The Salt Road D&D 5e Campaign Compendium – 16 Adventures, Levels 1-5 (PDF)

Sixty miles of working road. Salt comes out of the hills at the western end and goes to the border markets in the east, and everything in this book happens in between: a ford, a tollgate, three smokehouses, a horse fair, a chapel, a cutting, a row of warehouses, a quarantine house, a ferry, two lamp-towers, a field of cairns, a drovers' camp, an auction floor, a bridge, a grave - and the works the salt comes out of.

Each stop is one evening. Sixteen of them, west to east.

EVERY STOP HAS NOTICED THE SAME THING AND NOT ONE OF THEM HAS SAID SO. Something that used to keep has stopped keeping. Every stop on this road has privately decided it is their store, their scales or their ground, and none of them has mentioned it to the next stop along. No adventure requires you to point at it. Do not point at it. Somewhere around the fourth one a table stops asking the GM and starts comparing notes with each other, and that only works once.

THE SIXTEENTH HAS NEVER BEEN SOLD AND WILL NOT BE. The First Boiling is the salt works at the western end, it is the last thing in this book, and it says what has been happening. Fifteen stops ask. Only this book answers.

WHAT IS IN IT - 643 pages
- 16 adventures, each rendered exactly as it sells on its own. If you already own one, the pages match
- 33 battle maps, 99 images in all - DM, player, and a no-grid copy of each, at 70 px per 5-foot square, aligned for Roll20 and Foundry
- A 22-page gazetteer of the whole road: sixteen places, fourteen people, the year, the tables, and twelve things currently wrong that have no adventures attached to them. Free on its own; this is the same one, bound in
- A bestiary gathering every creature invented for this road into one place, so nobody is hunting through six hundred pages at eleven at night
- 60+ ready-to-play characters across the sixteen, levels 1 to 5

THE ROAD DOES THE LEVELLING. No experience points, no downtime, no calendar to keep. The party levels by getting further east, one level per three stops, because the further the salt travels the more it is worth and the worse the trouble around it gets. Four level-ups across sixteen sessions, and the whole system fits on one page because a road only has one axis.

THREE WAYS TO USE IT. One stop is a Tuesday night. Four or five is a short campaign that ends somewhere the party has never been. All sixteen is a party that walks out at 5th level having watched one thing go wrong the length of a country. Or take it apart - sixty miles of working road bolts onto almost any map you already run, and the last page of the gazetteer is about exactly that.

TWO OF THEM ARE WRITTEN FOR TWO PLAYERS. The Smokehouses and The High Cut are built for a pair rather than a party and say so on their own covers. In a full run, split the group for a session and give those two the night.

THE FILES - four PDFs: A4 and US Letter, each in colour and in a printer-friendly build. The printer-friendly version is the same book in pure white, nothing removed and nothing shortened. Plus a zip of all 99 map images, one folder per adventure.

Compatible with Fifth Edition. Instant digital download - nothing is posted.

Made with AI assistance: the text and maps of this book were written and generated with AI, then edited, checked and laid out by hand.