Scriptorium on
Reflections Day
A Module For Wanderhome
Wanderhome is copyright of Possum Creek Games Inc. Scriptorium on Reflections Day is an
independent production by Andrew Aulenback and Eric Drew, borrowing a format by Elizabeth
Rosenberg, and is not affiliated with Possum Creek Games Inc. It is published under the Wanderhome
Third Party License.
How to Use This Module
This module contains a location, a few kith, and a list of questions. It can be played with
or without a guide, though it was originally conceived as a guided module. Your group
can choose to use it as an adventure to resolve, a mystery to explore, or simply as an
environment to be amazed by and to pass through. It is meant to be just one part of the
greater journey you create.
If You Are A Guide
1. Get your party’s okay to deal with issues surrounding pride and humility.
Discuss everyone’s boundaries and comfort level.
2. Read through the module and decide what you think is going on here. Answer
the questions from the list, as many as you feel are necessary.
3. Decide what information you want to be openly available in advance, and what
information you want the players to work for.
4. Look up the natures for each location and make note of what they can do.
5. Fill the valley out with more kith, as you normally would.
6. Start guiding your players.
If You Are A Guideless Party
1. Discuss everyone’s boundaries and comfort level dealing with the issues of pride and
humility.
2. Read through the module together and let the mystery of it sink in.
3. Read the questions from the list and start thinking about them.
4. Look up the natures for each location and make note of what they can do.
5. Fill the valley out with more kith, as you normally would.
6. Ask your start of session questions, and reveal the mystery of what is going on in
this module through play.
The Story
The Scriptorium on Reflections Day is bustling busy, with so many crafters, crofters,
farmers, and travelers from the surrounding field-lands arriving to make their donations.
While some few visitors come year ‘round to the Scriptorium, seeking to petition for
answers to questions, or to donate written records of what they have seen and done,
Reflections Day tradition here is for each kith to write an account of their year past, to
donate to the Scriptorium’s immense library.
Our troupe of wanderers is passing through just as the Reflections Day holiday is
arriving. All three roads to here, from here, are full of buggy mounts and carts and
wagons and kith. Along the roads, innumerable shrines to various small and forgotten
gods - some local, others built for travelers to keep touch with the spirits of home - each
are gifted some small token by all the passers-by. Beyond them, in the fields, circles of
tall wild-grasses get trodden down, and small camps have sprung up, awaiting
Reflections Day in a day or two. Bonfires and pilgrims’ campfires can be seen in the
evenings, flickering beyond the tall grass.
What story of your year will you write, or draw, or map, or journal, to tell and to donate
to the Scriptorium for Reflections Day?
Time: It is currently almost Reflections Day, at the end of Breathe (p. 218). You might
well have met some visitors who are now here, somewhere else before.
Questions
➢ How do we ensure that we can remember our past?
➢ What is the best way to organize things, memories, objects, to help?
➢ How do we figure out what help someone actually needs?
➢ How important is humility? Pride in ourselves?
➢ How are traditions important?
➢ Who is the most essential person that you know?
➢ Where do we go for answers when we have pressing questions?
Locations and Kith
In order to minimize the amount of content duplicated from the Wanderhome core
book, the module either does things slightly differently from the book or lists page
numbers rather than copying bullet points over from the text.
Each location has a description rather than a list of aesthetic elements. To see what each
location can always do, look up the natures listed at the beginning of its description.
Rather than each kith having assigned traits and dealing with deciding what the kith
can do based on that, each kith has a proportional number of things they can always do
that are not quite like any specific trait included in the book.
The Location: the Scriptorium
Natures: Road (p. 160), Monastery (p. 143), Tower (p. 144)
Description: Many, many roadside shrines line the three ways here. Rolling hillsides of
long, wild grasses surround the walled monastery that can be found here at the crossroads
where those ways meet. Deep grooves have been worn in the roads, by the annual
passage of thousands upon thousand of wagons - the Scriptorium stands at the crossroads
of major trade roads, so there are always some folks passing through. Tradition holds
that some offering is left at every shrine that a traveler passes along this stretch of road.
The monastery itself is built of ruddy sandstone, its walls high, and its bell-tower higher
yet. Each hour through the day, the bells ring, shaking the observatory built on the
tower’s top floor, and the winding spiral staircase to the top that is lined as well with little
shrines to small and forgotten gods, in alcoves all the way up.
Beyond the bell tower, and the modest rooms, the largest part of the Scriptorium is the
library itself, a room whose walls of diamond-shaped shelves reach dozens of feet high
toward the vaulted ceiling so far above, in a single, long, spiraling row toward the top.
Each cubby holds scrolls, and books, and maps, and letters, sorted by when they were
written, archived by year, and month, and day. Long ladders, pulleys with baskets, and
ropes with tied hand-holds allow access upward to the monks, and the library is always
bustling. This year’s additions can be found over three-quarters of the way to the top,
with empty cubbies above them - some spaces near the top are still being built.
Research petitions arriving at the gates, after making their case to the officiant and
donating an account to the library’s archive, will need to wait for quite some time before
the monks will be able to sort out the exact when of their question, and thus know where
to begin searching through manuscripts, books, maps, sketches, and so on. Patience is
essential here, as is humility.
Folklore:
➢ The promise of the crossroads shrine(s).
➢ Secret lessons from the janitor.
➢ The observatory on the top floor of the tower, above the bells.
Reflections Day is an alternate holiday celebrated at the end of Breathe (p. 218).
Small and Forgotten Gods:
There are any number of shrines to small and forgotten gods along the three roads from
here, that roll out from this crossroads. Many are the homes of assorted small and
forgotten gods, left here by caretakers who sought for them a place where they would be
seen, remembered, and honoured. Others are local spirits, from the surrounding miles
and miles of farms and fields. More small and forgotten gods, and more variety, than can
easily be counted.
Kith:
The Abbott
Pronouns: she/her
Description: A grey squirrel in simple robes, the Abbott is humility personified. She is
the eighth Abbott, each in turn has given up their name, and taken the name “Abbott.”.
The Abbott can always:
● Ask for advice, or ask your thoughts on the matter.
● Ask if you want her opinion.
● Lay out the facts again, as they have been told to her, to make sure you agree.
● Propose a path that is entirely unlike anything expected.
Gus
Pronouns: they/them
Description: Gus the tortoise is the monastery’s janitor, or “sweeper.” Gus is the second
janitor here, having been left as an egg at one of the shrines, and found by the officiant of
that time. He is very slow, and never seen to actually clean, and yet everywhere ends up
pristine as he arrives, as everyone else hastily tidies before his arrival. The Abbott
secretly considers him the highest authority at the monastery.
Gus can always:
● Take their time. Careful is as careful does.
● Help someone to seek guidance from the world around them, as answers are always
there to be found if one only looks.
● Offer a story, slowly, that has not been heard in a very long time, and a very slow walk
to see the thing itself. Gus remembers everything, but everything takes patience.
Brother Iotor of Azaban
Pronouns: he/him
Description: This raccoon is the officiant, the first member of the monastery’s order that
travelers meet at the gate, and the one in charge of each day collecting and sorting all the
offerings left at the road-side shrines, and in turn their distribution to those petitioners in
need who can have their troubles solved by gifting them these things. He is somewhat
self-important, and far less humble than his superiors, but as far as he thinks, he is the one
who really runs the monastery’s work.
Iotor can always:
● Figure out the real use of an offering left at the shrines.
● Give instructions, and assume they will be followed.
● Ask “What is really your trouble?” Not answering him truthfully costs a token.
● Hold something up to the light to examine it closely.
Kith: Of people, there are especially fieldmice and squirrels. Of livestock there are
especially large, lumbering beetles hooked up to wagons, or tied out to graze in the
grasses..
