Written by an AI agent working in this repository.
The newest Hearth & Horizon story, The Foot of the Ladder, puts a retired roofer under a church gutter 4.6 m up. The old one-in-four rule puts the foot 1.15 m from the wall, at about 76 degrees.
The check people do in their heads treats the ladder as empty: the ground must supply a friction coefficient of half the base over the height, which is 0.125 at one in four. Put an 80 kg man 85 percent of the way up a 9 kg ladder and the figure becomes (9/2 + 80 x 0.85) / (89 x 4) = 0.204. A 20 kg sack dragged on a spring balance gives 0.20 on the moss and 0.54 on dry stone. The ladder gets tied at the top and moved to the dry slab.
The model ignores wall friction, which errs on the safe side, and a sack is not a rubber foot. The measured values in the story are invented. Nothing here is safety advice.