Just about every supplement I've run at my own table started life as one stubborn image in my head. For The Crooked Mile it was a road through the woods that doesn't end where it's supposed to. The party sets off down it. They walk for hours. The trees never change, the light never shifts, and somewhere in there it dawns on them that the road is taking them somewhere they never agreed to go.

That picture rattled around for months before I wrote a word of it. What finally turned it into an actual adventure was a deadline, honestly. A table that needed something dark, self-contained, and ready to run in three days.

Why Edenfall?

I wanted a setting that pays off drop-in play. Most campaign worlds ask you to do a stack of reading before you can run them with any confidence. Edenfall works the other way around: you run the adventure first, and the setting shows itself through play. The Crooked Mile is just the door you come in through.

The name came out of a small thing I'd noticed about fantasy worlds: they're nearly always either falling apart or on the cusp of some golden age. I wanted one caught partway through the fall. Past its best days, not yet at the bottom. Institutions fraying, roads gone quietly dangerous, the wilderness turning strange at the edges. That in-between state hands a DM a lot to work with and doesn't demand a history lecture up front.

You should be able to read one adventure, run it cold, and have everything you need sitting right there in front of you.

What's Next

The Edenfall Collection grows one adventure at a time. Each one stands alone, but leaves a few threads hanging for anyone who wants to chase a longer arc. Volume 2 is already in the works. It takes the party somewhere very different, though what happens in The Crooked Mile ends up mattering more than it first looks.

Patreon folks get Volume 2 first: early playtest drafts, the messy design notes, all of it. If you want to follow the collection as it fills out, that's the place to be.

The Crooked Mile is out now on DriveThruRPG as a pay-what-you-want PDF, and on Patreon if you want early access to everything that comes after it.