Making things in Coldkiln is illegal.
Mending them isn't.
Tobin Ward spent eleven years keeping other people alive — with a whetstone, a needle, a cook pot and a knack for noticing which strap was about to fail. His company made their names. He made their repairs. When they finally got their charter, they left him off it.
So he takes his last purse to Coldkiln: a frontier town slowly emptying since the Artisans' Concord pulled its charter and made it unlawful to sell anything the town actually makes. He buys the ruined guild hall, because a building nobody can legally work in is very, very cheap.
Then the System offers him a class everyone agrees is a joke. Half experience. No specialty. No bonuses of any kind.
No cap.
He can't sell so much as a spoon. But nothing in the charter says a man can't mend — and a town that has been living with its broken things for nine years turns out to have a great deal that wants fixing. A door. A shutter. A cradle. A chimney that has not drawn since before the boy next door could read.
Winter is eleven weeks out. The hall has no roof.
Crafting · Progression · Slice of Life · Community Building · Low crunch · No combat
A man learns every trade in the world, badly, in order — and the town he learns them in comes back to life around him. One craft a book, from a chair that doesn't wobble to a chartered school.
New chapters, release dates, and the occasional piece about how a thing is actually made — a drawbored joint, a chimney throat, why a riven handle outlasts a sawn one. No schedule, no filler, and one click to leave.
The Offcuts isn't open yet. When it is, there'll be a box here and one letter whenever a book goes up.
Until then: [email protected] — say "offcuts" and you'll be on the list the day it exists.
T.J. Calder writes cozy crafting LitRPG about people who are good with their hands and bad at being thanked for it. The Common Crafter is his first series.
He is interested in the parts of a building nobody looks at: the joint between two trades, the drain that has been working for a hundred and forty years, the wedge somebody's father whittled and drove in badly. Most of the research is done with the wrong tool and takes twice as long as it should.