The Wandering Herbalist

You do not have a shop. You have a satchel, a circuit, and whatever the road gave you this morning. Every other herbalist game puts you behind a counter or in a garden that stays put. This one puts you on the road: seven villages, once around one season, and then back to the first of them. You arrive, you find out what the walk in gave you, you open the door to whoever comes, and you make something out of what you are actually carrying — which is rarely the right thing, and which is where the game is. Nothing restocks between chapters. What you spend in Thornmere in the thaw is not in the satchel when you come over the ridge into Saltwick in the heat, and the villages remember how you left them. Seven sittings of about an hour, one player, one pencil, a d6 and a d8. Twenty-five pages: Seven village chapters, each with its own season, its own colour, its own local rule and its own d6/d8 tables Twelve real roadside plants, drawn as pressed specimens, keyed to six invented virtues — Sharp, Sweet, Bitter, Green, Root, Cold Forty-two ailments across the circuit, and a pairing system where a Partial result costs you something in the next village The satchel, Standing and coin, all carried forward the whole way round Six write-on sheets: the circuit, the satchel and tracks, a two-page daybook, a debts page, and a Field Herbarium you fill in as you go and keep when the season is done Two editions in the download, A4 and US Letter A plain note, because the book makes it too: the twelve plants are real and ordinary, and everything this book says about them is invented for play. No ailment in the tables is a real condition and no pairing is a remedy. It is a game about a job, not a herbal.