The Lighthouse Keeper's Log

You are the keeper of a light on a rock, alone, for twenty-one nights of one bad season. Every night you roll the weather, roll what the watch brings, and write the entry. A smack runs too close to the teeth. Something comes in on the tide. The fog starts answering your lamp. Ten or fifteen minutes a night, two ordinary d6 and a pen.

Then you decide where the entry goes. A station logbook is Board property and it gets read — by an inspector, by a clerk, by whoever keeps this light after you. So every night the entry goes either in the Log, plain and factual and legible to strangers, or in the Margin, the narrow column nobody collects. That single choice, twenty-one times, walks a nine-step meter between Company and Isolation and decides which of six endings you get. Neither end is the good end. They are just two different people to have been by the last night.

Everything the game rolls on is printed in the book. No GM, no other rulebook, no app, no deck:

• Three weather tables that get worse on a schedule as the season turns, each result carrying a Strain value the light is measured against
• A 36-result d6×d6 night oracle — six Quarters (Seaward, the Shore, the Tower, the Quarters, Landward, the Light Itself) and what was there
• Ships Sighted, and a 2d6 table for what the sea leaves at the waterline
• An optional six-rung ladder for the thing in the fog, with three ways to resolve the sixth rung and none of them free
• The Light, the Oil and the Stores, and one d6 Tending roll a night to keep her lit
• The supply tender, three times a season, when she comes at all
• Six endings keyed to which column ran longer and what state you left the light in

Eighteen pages, set like an issued station logbook rather than a gothic curio. Three of them are printable sheets you will use again and again — including the two-column entry page that is the mechanic. Both A4 and US Letter editions are included, identical in content, so you can print on whatever paper you actually own.