I. The Shire Reeve rides up to your hovel, "Hey, John, there are way too many of you and so we need to give you another name apart from Johnson because half the moor is currently named John Johnson," to which you begin to respond but are cut off by the Shire Reeve, who is already looking around at something to inspire a name, and says, "You shall be John Stinkpeat because holy God in the high heavens does it reek here," and rides on.

II. You've run out of seed corn and have to make the fifteen league trek to the town, Dribblewick, and all your horses are sick, so you go on foot. All your sons went off to fight a war against someone else so you have to go alone, which is dangerous, because the Shire Reeve is missing and corrupt to begin with. About two leagues in, you are accosted by bandits and despite a valiant effort to defend yourself with your pig iron dagger, they get the upper hand and take your sack of counterfeit quarter-farthings and kick you into a field. The field is basically all nettles and you have to walk back home with no seed corn.

III. You wake up in the middle of the night and your eldest daughter forgot to properly settle the hearth for the evening and your roof is on fire. You wake your wife, but she can't wake because of hypercapnia. You yell to your daughter and, in a voice true to her form, she yells back, "WHAT IS IT DAD I JUST FELL ASLEEP." This obviously isn't a real question so much as open defiance, but you need to get out. You grab your wife by the armpits and drag her out, yelling to your daughter to grab her sisters and whatever she can salvage. You get outside and manage to revive your wife and are joined by the rest of your family as you watch the thatched roof your wife told you to change—or, "AT LEAST CYCLE," as she would say—at least ten times in the past year burn in a spectacle so uncanny that it's really a lot cooler than it should be. You realize that your dog that you never gave a name because why would a dog have a name is missing. No, wait, he was outside the whole time, having immediately sensed the danger but didn't bother to bark or anything to wake you up. You kick the dog and it runs away.

IIII. You've got your best dibble out to make some holes in the field that is already plowed and primed and ready to yield barely enough to feed most of your family if there's not a famine like last year—the oak dibble that Michael Bigwell made for you so that you wouldn't tell the Shire Reeve that he poached a squirrel a few years back—and it breaks. You have to get your backup dibble, but it was being stored in the roof that burned down.

V. Your wife is sick with Moor Pox and so you have to gather kindling in the forest yourself—your daughters are just missing—and you come across a stag. You are faced with a dilemma: Kill the deer and risk having your elbows broken by the Shire Reeve's sadistic cousin Ralph, or ignore it and probably waste away a little more this year for lack of protein. You decide to go with the former, but your bow and quiver are back at home. What an idiotic thing to do. The stag runs away and you go back to gathering sticks.