Postcard from The Dark Peak · #7
Lonik Weather
Page forty-three of Pip's second notebook, in Pip's own hand: Do not follow the Lonik after murkfall. The job exists because someone did. They came out at the weir with a soaked boot and no instrument case — a sealed brass cylinder, survey weight, now sitting on the weir apron just above the waterline, or in the pool below it.
Get to the weir, get the cylinder, and cross Hellsborough Corner Bridge to the far side before the sixth Encounter roll. The Wisewood rearranges itself around the sound of a Lonik chewing. The fallclimbers on the weir face respond to noise and to anything that falls in the water. And the thing that has fed from the crossing since before the bridge was built will suggest, gently, warmly, that the water below is not as cold as it looks.
Field notes by Pip Rippon. Keep moving on the bridge. Stopping is how it compounds.
What’s inside
- One Dark Peak location: the upper Loxley — the Wisewood margin, the weir, and Hellsborough Corner Bridge
- Three creatures from the Bestiary — the Lonik, the Fallclimber, and the Loxley Kraken
- One page of reusable rules (OSR-adjacent, 2d6, no prep required)
- A harmless creature that is still a hazard: the Wisewood uses the Lonik to move you where it wants you
- A warden in the river you cannot fight — only outpace, one round at a time, as the Draw pulls your Murk down
- A tentacle that comes over the parapet if you linger too long on the bridge
- A 2d6 Encounter Table — 12 results
- Three outcomes: cylinder delivered, taken by the weir, or a very clear view of the riverbed
Format: A5 PDF · 14 pages · Free
The story behind it: Lonik Weather, in Urban Myths and Hymns.
What’s waiting out there
What the Loxley Kraken is
Pale, wide as the river channel, patient the way very old things are patient. You feel it before you see it — a warmth behind the eyes, a suggestion that whatever you were retrieving was never that important. It does not surface until it believes the meal is already secured. The tentacle, when it comes, arrives with no drama at all, as if this were simply the next thing that was going to happen.
What you need
Two six-sided dice, something to write with, and one evening. No GM, no group, no preparation. It’s a solo tabletop RPG scenario: one location in Hellsborough and The Dark Peak, a handful of creatures from the Bestiary, and a very bad night.
Never played a solo RPG before? The first Postcard Adventure, Something in the Hole, has a complete example game you can follow once and have it.
When you want more
Every Postcard Adventure uses the same three stats, Grit, Wit and Murk. Foked is what they grow into: the full solo ruleset, where your stats are your flesh and your character carries every scar into the next job. The core rules are free.
