System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

The Porter's Yoke

The burden is a rule you keep, not a weight you drag — keeping it is the whole of the work

Stands outside the city. Press [E] there to shoulder a stone — one of three burdens, each a straight distance target rather than anything with actual mechanical weight:

Three rules, while it's on your shoulder

• Do not jump. A long fall counts as a jump too.
• Do not run.
• Do not be hit.

Break any one of the three and the stone comes straight off. Crucially, carrying a stone doesn't slow you down or change how you move in any way at all — the burden is a rule to keep, not a weight dragging on your character. A pace is simply one metre actually walked, measured as distance travelled rather than distance from the yoke itself, so any route at all works, including wandering somewhere and back with no particular destination in mind.

A dropped stone lies where it fell

Breaking a rule doesn't erase progress outright — the stone lies exactly where it was dropped. Walk back to it, press [E], and pick the carry back up from that exact spot. Only the running tally toward the current target resets; the ground already covered is never taken back from the permanent record.

The Porter's Ledger

[F10] opens it: which stone is currently on your shoulder, which burden comes next, the current tally, and a permanent roll of every carry ever completed. Leaning on [E] at the yoke never ends a carry already in progress, and the yoke is endlessly repeatable — nothing already carried can ever be taken back once it's done.

What it pays

Nothing — no coin, no items, no experience, no stats, no drops. Getting the stone there is the entire point of the exercise.

Version history

• The Porter's Yoke added, as the fifth in a run of five consecutive single-purpose "station" versions (alongside the Oathstone, the Prentice Step, The Finder's Post, and the earlier Road Post) — each excellent on its own, and, at the time, each completely sealed off from the others with no shared connection to the city they all stand outside of.

Trivia

• The three burdens scale purely by distance, not by any in-game weight or stat requirement — the millstone is simply the field stone's challenge stretched to nearly seven times the length, with identical rules governing all three.
• Because carrying a stone changes nothing about movement itself, the entire challenge lives in discipline rather than in any stat check — a maximally strong, maximally fast character faces exactly the same three rules as a fresh one.