The Fathom Line

*A solo horror journal for one player, a deck of cards, a stacking tower, and a marker.* --- You are the last caretaker keeper of LV-84 *Cormorant, a British lightship decommissioned six weeks before winter fall and left at her station over Longsands Shoal, twenty-two nautical miles off the East Anglian coast. The scrap tug is coming for her at the spring equinox. You were posted here on Board of Trade authority. Regulation requires the lightship's log to be kept unbroken from commissioning to breaking-up, and the vessel is not yet broken. So you are here. One keeper. One winter. One vessel that is not, officially, on watch anymore. Τ he lantern room is dark. The klaxon does not sound. The Trinity red hull is scheduled to be cut for its steel in April. But the vessel is still on station. She still swings on her mooring. And each dawn, by regulation, the caretaker keeper drops the **sounding line** from the bow to verify the shoal is where the chart says it is. You keep the keeper's log — the day's watch, the weather, the mooring, the drift, the sounding. Winter is ninety-one days long. You will write until one of these things happens: the scrap tug crosses the horizon, the tower falls, or the deck runs out and the vessel holds and the last watch is stood alone. --- ## What you need - A standard 52-card deck (no jokers) - A stacking tower (Jenga or equivalent, 54 blocks) - **A permanent marker** - A notebook — this is the log - A candle or oil-lamp glass (optional; recommended) ## How it plays Draw one card per in-game day. Write one log entry. If the card instructs, pull a block from the tower. **Every block you pull, you write one word on it** — a sounding reading (a depth in fathoms), a name (a mate, a woman on shore, the vessel herself), or a small keeper's thing (*oil, brass, rust, rope, salt*). Words accumulate. By the end of the game, the tower is *The Fathom Line* — a leaded rope of marks, read from top to bottom or from wherever it lands. Three endings: - **The Thaw** — you draw the King of Hearts, and the scrap tug appears on the horizon at first light, six weeks ahead of schedule - **The Fall** — the tower collapses, and you read the words in the order they landed on the floor - **The Silence** — the deck runs out without either, and you read the standing tower top to bottom as your closing entry Sessions are 15–45 minutes. The full game takes weeks. It is designed to be put down. ## What's inside - 52 prompts, one per card, one per day - Full rules for the *words on the line* mechanic (variant of *words on the tower* from *The Long White* and *words on the bell* from *The Last Bell*) - Three endings, each with an explicit prose exit - Editorial documentary layout, single column, print-friendly - 29 pages, delivered as a single PDF, with five original interior photographs ## Content note This is a game about keeping a book at the end of a thing that has already ended. It touches on isolation, an unreliable memory, one keeper alone with a service that has been shut off around them, and the slow arrival of a sea that is not behaving as the chart says it should. There is no gore, no violence, no explicit horror. The dread is quiet and cumulative and civil — the dread of a regulation being observed after the reason for the regulation has stopped observing back. Play only if that sounds interesting today. ## About the design *The Fathom Line* is built on the [ Wretched & Alone ] framework by Chris Bissette, released under CC-BY 3.0. It is a sibling to Marrow & Ash Press's first two releases — same framework, same tower-words mechanic (retitled here as *words on the line*), different setting entirely. *The Long White* was cold environmental horror at an Antarctic research station. *The Last Bell* was folk-horror in a plague-year English village. *The Fathom Line* is mid-century North Sea maritime archival horror. You do not need to have played the others. They are not sequels; they are siblings. --- *If this game finds you, it will not leave quickly. That is by design.*