Troubles

A Trouble is a quick kit for a place: what is going on there and who is tangled up in it. It has six parts, a Premise, an Enemy, a Friend, a Complication, a Thing and a Place, and each part comes from its own set of one-roll tables. A Trouble is a prompt for you to build on, not a finished answer: keep what gives you an idea and leave the rest.

How to build one

1. Pick the column. Every set has five columns. Choose the one that fits where the posse is and read every set from it: Wilds (open country with no settlement); Outpost (a camp, steading, trading post, fort or mine); Town (an established frontier town); City (a large settlement with real power structures); Route (a rail line, river or road, and the people travelling it). Tables marked “all columns” are the same wherever you are.
2. Roll the Premise. Roll a d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and d20 together and read each die on its table. The Premise is the anchor; read everything else in its light.
3. Roll the other five sets the same way, staying in your column. Each set only uses the dice it has tables for, and has its own sentence frame.
4. Interpret. Read it all together and look for the thread. When two results seem to disagree, don't reroll: ask what would make both true. That answer is usually the best part.
5. Record it with the location. When the posse comes back, reroll only the d4 Pressure to see how things have moved on.

Good to know

• The frames are a reading aid, not a rule. Reword, reorder or ignore them.
• The people caught up in the Premise can be the same people as the Enemy or the Friend.
• If Route results mix rail, river and road, the place is where they meet.
• Roll a single set when you only need one piece: Friends for a helpful stranger, Places for a scene, Things for something to chase.
• Roll a set twice for a second Enemy or Friend, or a second Premise to see how two Troubles collide in one place.
• Choose instead of rolling whenever you like, or roll and then change one result.

Troubles and hexploration

Hex discovery says what is in a hex; a Trouble says what is happening there.

• Only features with people or something at stake get a Trouble. A homestead does; a dry waterhole doesn't.
• The discovery picks the column: wilderness features use Wilds; a camp, steading, mine or fort uses Outpost; a settlement uses Town or City by size; a road, river or rail hex uses Route.
• A world hex (24 miles) gets a Premise only: the region's background pressure.
• League hexes (3 miles) get full Troubles for their features, read in light of the regional one. Where a local Trouble clashes with the regional one, that clash is the adventure.
• Optional: a hex with Leyline Strength may take Ley & Aether as its Theme instead of rolling.