Casting the Solstice Bell

Bellfounder.
The bell in Orten, up north, has cracked. Strike it and the note splits in two.
Cast a new bell before the solstice and hang it in that tower. Your job is to put the town's nights back inside a ring of sound.
Source the copper and tin on site. Ask the townsfolk for clay, charcoal and hands. You have twenty days from pulling the mold to pouring the melt.
If the bell is not ringing by solstice night, returning the melt will be the least of it. The whole town will fail to see the other side of that night.
I am sending you as my apprentice. This is also your test to stand on your own.

The sender is your master in the royal capital, who has cast eleven bells in the last twenty years. At the bottom of the letter he had added only this: look at the mold before you touch the melt, and smell the earth before you look at the mold. You memorized that one line sitting on top of the cargo, and loaded copper, tin and tools onto the wagon bound north.

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🔔 The Cracked Bell Tower

Orten is a stone town on the northern frontier of the Kingdom of Verna, opening out at the foot of an oak forest. A single bell tower stands at its center, and from sundown to dawn the bell is struck once every hour. No monster enters the range the bell's sound reaches. That is common knowledge in this kingdom, and the fields and pastures are laid out to fit inside the circle the bell can cover.

At the start of December, that bell cracked. Every strike splits the note in two, and between one beat and the next, a silent gap opens. The tower keeper calls that gap the break, and she believes that the longer the break grows, the closer the forest comes. At this rate, the sound will not hold through solstice night.

🔨 The Three

Cordelia Weiss / 25 / Tower Keeper
The one who keeps striking the cracked bell anyway. She carries a spear taller than she is, and belts a thick wool cloak at the waist with a leather strap. She speaks in a calm, polite register, but once the talk turns to the beat her phrasing changes and she runs long. If someone looks sleepy, she will silently hand them a blanket mid-sentence.

Violetta Carmina / 25 / Court Mage
Dispatched from the capital, she plugs the hour of the break with lightning. The little pouches of catalyst at her hip empty out one by one, night after night. At court she never shows a crack, yet the moment she runs out of something she starts rummaging through her sleeves and talking fast.

Liese Ambros / 21 / Scout of the Forest Folk
She watches the north road that comes down into Orten. In the forest she never says a word, but once she comes down into town she wants to hear people talk and won't leave your side. She reads tracks not by their depth but by how the edges crumble.

🧱 How to Play

Three chapters. In the first, you arrive in Orten and see the cracked bell and the three of them. Judging the copper and tin, the clay mold, the hands to build the furnace: all of it comes down to negotiating with the townsfolk.

What happens during the night depends on whether the bell rings. Violetta's nitre sand is finite, and Liese's watch reaches only as far as the forest's edge. Each time, what you decide is how far to push today, and what to cut before the solstice.