How trails work
Every number below is the one the server draws and pays by. There is nothing hidden and nothing rounded for display.
Finding a note
A fight won sometimes turns up a note: the chance is the fight's seconds in 10,800, about one every 3 hours of winning. The chance grows with how long the fight took, so a quick kill is no better a source than a slow one. Losing, fleeing and gathering find none. Your first note comes for certain on the fight that takes your combat to 10, or past it.
A note is from one of the bands of combat levels below, drawn evenly from the bands you have opened. You hold one unread note a band, so a note always comes from a band you hold none from, and with one from every band in hand, none turns up. A note never expires.
The bands
Each band is a country, from the level its first places open, and its note is named by what it is written on. It opens to you once 3 of its places are open to you.
Reading a note
Notes are read on the Here tab of wherever you stand, one trail at a time. Reading one lays out its trail there and then: 3 to 5 steps in that band's country, shown one at a time, taking turns between going somewhere and killing something, and always ending on going somewhere.
A place can be anywhere in the band you can enter: a town, the arena or a boss's room among them. The place you read the note in counts as visited, and no place comes twice while the band has others. A kill step asks for 10 of something in a place of the band, never a boss and never above your combat level. It counts from the moment it becomes your step, so kills before it do not go toward it, and a kill on a trail counts toward a contract for the same monster too.
A step to go somewhere is done when a walk ends there, or when you stop a walk there. Passing through on the way somewhere else does not count. A kill step is checked by the walk after it. A step whose place or monster has since left the world counts as done.
The casket
The walk that finishes the last step opens the casket. It holds what a contract would pay for the trail's kills, before any streak, shown from the moment the note is read:
coins = each kill step's kills × what its monster pays in coins × 100%
And one find, from those listed below for the note the trail was read from, each as likely as the others, and one you already have can come again. Finds are kept in your Ledger. They cannot be sold, banked or lost.
Abandoning
You can abandon a trail from the Here tab. Nothing else is owed, but the note is lost: it cannot be read again for a different trail.
Finds from scraps
Off a milestone that once said how far it was to somewhere. The somewhere has worn away.
A brass snuffer from a window that is never dark, and its cup has not once been sooted.
Fell from the hollow oak in Greenglade, and it is hollow too. Something in it is listening.
Sooted on the inside from years under an eave, and it smells of the oil yet.
A ribbon once tied to a lance for luck, and faded to no colour at all by the luck it brought.
Drawn from a cart sunk to its bed in the reeds, with the load still aboard and still unweighed.
Finds from folded notes
Cut from the flag still upright halfway across the ford, and it has never quite dried.
Locks the gate with no wall either side of it. Nobody has ever once needed to use it.
Pushed out of the course that was laid round something, and scored on the face that was inside.
Raked from a brazier on the doubled wall, where they burn all night, and warm in the hand yet.
Worn to a point at the tip, and it taps out a step of its own when nobody is holding it.
Twisted out of a hurdle of the pen, and still bent to the shape of the waiting it kept in.
Finds from sealed letters
Taken from a mound already open. Whoever it was buried with has not yet come to ask for it.
Picked up warm from the ground at Emberfall, and it has not cooled in a pocket since.
Frayed at both ends, and nobody on the Gallowsway will say which end was the one in use.
Burned at the head of a slab in the dead-house, and put out the day the cart stopped coming.
A cork float off a fowler's net, come up green and late from the floor of the mere.
Spun round something the stalkers carried up to the crowns, and whatever it was has gone quiet.
Finds from waxed maps
A pebble off the second wall, glazed through in the worst of the fighting and not yet cool.
Kept back for a sowing that never came, and gone a colour no seed ought to go.
Broken from the rim of a pit with half a tally cut in it, and the other half still owed.
Knocked out of a leaf of the outer gate as it came down, and as straight as the day it was forged.
A page of the garrison roll with every name still on it, and room left at the foot for more.
A glass stopper from an alembic still warm under the garden wall. It fits nothing out here.
Finds from gilded writs
Set at the long table for a guest who never sat down. Nothing has eaten off it since.
Snapped off the yew that climbed the spire stair from the inside, and as grey as the day it grew.
Sifted warm out of the ash in the drift, and it was the window of something once.
Rings like a struck pot when it is dropped, as the sheets it was broken from do underfoot.
A flake off a terrace, yellow and brittle, that has not stopped smelling of what came up under it.
Dented, and whatever water goes in comes out with a hint of sulphur, however clean it looked.
Every number on these pages is read from the same rows the game runs on, so it cannot drift out of date. Drop chances are exact.