What the Rope Will Bear

The setup

The winter road stops at the Skarn. Two hundred feet down, the river runs half under ice and half open and black. Three hundred feet across, a slate quarry called Overcut has thirty people in it and no way home until the low road thaws.

One line crosses: a doubled hemp cable on an oak wheel, with a wicker cage on the end that takes one person or two hundred pounds of anything that does not argue. Ingrith Lorimer has worked that wheel for nineteen winters, and every morning before light she walks the cable as far as her arms reach and puts her hands on it.

It is going. One strand of the three has parted out over the middle where no hands will ever get to it, and the line creaks now in a register it did not have in autumn. Ingrith has done the only arithmetic anybody has done. She counts what is left in hauls, because a haul is the unit that means anything on this ledge. Her number is eleven.

Eleven hauls of flour and salt fish is nine days of half rations for thirty people. The low road opens in nine days. Or fourteen. Or whenever it opens. So a haul spent on a body is most of a day of food for everyone up there, and Ingrith will not spend one. There is a woman at Overcut named Elowen Tasker with a leg crushed under a slab, the leg is going bad, and Ingrith has sent up what medicine she has and will not send the cage.

The party needs to be on the far side tonight.

What's really going on

Nothing is hidden here. That is the whole difficulty.

Ingrith is not guarding a secret and she is not running a swindle. She gives the party the count in the first minute and turns the slate around so they can read the tally. She was handed a failing rope and thirty people and no help, and she did the thing nobody else did. She put a number on it.

More to paint

The voice from the other side. Osric Deben runs the quarry face. Every few hours he shouts across through a speaking horn, reading Ingrith the same list. It gets shorter each time.

A quarter mile north the gorge wall carries a stair of quarry notches, cut by the crew that opened Overcut before anybody thought of a rope. It drops to the scree on this side, crosses the river on an ice shelf at the narrows, and goes up the far wall in two long pitches with a ledge between them. Nobody has used it in nine years.

The interesting choice

The party can be across in ten minutes. There are eleven in the rope and she will spend one, if they ask her for it in words.

That is the trick of this encounter: she says yes. There is nothing to break into and nobody to fight for the winch. What she will not do is let anyone pretend it was free. She asks them, once, to say which day of Overcut's bread they are taking. Then she works the wheel.

Three doors, and none of them is clean

1. Spend a haul. It works exactly as advertised. Nobody is cursed and nothing is hidden. Thirty people eat a little less because four people were in a hurry, and Ingrith will not shame anyone for it. She writes it down and reads it back.
2. Take the old cut. Costs her nothing. Costs the party a day and a night on iced notches in the cold, plus whatever is nesting up there. This is the door where the party pays instead of strangers, and a table that picks it should be told plainly that they picked it.
3. Change what the eleven are for. The rich one, and the only door that puts somebody different on that shelf. Stop hauling food and start hauling people. Eleven hauls is eleven people. There are thirty. She would be picking eleven names and leaving nineteen with no food coming and no crossing left, which is exactly why she has not done it. It is a real reason. It is also how she has managed never to choose a name.

Outcomes

They spend a haul. Across in ten minutes, recorded in a hand that does not editorialize. The next time they come through Overcut, somebody there knows exactly whose meal that was.

They take the old cut. They arrive a day late and cold, probably one member short of upright, and the count is untouched. Ingrith notes that too, in the same column.

They argue her down. She runs the line out that night for people instead of flour. Eleven come down with Elowen Tasker first, and nineteen watch the cage go. If the low road opens on the ninth day, she spent her crossing on eleven who would have walked out anyway. If it opens on the fourteenth, she saved eleven lives and cost nineteen their food line. She will not know which for a week, and neither will your party.

They take the winch by force. They get across, Ingrith lets them, and the count is still eleven and still hers. A table that tries to win this by force finds out there was nothing to win.

What they leave with: no coin and no gear. If they argue the count down, eleven people and the nineteen they did not take.

Mechanics

Read the count (Wisdom / Insight, DC 13). On a success the party sees what Ingrith is standing on top of: she is frightened of that number and she has no better one. Failure costs only the benefit of the doubt, and she reads as a toll-keeper inventing a shortage.

Read the rope (Intelligence / Investigation, DC 15). A character proficient with carpenter's tools or weaver's tools has advantage. On a success, say it plainly: one strand of three is gone, the other two are sound as far as anyone can reach, and no honest person could turn that into a number. Fail-forward: they learn the fray is real and take the eleven as fact, which makes the third door much harder to argue.

Argue the count (skill challenge, three successes before two failures, all DC 15). Charisma (Persuasion) to get her to say out loud that the number is a guess. Intelligence (Investigation) to show her what the fray actually means, available only if somebody made the rope check. Wisdom (Insight) to name the thing under it: she has been rationing a rope so that she never has to decide about Elowen Tasker's leg. At two failures she goes quiet and thanks them for their opinion, and the eleven stands. She will still run the cage for them, which is the cruelty of her.

The old cut (Strength / Athletics, DC 13 per pitch). Two pitches on the far wall, an hour each, with the Halfway Bench between them. The Bench sits thirty feet above the scree and is eight feet wide, and the top of the upper pitch is forty feet above the Bench. A failed pitch drops nobody: it costs an hour and a level of exhaustion, and they try again.

Reaching for the wheel (Dexterity / Acrobatics, DC 10). Luring Song does not make anyone step off the wall. It makes them want to be nearer the sound, and a quarry notch is eleven inches wide. At the start of each of its turns while charmed and on the stair, a creature makes this check. On a failure it comes off: from the lower pitch, a thirty-foot fall to the scree for 3d6 bludgeoning damage, and the slope carries them the rest of the way down prone; from the upper pitch, a forty-foot fall to the Bench for 4d6 bludgeoning damage, prone on the ledge. A fall is damage from a source other than the harpy, so the save against the song repeats at once. A character who comes off is out of the fight and has to climb their pitch again. Nobody dies of this wall unless your table wants them to.

Ingrith Lorimer. SRD commoner, with Insight and Persuasion at +5. She will not fight for the winch. If the party takes it by force she steps back and lets them, and writes down what they took.

Scaling

Party	The fight, from the tool
3rd	Three whistlers as written, Hard at 1,200 adjusted XP. The wall is the dangerous part, not the birds.
<3rd	Skip the cut, or run a single whistler as a warning that turns the party back to the winch. The conversation works at any level.
4th	Four whistlers, 800 XP raw, 1,600 adjusted, still Hard (thresholds 500 / 1,000 / 1,500 / 2,000).
5th	Whistlers stop being a threat and the tool says so plainly: six against four 5th-level characters is 2,400 adjusted against a Medium threshold of 2,000. Lean on the light clock and the cold instead of adding bodies.
More	Add whistlers. Never make Ingrith a fight. She is not an obstacle. She is the person who did the arithmetic first.

d10: What the Skarn does while you are on the wall

Roll once per pitch, or whenever the climb needs a heartbeat. Most of these cost a decision rather than hit points.

Roll the wall

d10	What the Skarn does
1	The notch is ice. One notch is filled flush with clear ice and looks exactly like stone from below. The first character to weight it makes a DC 10 Dexterity (Acrobatics) check or hangs by the hands, which costs their next turn getting back on.
2	The updraft. Warm air comes off the open water below and goes straight up the wall. It is the first warm thing anybody has felt in two days and it makes a person want to stay exactly where they are.
3	Somebody's rope. A fixed line, nine years old, knotted through a notch by a person who did not come back. It will hold a pack. Nobody will agree on whether it will hold a person, and finding out is a decision rather than a check.
4	The horn. Osric Deben's voice comes off the far shelf, close enough now to make out words. He is not calling to the party. He is reading the list again, and they can hear which day it has got down to.
5	One goes past. A whistler crosses the face forty feet out, unhurried, not looking at anybody, and lands somewhere above. It does not attack. It has seen them, and now they know that it has.
6	The ice shelf lets go. Below them the river takes back a slab of its own cover with a sound like a door slamming in a stone room. Anyone still to make the bottom crossing has colder water to make it in.
7	A handhold that is not stone. Fingers close on something smooth and light and wrong in the dark, and it comes away. It is a finger bone, and it belongs to one of the four who did not come off this wall.
8	The sun leaves. Tick the light clock whether it was due or not. The far wall goes blue, the notches begin to glaze, and every Athletics check on the cut is DC 15 from here.
9	A place to stand. A ledge wide enough for two people to sit down with their backs to the rock. It is the only genuinely good thing on this wall. Give it to them. Tell them what it costs in hours and let them take it anyway.
10	The wheel turns. Everybody on the wall hears the winch working, plain and unmistakable, from a quarter mile south where nobody is standing. It might be the wind in a notch. It might be Ingrith spending a haul she said she would not spend. It is neither, and they will argue about it the rest of the way up.

Running this somewhere else

Two rows of the d10 carry any mechanics at all. Row 1 asks for a DC 10 Dexterity check against a slip, and row 8 raises the climb difficulty to DC 15. Everything else on that table is the gorge behaving like a gorge. The fight wants a flying ambusher with a song that pulls people toward it, which every game has under some name.

The count is not a rule at all. It is one woman on a ledge with a rope, and a number nobody can check.

DM cheat sheet

Auto-built from every data-dc, data-hp, stat block, preset clock and pre-loaded combatant in this file. Prints on its own sheet.