Under One Sky

You take a chair outside and you sit in the dark.

Your eyes need about twenty minutes to open all the way, and every light that comes on in that time — a porch, headlights across the fence, your own phone — puts you back to the beginning. Meanwhile you are getting colder, and the cold does not reset. That tension is the whole game. Every Watch you stay out opens a deeper group of the constellation atlas; the faintest things in the book are only reachable on the last Watch a body will take.

Under One Sky is a solo journaling RPG about one season of backyard stargazing — twelve to sixteen nights, one per sitting, fifteen to twenty-five minutes each. Roll what the sky is actually doing (most nights are not clear), pick a group you are dark enough to read, go and look for the thing it names, and write the entry.

Then there is the Lookback, which is what makes it a journal rather than a lookup table. Every atlas entry carries its star's real distance, so the light you are looking at tonight left years before you stood there. Four distance bands point the writing at four different registers: a year in your own life, somebody else's, this patch of ground's, or nobody's at all. One or two sentences, then back to looking.

Running under all of it is one quiet thread. At setup you name a person who is somewhere else tonight, under this same sky, and one thing you have not told them. They surface four times in a season and they never answer.

What's in the 17 pages:

• The dark adaptation and cold tracks, and the group ladder they gate
• An eleven-result sky table — fog, haze, moonwash, broken cloud, and three kinds of rare night
• The atlas: 24 constellations in four groups, each with a named star, its distance, and an original one-line hook
• The Lookback bands, with a worked night so you can see the ratio
• Tables for meteors, planets, aurora, and the things that are not stars at all
• Interruptions — the porch light, the car, your own phone
• Six endings, keyed to how many stars you inked and whether you told them
• A one-page quick reference and three printable sheets, including a blank star chart you ink one dot into per night across the season

You need a notebook and two ordinary six-sided dice. No telescope, no astronomy knowledge, no app, no other game required. Everything in it is original writing: the mechanics, the atlas hooks and the endings. Constellation and star names are public-domain astronomical terms and the distances are rounded published values.

Two PDFs, A4 and US Letter, each laid out properly for its own paper rather than one squeezed into the other.