The kingdom’s greatest hero sat up at his own wake.
He has twelve days, a great many loose parts,
and an apology to make. He can’t remember to whom.
The Revenant’s Road is a complete narrative adventure, and a road trip with a dead man. Sir Aldric Harrow, the Hero of Morrow Ford and the subject of fourteen extremely filthy ballads, opens his eyes on his funeral table in the middle of a very rude song and asks, politely, whether anyone has seen his left boot.
Something is pulling him east. He hires the party to get him there, with his widow, an inquisitor and a hopeless young bounty hunter on his heels, and a balladeer riding pillion who smells the sequel of the century.
It is bawdy, slapstick, and very, very funny. And every time a piece of Sir Aldric falls off, a memory comes back: a summer, a millpond, a girl with flour on her face, a promise, and the morning he ran. By the end of the road, the jokes are still funny. They just mean something else.
- 61pages
- 12scenes
- 5conversations
- 6set pieces
- 14filthy ballads
- 10body parts lost
What makes it different
The Rot
Sir Aldric loses ten pieces of himself on the road, in a fixed order. Each one comes with a joke and a memory: the table laughs, then he goes quiet, then the story moves on. Laugh, remember, keep going.
Played for laughs, and paid for them
Players earn Pennies, the adventure’s rewards, for vivid play and for a genuine laugh from the table. Spend one to have Sir Aldric lose a body part at the most useful, or funniest, possible moment. He is mortified every time.
Conversation as play
Five structured scenes, each a game: a balladeer’s liar’s contest, a supper of things a husband and wife never knew, a list of last requests, a roast and a eulogy for a man still in the room, and a song the players write together.
Comedy over a broken heart
Every character’s surface is funny and every one is hiding something. The cruder the legend, the sweeter the truth underneath it.
A bawdiness dial
Written at tavern level: ribald songs, innuendo, a bathhouse farce, never explicit. Guidance to turn it down to parlour or up to barracks for your table.
Nothing is wasted
Every running joke lands somewhere. A one-page map traces each one from the first laugh to the moment it turns around and breaks your heart.
Moments your table will carry home
- A dead knight sitting up at his own wake, in the middle of the chorus.
- A horse that eats her rider’s ear and looks very pleased with herself.
- A bathhouse raid conducted entirely in towels.
- A statue unveiled at exactly the wrong moment.
- A list of last requests, the last one underlined twice.
- A wake held for a man who is still in the room.
“Wherever I end up, after this, I don’t think there’ll be anyone singing. So I wondered. If it’s not too strange. Whether you’d hold one for me tonight. While I’m still here to hear it.”
Act Two · The Wake for a Man Who Isn’t Dead Yet
Look inside
Pages from the free preview. Click any page to see it larger.
What’s in the free preview
The opening chapter, the rules for story-first play (including the Rot and the Bawdiness Dial), the backstory Threads, the King’s Road with two of the Ballads of Sir Aldric in full, and all of Act One. Every page carries its page number from the full edition. It ends with three short glimpses of later scenes, chosen to show where the road goes without giving away where it ends. Read the preview.
