How to play
Roll a character, survive the night, and find out who the rest of them were prepared to send through the door. 2 to 6 of you, about 7 min, no downloads and no account. Everybody builds a character out of the same six numbers, the party takes on 5 encounters together, and exactly one of you walks out with the Hoard. Every phase is simultaneous, so nothing ever waits on one person and a table of six takes the same time as a table of two.
First
A run is a fixed sequence of timed beats. Each one ends on its deadline whether or not everybody acted, and the deadline default is always a real move rather than a skip, so a closed tab is a problem the table can see instead of a phase that hangs.
| Beat | Seconds | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| Muster | 16 | The array is rolled and the pick order is published. |
| Draft: Callings | 35 | Rank up to 3 of the 8. One of each per table. |
| Draft: Kit | 30 | Rank up to 3 of the 12, in reverse pick order. |
| Assign | 70 | Place the six numbers, choose a Hook. |
| Act | 60 | Commit an Approach. Happens 5 times. |
| The reveal | 45 | The ledger, what nobody took, keep or hide. |
| The Ballad | 35 | Laurels are cast and the Hoard is awarded. |
Then
The Calling is the loudest choice in the game and the first one you make. There are 8, and only one of each per table, so two of you cannot both be the Knife. You submit up to 3 ranked choices at the same time as everybody else, and the server grants each player their highest surviving pick in the published order. Being denied your first choice is the point. That is the moment a draft becomes a game instead of a form.
A Calling gives you three things. Two ability affinities, meaning the two things your sort of person is trained at, worth +2 to the total whenever you roll one of them. One Signature: a special move you may use once in the whole run and never again. And one Failing, which is the situation your character is worst in. Every encounter is labelled with a word or two saying what sort of trouble it is, and when one of those labels matches your Failing, everything that goes wrong in it costs you double.
The Failings deliberately do not name the frightening situations. A Failing on the dark, or on something with teeth, would just be a tax on the encounters everybody already dreads. They name the situation that makes you irrelevant instead: a crowd with no doorway in it to hold, a ledger that will not balance, a fire no dog will walk towards. Being useless is a more interesting problem than being hurt. There is a longer write-up of all 8 if you would rather read them properly before you have to rank them under a clock.
Get behind me and stop arguing about it.
I was never in the room, and you will not remember me leaving.
I know what the marks on that lintel are for. You do not.
Give me a bar and a half and the whole room is mine.
Everything has a price. I have written most of them down.
She has the scent. Try to keep up.
Doors are a suggestion. Walls are a schedule.
I said I would. That is the end of it.
Dealt to you
There are 8 Bloods and they are not scarce, so they are dealt rather than drafted. A Blood is not a bag of stat bonuses. Not one of these adds to a roll. They bend what a result costs, who it costs, or what you knew before you committed, so your Blood changes the shape of your night rather than the size of your numbers. Each one may be used once in a run, and all 8 are written out at length elsewhere.
High pasture and low cloud. They walk uphill for an hour before they call it a walk.
Once a run, if your die comes up a one, pick it up and throw it again. You keep the second throw, whatever it is.
Drovers and message carriers, road dust to the knee, home about twice a year.
Once a run, look at the Reckless target number without spending a Torch. Use it on the Act where you cannot tell whether the reward is worth it.
Eel traps and duckboards. Nothing in a fen stays where you left it overnight.
Once a run, after an Act has played out, swap one of your six ability numbers with another of your own. Wait until you have seen what this night is actually asking for.
From a valley that burned in a single afternoon, and they still sift the ground for hinges.
Once a run, take the Renown cost of a failure as party Dread instead. You pay nothing. Everyone pays a little, including the people who were not there.
Two tides a day tell them when to work and when to sit down, and they have never argued with either.
You begin the run with an extra Hook token, so you can spend one early instead of hoarding it and waiting to be singled out.
They wash and box the dead in a town that keeps its cemeteries inside the walls.
Once a run, hide a Scar and pay no Renown for it. Nobody at the table finds out it happened, which is the part you are actually paying for.
Hedge-layers. You can read every hedge they have ever laid off the backs of their hands.
Once a run, keep a Scar in public and add no Dread to the party. The best Scar you will ever take, so hold it for a bad one.
Charcoal burners who sleep in shifts, because a stack that goes out is a fortnight wasted.
Once a run, stop the party taking Dread from a result. Save it for the Act that would tip the Night over.
The bit that ends an old argument
The server rolls 6 numbers once, for the whole room, by throwing 4 six-sided dice and dropping the lowest one. Every player at the table then assigns those same 6 numbers to their own six abilities.
This is deliberate. The old argument about rolling against buying points is a fight between two different kinds of fairness, real dice on one side and an equal start on the other, and it is unwinnable because each side is defending something else. One shared rolled array gives you both, and it moves the whole decision to the interesting place: where the highest number goes, and who is prepared to live with the lowest.
The familiar curve. A score of 10 or 11 adds nothing, and every two points either side of that moves the modifier by one.
| Score | 6 | 8 | 10 | 12 | 14 | 16 | 18 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| On a roll | -2 | -1 | +0 | +1 | +2 | +3 | +4 |
Lifting, breaking, holding a door that does not want to be held.
Hands and feet. Locks, ledges, pockets, knives.
Carrying on after the point where carrying on stopped being sensible.
Noticing. Remembering. Working out what the room is for.
Not running. Not flinching. Not showing it.
Being believed, whether or not you are telling the truth.
And a second draft
12 pieces of gear, one of each per table, drafted exactly like the Callings with one change: the order is reversed. Whoever got first crack at the Callings picks last on the Kit. One reversed list, and a draft position that would otherwise be strictly better becomes a real fork. The best Calling or the best gear, not both.
Nothing in the Kit is enchanted. Some of it is a flat bonus to one ability, which helps in every encounter and never runs out. The rest is a charge, a small number of uses of something that fires when you choose: a reroll, a look at a hidden number, or a torch. A torch is what you burn to see what the Reckless line actually needs, at 1 torch per look. All 12 pieces are listed with what each one is actually for.
The important one
A Hook is one specific thing you did, or that was done to you, and what it left behind. There are 20 and they are not exclusive. Backgrounds usually die in games like this because they are social features that only fire if somebody remembers them. This one is currency, and it is spent three different ways. Every one of the 20 is written out in full, which is worth a look before you have to pick one in seconds.
One
Every Hook names a tag the server guarantees to place in the deck. Take the one about the second key you cut and there is a lock in somebody's Act. Take the one about walking away from the column and there is a patrol. Your background is not a note on your sheet, it is an edit to the adventure the other four have to play, and they can all see whose fault it was.
Two
Each Hook carries 2 tokens, worth +5 on a roll each. They refill only when your Hook tag is called against you. Being singled out stops being something that happens to you and becomes the thing you were hoping for, and leaning into your own worst trait is rewarded instead of quietly punished.
Three
At the top of every Act the server prints whose Hook tags are live. Being Marked pays +2 Renown for taking the Act at all, and costs you -1 Renown more for flinching from it. The whole table sees the Mark, so it is a target as well as a wage. Everybody knows who ought to be going through that door, and everybody knows what it is worth to them.
Then, five times
An encounter is put in front of the whole party, with exactly three ways through it. Each one names an ability, a target number, what it pays if you make it and what it costs if you do not. You have 60 seconds. Everybody commits at the same time and nobody sees anybody else's choice until the Act resolves.
It is deliberately a bad bet for a player with no claim on it. Measured across every encounter in the pool, an ordinarily trained character does better on the best safe line. The same character, Marked for that Act or spending a single Hook token, does better on the Reckless one. So the door has a natural claimant each time, the Mark says publicly who that is, and it is never a free lunch.
Before you commit you may nominate somebody else for the Reckless line. If they pull it off you take 50 per cent of their prize. If they do not, you lose 2 Renown. You can shove somebody through a door, and it costs you when they do not come back. Nominating the player who was never the claimant is the hostile version, and everybody can see you do it.
The deadline default is not a skip and not a bot playing your character. It is a real move called Flinch, narrated as hesitating: -1 Renown and +1 Dread on the whole party, and -1 Renown more if you were Marked for that Act. It scores badly and it taxes everyone, which makes an absent player something the table can see and argue about. Flinching scales with Dread like every other cost, because a game that needs somebody to go through the door cannot make standing still the cheapest option once things go wrong.
The reveal shows all three lines, including the ones the party left alone, and what they would have paid or cost. That is where the regret lives, and it is the only honest way to find out whether the argument you lost was the right argument.
The thing nobody expects
The game never prints a total. It prints the named sources that made the total, in the order you would read them out. Every number you see can be traced back to a word, which means a roll is a sentence rather than a sum, and you always know exactly which of your choices did the work.
Here is a real one. You are the KNIFE, carrying the roll of picks, with 15 in Deft, and you spend one Hook token. The encounter is The Cellar Steps and you have taken the line called fish it out with the beam hook.
Needed 13 on Deft
The cellar has taken two feet of black water overnight and the landlord's strongbox is down there with the quarter's takings in it. The stairs go under at the fourth step.
| The die: d20 | 2 |
|---|---|
| Deft | +2 |
| trained: knife | +2 |
| roll of picks | +2 |
| you have done this before | +5 |
| Total | 13 |
The hook finds the handle on the third try and the box comes up slick, dripping and still shut.
Read that list again and notice what is doing the work. The die gave you 2. The reason it was enough is that you drafted a Calling trained in Deft, put a high number there, took the piece of Kit that suits it, and spent a token you had been saving. Four decisions, each worth a line, all of them yours.
Missing that line costs 2 Renown and puts 1 Dread on the party. With Dread already at 3 Dread it costs 4 Renown and 2 Dread instead. Costs double, never the roll. Being told the situation is worse is the same arithmetic as being told you are worse at something, and it is a great deal easier to live with. The Reckless line is the one exception, because it already carries the worst cost in the encounter against a fixed reward.
Every failure
Every failed roll leaves a Scar. A Scar is a wound and an asset at the same time, and it hands you one dice-free decision after every Act, with 45 seconds to make it.
Everyone sees it. It is worth 4 Renown at the Ballad, and it puts +1 Dread on the party. A personal gain funded by a tax on everybody, which is exactly why the table will have an opinion.
Nobody is told what it was, only that you have one. It costs you 2 Renown now, and the party nothing. Say nothing about it and the night stays survivable for everybody else.
If you do not decide, it is hidden rather than kept, so an absent player pays for their own closed tab instead of taxing the table with it.
Shared, and it only goes up
Dread is one number belonging to the whole party. Failures add to it, kept Scars add to it, flinching adds to it, and two people grabbing the same door adds to it. The thresholds are published rather than hidden, because a number nobody can see is not frightening.
Threshold one
3Dread
Every cost doubles, including flinching, and including your own Failing on top of it. The Reckless line is exempt, because it was already the worst bet in the encounter.
Threshold two
5Dread
The last Act is drawn from a worse deck: the hardest encounter in the pool that the party has not already faced. There is no way to draw it back down at that point except one Calling and one Blood, and only one of you has each.
Dread is what makes everybody flinching an unstable position. If nobody moves, the whole party pays, and it keeps paying. Somebody has to go through the door, and the argument about which of you it is going to be is the game.
Last
35 seconds at the end, and four things are added up.
Everything you earned, less everything you paid, accumulated across the whole run.
They pay only if your Renown is at or above the table median. Without that gate the winning line is to never take a risk, collect cheap Scars and keep all of them, which is the failure every game like this has to clamp. Wearing your wounds has to mean you were in the fight.
One secret vote each, never for yourself, cast in the last 35 seconds. It means the player who was out of contention two Acts ago still holds something the leaders want, right up to the end.
It goes to exactly one player, even on a tie, broken by Renown and then by how little you hid. The party survived together. One of you got paid.
And the ones that come up
If you have never played anything like this before, the rules above are the reference rather than the introduction. There is a shorter piece written for a first night that translates the vocabulary and walks through what the first ten minutes actually feel like.