🕯️ An Almanac of the Small Country — a year-long solo journaling roleplaying game.
Fifty-two weeks. One deck of cards. One notebook. One imagined country only you will ever know.
You are the Almanacist. Once a week — for fifty-two weeks — you draw cards, and you write. About the weather. About who you saw. About what the country did that week, and what it didn't. Over the year, a country you have never visited will begin to have a name, a shape, a bell, a saint, a grief. At the end of the fifty-second week, you will have an almanac. Hand-filled. Yours. Nobody else's.
WHAT YOU DO EACH WEEK
Draw one card for the WEATHER.
Draw two more for the FOCUS — a person, a place, an event, an omen.
Write your week. A paragraph. A page. One line.
Choose ONE thing to preserve in the Marginalia — the country's permanent record.
Add a tick to the Tally.
Ten minutes if you write briefly. Half an hour if you write at length.
THIRTEEN MOONS
The Moon of First Light. Fires. Green Water. Long Sun. Dust. Harvest. Bells. Rain. Iron. Long Night. Small Hopes. Return. The Closing Hand.
Each Moon is four weeks. Each Moon has its own weather, its own prompts, its own rhythm. The country you build fills itself in one week at a time.
SIX ENDINGS
The Country Falls. The Country Wakes. The Almanac Is Buried. A Successor Is Named. The Almanacist Leaves. The Almanac Closes.
You do not choose your ending. Your Tallies decide, at Week 52, which of the six is yours. You may play toward one — but the almanac is patient. It gives you the ending you earned.
WHAT YOU NEED
A standard deck of 52 playing cards. Any deck. The kitchen-drawer one is fine.
A notebook you will keep for a year. A hardback if you can.
A pen.
Optional: a candle, a cup of something warm, a quiet room, an evening.
158 pages. Illustrated with wood engravings by Thomas Bewick (1753–1828).
Three early-exit points at Weeks 20, 32, and 44 — if you cannot finish the year, the book has graceful endings ready.
🕯️ comatador.itch.io/an-almanac-of-the-small-country — $14
Community copies enabled. If you cannot afford it, take one. Every purchase adds one, no questions.
Honest disclosure: The text was drafted with the assistance of a large language model and edited by a human author. The illustrations are wood engravings by Thomas Bewick (public domain). If you prefer solo RPGs made entirely without AI, we recommend Sealed Library, Mousehole Press, Spring Villager, and Exeunt Press.
Draw slowly. Fifty-two weeks is a long walk. There is no hurry.
