A mercy mission carrying desperately needed supplies through forty miles of deadly winter wilderness reveals a sealed letter with an impossible order: the king has chosen who lives and who dies, and now so must you.
Welcome to “The King’s Mercy” 5E adventure! Within these pages, you’ll discover everything necessary to embark on this thrilling quest, complete with detailed descriptions of locations, encounters, NPCs and stat blocks, maps, and handouts.
This adventure also features a versatile and scalable system, allowing Game Masters to easily adjust the difficulty and complexity of encounters to suit their players’ preferences and skill levels. Whether you have a party of advanced players or beginners, you can tailor the challenges to ensure an exciting and engaging experience for everyone involved. The scalable system guides modifying creature statistics, making it simple to customize the adventure to fit your party’s level.
In “The King’s Mercy,” a party of 3-5 characters (levels 4-5) is recruited by Lord Castellan Roderic Blackmoor to transport food, medicine, and firewood across forty miles of frozen wilderness to Northhaven — a border village of 200 civilians and a 40-soldier royal garrison, both facing starvation after an early winter sealed the mountain passes before the final supply caravans could arrive. The reward is 400 gp and the lives of 240 people. The characters also carry a sealed letter bearing King Thane’s personal wax seal — magically trapped — to be delivered unopened into the hands of garrison commander Captain Brenna Ironhelm. What begins as a heroic mercy mission becomes a test of values when the letter’s contents are revealed: the king has run the arithmetic of survival, and he has chosen the garrison. The adventure is divided into three parts and is designed for a single 3-4 hour session.
Part 1: The Hook
Lord Castellan Blackmoor briefs the party in Kingsford’s war room, genuinely believing this is a straightforward mercy mission — he has no idea what the sealed letter contains, and he is immovable on both the reward and the sealed-orders policy. The party is outfitted with winter gear and an enchanted supply sled, and faces its first quiet choice before even leaving the city: how many personal rations to take from the sled, knowing every pound removed is a pound denied to a starving village. An optional scout, weathered northern veteran Gunther Frostwalker, can be hired to ease the journey ahead — though there is one creature on the route he flatly refuses to face.
Part 2: The Frozen Journey
The forty-mile trek unfolds over several days, governed by interlocking survival mechanics for cold exposure, travel speed, navigation, and exhaustion — the winter itself is an antagonist, and a party that manages rations and rest poorly will arrive in no condition to face what waits. From a roster of journey events, the GM selects several to shape the trek: a punishing blizzard, an avalanche zone with a safe detour or a risky crossing, a treacherous frozen river, and the territory of a frost giant best handled with caution rather than steel. The journey’s hardest moment is Sergeant Kara Thornfeld and her band of desperate refugees — former soldiers and emaciated children, survivors of a village that already starved, now blocking the trail to rob the sled. They can be fought, reasoned with, or won over, and what the party shares with them echoes into the adventure’s final choice. The only route into Northhaven’s valley is Wyvern’s Pass, blocked by an injured, starving wyvern maddened by two weeks of pain. The party can fight it, feed it, heal its broken wing, or slip past unseen — and a wyvern shown mercy may remember it.
Part 3: The Village Crisis
Northhaven is a corpse of a village — silent homes, hollow-eyed children at the windows, no smoke from most chimneys, the king’s banner still flying over the fortress. Captain Brenna Ironhelm meets the party professionally but visibly crushed, and when the sealed letter is placed in her hands she reads it twice in silence. The king’s order is stark: the supplies are for the garrison alone; the two hundred civilians are a strategic sacrifice. And the Captain, unable to carry the decision by herself, looks to the party. Four paths open from here — follow the king’s orders, defy them, broker a compromise that keeps everyone alive on the edge of starvation, or attempt a creative solution that demands real sacrifice — and each carries its own reward, its own cost, and its own consequences in Kingsford and Northhaven alike. Every major NPC, from an eighty-year servant of the crown to a priest of divine mercy to a soldier who cannot celebrate his own survival, responds in their own voice. The adventure offers no perfect answer — only the one the party can live with.
Release Date: 2025 Format: Digital (PDF)
Items Included
- The King’s Mercy 5E (PDF)
- A B&W Printer-Friendly Version (PDF)
- Maps
- Illustrations (Generated with Midjourney)
- Monster Stat Blocks
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