Wolf Slopes

There's one bad night every season.

Tonight's is on the fifth of Candlemass. The wind skirls past the shutters and howls in through the eaves, and it's almost so loud it drowns out the knock at the door.

You awaken, dressed in your warm nightclothes, and pad down the stairs of your little public house to where your outside clothes sit half-frozen by the door.

The knock comes again, pounding, and at this time of night it can only mean one thing.

You fling open the door, letting a gust of snow blow in past the threshold. Outside are two villagers from Bairnhallow, the town in the neighboring valley. Their faces are pale and pinched from the cold and with worry.

"Zeke took the flock to the middle slopes this morning," the older of the two says. "He hasn't come back down."

The Wyrmspine Mountains can be treacherous even in midsummer, with unsure footing and hidden crevasses folded into the bland gray of the rocks, but they're much worse in late winter. Sometimes there's forage preserved under the snowline, and it can help to ease the goats' hunger when the autumn hay starts to run low, and to a fool of a young man that can seem like a good risk.

The boy could be anywhere.

Alone, you'd never find him.

But luckily you aren't alone.

Out in the stables Houndstooth, the oldest of your wargs, lets out a whine like an industrial saw. He can pick out a scent from twenty paces away during a blizzard. You know this because you've trained with him.

You've spent more time drilling 'seek' than you've spent checking in guests most years.

The snow rescue work doesn't really pay anything, naught more than an extra bottle of peach brandy and some spare foodstuffs each harvest, but if you don't look out for the lost travellers, overconfident villagers, and misguided adventurers who get stranded on the slopes, then who will?

You're shivering from the open door and blowing wind as you struggle into your cold weather gear, but at your core, determination is a bonfire.

You'll keep clawing lives back from these mountains, whatever it takes.

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Wolf Slopes is an 11 page solo tabletop roleplaying game about maintaining a hospice in what would be the Italian Alps---if it weren't also a heroic fantasy setting in its own version of the early 1800s.

You play by slowly growing your hospice, by journaling your exploits, and by helping others.