and do not let anyone tell you otherwise. |
| 2 | A strongbox of silver dollars, 2d6 × 10, minted the year the shaft closed. |
| 3 | Company scrip, 3d6 × 10 face value, banded and clean. Chapter III told you what paper is worth and where. |
| 4 | A crate of trade muskets, 1d6 of them, cosmoline-perfect, serial numbers filed by the Company's own armorer. Somebody was planning something. |
| 5 | Prime pelts, 1d6, baled and impossibly preserved, of an animal nobody at the post can name. |
| 6 | Raw moonstone, 2d6 × 10 silver in weight, cold in a way the assay office will pretend not to notice. |
| 7 | A dead man's kit: excellent boots, a Master-made coat, a loaded revolver, and a journal whose last entry is advice addressed to whoever finds it. The advice is good. |
| 8 | Smithing steel and tools of pre-charter make — a Boon to any forge work done with them, and a maker's mark no living smith will discuss. |
| 9 | The shift ledger. Names, wages, and the reason the shaft closed, in a clerk's steadying hand. Worth 100 silver to the Company, more to its enemies, most to the families. |
| 10 | A relic of the old ice: a lens, a bell, a knife of black glass. One power, one price. The Guide builds it; the finder tests it. |
| 11 | A map to another delve, deeper, hand-drawn, annotated by three different hands. The third hand only writes numbers, and the numbers are counting down. |
| 12 | A sealed Company vault door, and the key is at Fort Harrow, and now the party has a reason and the factor has leverage, and the Guide has a campaign. |
Shaft Nine — The Harrow Bay Company's deepest working, closed by the Company's own dynamite crew after the moonstone seam “turned.” Visible problem: it has been unbricked from a direction that troubles the masons. Hidden sin: the Company knew what the seam ran through and mined it for six more profitable weeks. The superstition that is true: miners' lamps hung at its mouth burn white, and a white flame will not light a fuse. Depth 3, and the shift ledger for its last week has never been found, and the Company's standing reward for it is worded very carefully as recovery and non-disclosure.
The Ice Church — A chapel under the Glass Barrens, hollowed from blue ice by parties unknown, pews and pulpit and all, facing an altar that is a slab of the clearest ice anyone has stood before. Visible problem: pilgrims keep going, some of them yours. Hidden sin: the missionary who “found” it preached there one winter, and his congregation is still seated, and he is still owed a sermon. The superstition that is true: what you see in the altar ice is what the Silence is currently owed by you, itemized. Depth 2, no timber, no echo, and the Cold rules run double past the narthex.
The Bone Cellar — Under a burned Tallow Ring rendering camp in the Black Spruce: a root cellar that goes down further than the men who dug it authorized. Visible problem: the kettles above are full and nobody empties them. Hidden sin: the Ring rendered everything on this line — everything, the whole of nothing used — and the cellar is where the country filed its counterclaim. The superstition that is true: carry nothing tallow-made past the first landing, no candle, no soap, no grease, or the stairs get longer while you are on them. Depth counts strangely here; the Guide is encouraged to lie.
Chapter VI — Eight New Callings
Eight Callings of the fur country, built on the core rules: Blood bonus, gear, features at Levels 1, 3, and 5. They ride beside every Calling in every Gravesmoke book, and unlike most of those, these eight have references and can produce them.
New Calling No. 01 of 08
A trapper whose forty miles of steel and snare are less a livelihood than a jurisdiction.
Starting GearA trapline of a dozen steel traps, skinning knife, snowshoes, a country you know like a grudge.
Declare a home territory a few days across. Within it: Boon to travel, track, forage, and notice what changed since last season — and something always has.
Once per scene, reveal a snare or deadfall you set earlier, anywhere you have had one quiet minute: 1d6+1 and the target is held until it wins a Might roll against 10.
Once per session, declare that a fleeing enemy or quarry has already stepped in one of yours. It is held, hurt 1d6, and exactly where you say it is. The line provides. Mind what the line asks.
New Calling No. 02 of 08
A meat hunter of the deep timber who feeds the posts, reads the wind like scripture, and wastes nothing, out of policy.
Starting GearRifle you trust more than people, skinning knife, bear grease, a week of pemmican.
Boon on all hunting and stalking rolls, and your kills grade +1 pelt quality. A day's hunt on a success feeds the whole party.
You cannot be surprised outdoors, and you take a Boon on rolls to weather the day — you smelled the turn coming an hour before the dogs did, and the dogs resent it.
Once per session, against any target you have stalked for a full scene, your shot simply hits: maximum damage, no roll. The North allows one perfect thing per hunter per outing, and it counts.
New Calling No. 03 of 08
A Harrow Bay man or woman of accounts — or one who left the Company holding its ledger and its grudge.
Starting GearLedger and pens, seal ring, 20 silver in scrip, a coat too fine for the country.
Appraise any goods, pelt, or relic at a glance, and take a Boon on all Trading rolls. You always know what the Company would pay, which is never what it is worth.
Once per session, produce reasonable gear, passage, or lodging that was, it turns out, already arranged and paid for. The paper is genuine. The favor is now owed.
Once per session, name a debt someone within earshot owes — money, favor, blood, silence — and it comes due now: they take a Bane on everything until they settle with you or defy you outright, and defiance is entered in the book.
New Calling No. 04 of 08
A forge-hand of the Line who knows the old quenching words and pretends, professionally, not to.
Starting GearField forge and tools, hammer (as hatchet), aprons and scars, three iron nails from a church.
Set a working forge anywhere with fire and an hour. Boon on all Smithing rolls, and your repairs hold in cold that breaks other men's work.
Weapons and traps you forge count as cold iron against the uncanny for a season. Things that hate iron know your mark on sight, and give your camp one extra warning they give nobody else.
Once per session, forge a wound shut at the fire: an ally regains 2d6 Blood and any Bleeding stops. The scar carries iron in it forever — and iron-scarred flesh cannot be possessed, claimed, or worn by another.
New Calling No. 05 of 08
The one who does the close work, does it clean, and has learned more from carcasses than most doctors learn from patients.
Starting GearSkinning kit, fleshing tools, salt, an oilcloth roll of knives kept sharper than necessary.
Your pelts grade +1 quality, you harvest in half the time, and you take a Boon on the harvesting-the-uncanny roll — including the part where something notices.
Study any carcass or remains for a turn and the Guide answers three questions truly: what killed it, how long ago, and what it feared at the end. The third answer is the trade secret.
Once per session, don a Prime or better pelt you took yourself: for a scene, beasts and the uncanny read you as one of the North's own — Boon against cold and fear, and things that hunt people hesitate. Do not speak while wearing it. It uses your voice for its own errands.
New Calling No. 06 of 08
A river-hand of the Free Brigades: paddle, portage, and the songs that keep time, courage, and certain things at bay.
Starting GearPaddle, tumpline, red sash, a verse for every rapid you have survived so far.
+2 Carry, Boon on all boat, river, and travel rolls, and you can portage loads that make oxen philosophical.
While you sing on the move, the party travels a half-day farther each day; while you sing at camp, everyone regains +1 Nerve at rest and the Snowblind Choir cannot get a verse in.
Once per session, the water refuses you and yours: nobody in your party drowns, capsizes, or goes through the ice this scene — or the current carries your boat a full day's distance in an hour. The river will want a song back. Write a good one.
New Calling No. 07 of 08
One who has been out in the White and come back — most of the way — and can now walk roads the weather keeps.
Starting GearA staff of black spruce, snow goggles you no longer need, a scarf over the face at all times, worn for others' comfort.
You see clearly through snowfall, whiteout, fog, and blizzard, and you cannot be lost while snow is on the ground. What else moves in whiteouts sees that you see, and extends a colleague's courtesy.
Once per session, walk into falling snow and out of it anywhere within sight, arriving with the next gust. Nothing crosses with you except what is already holding your hand.
Once per session, stand alone in the open cold and ask the Silence one question. It answers truly, in the manner of a thing with no mouth and long records. Gain +1 Doom — and once, someday, at the worst possible time, it gets to ask you one back, and you will answer truly too.
New Calling No. 08 of 08
A shaft-rat of the Shield who has spent more of this life underground than in it, and is owed by the dark accordingly.
Starting GearWhale-oil lamp, ice axe, rope and pitons, chalk, a canary's cage, empty, kept anyway.
You sense gas, bad air, deadfalls, and imminent collapse one turn before they matter, and you take a Boon on all rolls to force, shore, climb, and squeeze underground.
You take no Bane from darkness. Things that live in the dark treat you as local — not friendly, local — and will spend one turn deciding about the rest of your party that they would not otherwise spend.
Once per session, survive a collapse, fall, flood, or entombment outright: you turn up somewhere unexpected, alive, within the hour. Gain +1 Doom. You have never once dug yourself out, and you have stopped claiming you did.
Chapter VII — Arms & Kit
| Weapon | Damage | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Trade musket | 1d6+1 | Cheap, loud, everywhere; a full turn to reload with cold fingers |
| Bear spear | 1d6+2 | Two-handed; braced against a charge, roll damage twice and keep the better |
| Ice axe | 1d6 | Boon to climb ice; pries, wedges, anchors; never leaves a smart hand |
| Skinning knife | 1d6−1 | +1 quality on pelts when used by a skinner of any rank; always exactly where you left it, which is worth noticing |
| Hatchet | 1d6 | Throwable at Close; also the most important survival tool ever mistaken for a weapon |
| Harpoon & line | 1d6+1 | On a hit, the target is fastened to you. Consider carefully whose problem that is |
| Whale-oil bomb | 2d6 fire | One zone burns; foul black smoke; the Free Brigades sell them and deny it in the same breath |
| Cold-iron knife | 1d6−1 | Master-forged; full damage to the uncanny, which is more than most rifles can say |
| Item | Effect |
|---|---|
| Blanket coat | 1 DR; Boon on rolls to resist gaining Cold. The single best purchase in this book |
| Fur-lined boots, dry | Required for the Boon above to mean anything. Wet boots are a Bane and a countdown |
| Snowshoes | Full pace over deep snow; without them, half pace and a Grit roll each day against +1 Cold |
| Ice cleats | Ignore Banes from ice underfoot; smug on frozen rivers |
| Snow goggles | No snow-blindness on clear days; look ridiculous; be alive |
| Fire kit, oiled | Fire in any weather in one turn on a Wits roll against 8; against 10 without it, in the wind, in the dark, while shaking |
| Bear grease | A day's smear ignores the first Cold gained each day; everything downwind knows your schedule |
| Ice auger | Through lake ice in one turn: fishing, soundings, and the reason the Auger Wife in Chapter VIII has that name |
| Pemmican, week of | Rations that do not freeze, spoil, or apologize; counts double if a Master provisioner made it |
| Whale-oil lamp | Burns a full delve on one fill; warms nothing; reliable as a debt |
| Sledge & six dogs | Carry 32, triple pace on snow, 6 rations a day, and the finest alarm ever to also be your friends |
| Trap, steel | The tool of Chapter III: 1d6+1 to anything that steps wrong, and it holds. Trapping rank sets how wisely it is placed |
| d6 | The team |
|---|---|
| 1 | Will not run past a delve mouth without being hooded. Any delve mouth. Even ones you have not spotted yet, which is the useful part. |
| 2 | The lead dog watches one party member sleep. Has since the Barrens. Nobody remembers whose dog she was originally. |
| 3 | Howls exactly one hour before the weather turns, to the minute. The team is never wrong. The hour is never quite enough. |
| 4 | Refuses to eat on nights the fire burns white. Goes hungry rather than argue about it. |
| 5 | Once dragged an empty sledge home through a whiteout, four days, and sat at the post gate facing the way it came, waiting, until someone finally followed it back. |
| 6 | The Silence took a dog off this team once. The rest still leave a gap in the line where she ran. On some nights the gap pulls its share of the load. |
Prices on the Line run half again the core book's, in silver — or face value in Company scrip, which is how the Company keeps you. A Master's work costs double and is worth treble. And the standing advice of every old hand at every post stands: spend on the coat before the gun. The North has never once been shot, and it has frozen a great many people who were excellently armed.
“The Company says there is no such animal. The Company also settles every mauling on the Line inside the week — silver, in full, no questions asked. You ever know them to do that twice?”— Fort Harrow clerk, letter of resignation, unfinished
Chapter VIII — Monsters
Per the core book's law: the horror is never the peoples of the North. Every creature here is waste walking — stripped lines, rendered carcasses, unpaid men, unmourned expeditions — or the cold itself, finally taking an interest. Same simple stats. Special remains the awful part.
Attack: Scalding grip, 1d6+1
Special: Rendered from everything the strip crews wasted, and it smells like the kettles. Fire heals it — it is fuel, after all. Deep cold slows it, and using the whole of a kill in its presence, wasting nothing, deals it 1d6 no roll can reduce. It follows Tallow Ring silver wherever that silver is spent, which is worth knowing before you take their money.
Attack: Flensing claws, 1d6+2 and Bleeding on a Devil's Grin
Special: It holds court in the deep timber wearing every pelt taken without manners, and it knows each one by name. Pelts in the party's packs whisper to it — no surprise is possible while you carry fur. Returning a Prime pelt to the place it was taken, with apology spoken aloud, turns the court aside for a season. The court keeps minutes.
Attack: Maul, 2d6
Special: A white bear branded with Company marks that were never put on it by hands. It hunts debtors of the Fort Harrow ledger, patiently, in order of balance outstanding. It cannot harm anyone paid in full — it walks past them, politely, like a clerk — and settling a stranger's Company debt in silver, in their name, strikes 1 Wound from it wherever it walks.
Attack: The verse, 1d6 Nerve to all who hear
Special: A survey expedition that sang to keep together in the whiteout, and succeeded. They sing in every whiteout now, and those who fail Nerve against 10 walk toward the harmony, smiling, adding their part. They never test Morale; choirs don't. Carrying one singer's bones home to a marked grave silences that voice forever — there are eleven — and the Company has their muster roll, filed under expenses.
Attack: The long arm, 1d6+1 and dragged one range toward the hole
Special: She waits under lake ice at fishing holes, patient as winter, and she has as many arms as the lake has holes. She will not take anyone who gives their first catch of the day back through the ice — the old courtesy — and every fishing family on Sable Lake keeps it and pretends it is habit. Break the courtesy, and every hole in the lake is a door, and she has your scent, and lakes are large.
Attack: The hush, 1d6 Nerve and +1 Cold, no sound, no wound
Special: When the Silence condenses into a shape that walks the edge of the firelight, guns pass through it and their reports come out as nothing. Light held high staggers it; a voice raised in the dark — song, story, argument, prayer, the content does not matter, only the defiance — deals it 1d6 per scene of unbroken noise. It cannot enter any camp where a story is being told, and it will wait, all night, every night, for the pause.
Chapter IX — Places
Fort Harrow — The Company's great factory and the anchor of the Lantern Line: palisade, store, press-room stacked with a winter's fortune in fur, and the ledger. Visible problem: this season's brigades are coming in light, and the factor is extending credit with a generosity that frightens everyone who understands compound interest. Hidden sin: the fort's second ledger — the one the factor weighs at night — records what the Company actually pays for its charter up here, and the currency is not silver, and the account is in arrears. The superstition that is true: no debt recorded at Fort Harrow is ever truly forgiven; struck lines in the ledger rewrite themselves by morning, in better handwriting. A reason you cannot simply leave: your names went in the book the day you first spent scrip, and you have all spent scrip.
The Widow's Line — A forty-trap line in the Black Spruce, kept by the widow Aldous since her husband walked it out one Silver Cold and did not walk back. Visible problem: the line still produces — prime pelts, every trap, every week — and she has not baited it in two years, and the Company factor has stopped asking questions because the fur is flawless. Hidden sin: the pelts are payments, and Mrs. Aldous knows on what account, and she signs for every one because the alternative is admitting the account exists. The superstition that is true: walk the line at dusk and every sprung trap holds exactly what you need most, priced accordingly; the trap at the line's far end is always sprung, always empty, and always warm. The adventure is the far trap, the husband's unfinished last round, and the question of who is running the line for her — and what happens to the arrangement, and to her, the day somebody well-meaning pays the debt off.
The Company weighs the North in pelts per season, posts the prices at every fort, and calls the arrangement trade.
The trappers know better. Everything up here is bought from the Silence on credit — every pelt, every fire, every safe night — and the Silence does not post its prices. It simply collects, in its own season, with interest, in full.
The Silence is listening. Say something worth hearing.