Not So Grave

NOT SO GRAVE A solo journaling game about endings — mostly other people's You are the newest in a long line of undertakers. The cemetery was here before you and will outlive you too. Your job is simple, on paper: keep the grounds, dig when digging is needed, and be the kind of person a stranger can stand next to, in front of a stone, without feeling foolish about crying — or about not crying. Not So Grave never ends. There's no final page, no boss fight, no victory condition. You play for a week, a season, a decade — however long the mood holds. When you're done, you take a Leave and come back whenever you like, or ask for a Reassignment to a new cemetery entirely. Every day, you choose where to work and roll to find out what the day gives you — a small domestic absurdity, a moment of suspended melancholy, an act of care disguised as gruffness. Visitors come, mostly for people already buried, sometimes for someone you just laid to rest. What they tell you about the dead builds up on the page over months and years — and it doesn't always agree with itself. Let the dead be a little contradictory. They've earned it. Across the year, eight special days break the routine entirely: a spring clean-up the whole town turns out for, a midsummer festival invented for no reason anyone remembers, a night of harmless mischief, a vigil by lantern-light on the longest night of the year. What's inside: A complete solo journaling ruleset — no GM, no group needed A full year of play: weekly rhythms, funerals, and eight seasonal special days The Prompt Engine: a 6×11 table of moods and questions that never runs dry The Grave Index: a growing, occasionally contradictory record of everyone buried in your care Four printable character and reference sheets (Undertaker, Cemetery, Area, Grave Index) Not horror. Not grim. Just quiet, a little funny, occasionally tender — and always, eventually, someone's story