The Long White

# The Long White *A solo horror journal for one player, a deck of cards, a stacking tower, and a marker.* --- You are the last researcher at **Vestlund Station** , an isolated Antarctic outpost nine hundred kilometers from the nearest inhabited coast. The rest of the team left on the last supply plane before winter fall. You stayed to finish the ice core work. Three days after the plane departed, the radio went silent — not just yours; the beacons at Halley, McMurdo, all of them.  You have provisions for the season. You have work to do. You have **the register** — the daily log the station manager keeps — and you will keep it faithfully. At the bottom of ice core 91, drilled two weeks before winter fall, you found something that should not have been there. You do not know yet whether it woke, whether it was ever asleep, or whether the thing you saw is a fault in your instruments, in the ice, or in you. Winter is ninety-one days long. You will write until spring comes, or the station gives, or the register runs out. --- ## What you need to play - A standard **52-card deck** (no jokers) - A **stacking tower** (Jenga or any equivalent, ~54 blocks) - A **permanent marker** — thin tip - A **physical notebook** — this is the register - A pen - A candle (optional, recommended) ## How it plays Draw one card per in-game day. Write one register entry. If the card instructs, pull a block from the tower. **Every block you pull, you write one word on it.** Words accumulate. By the end of the game, your tower is a poem or a  wreckage. Three endings: - **The Thaw** — the plane arrives, and you choose to leave - **The Fall** — the tower collapses - **The Silence** — the deck runs out without either, and you read the tower top to bottom as your closing entry Sessions are 15 to 45 minutes. The full game takes weeks. It is designed to be put down. ## What's inside - 52 prompts, one per card, one per day - The *words on the tower* mechanic — original to this game - Three fully-written endings - A content note, a safety framework, and an epilogue for after - Five original interior photographs, editorial style - Print-friendly single-column layout, 23 pages ## Content note This is a game about being alone in a cold place. It touches on isolation, dissociation, memory loss, unreliable identity, and the slow arrival of something wrong. There is no gore, no violence, no explicit horror. The dread is quiet and cumulative. Play only if that sounds interesting today. ## About the design *The Long White* is built on the [Wretched & Alone](https://loottheroom.itch.io/wretched) framework by Chris Bissette, released under CC-BY 3.0. The *words on the tower* mechanic — writing on each pulled block, so the tower becomes a physical record of what happened — is original to this work. The mechanic is released under the same attribution chain. You may use it in your own W&A derivative with credit to *The Long White (Marrow & Ash Press, 2026)* . ## About the press Marrow & Ash Press publishes solo journaling games for one player, a stack of cards, and a room with the door shut. Slow-burn horror. Overwintered stations. Empty coastlines. The register kept after everyone leaves. Sibling imprint to Hearth & Quill Press. Same designer, opposite mood. --- *If this game finds you, it will not leave quickly. That is by design.*