The Last Seat

Nine hundred applied. Forty were called to sit. There is one seat left at the Coldharrow Athenaeum, and you are a candidate with a damp coat and four days to prove it should be yours. The Last Seat is a solo journaling RPG for one player, two six-sided dice and a pen. You sit five entrance trials — a written paper, a practical demonstration at the bench, an interview with four of the faculty, an unofficial night in a restricted library nobody invited you into, and the final judgement in the vestibule while they read your paperwork aloud. Every roll asks you to write first and roll second: the answer you actually gave, the working you actually built, the thing you decided not to say out loud. Two things carry the whole candidacy. Nerve is what you have left — it buys steadiness before a roll, it drains when the room turns, and at zero you break form in front of people who are marking you. The Application Portfolio is what you are making: five wax seals to ink in as the marks come, the favours you took to get them, the secrets nobody taught you, and one line per trial on what they will remember. There are four endings and none of them is failure; the portfolio survives all four, which is rather the argument of the game. 26 pages, A4 and US Letter, same layout in both Five trial chapters, each with its own oracle and its own way of going wrong 200+ rolled results: 36 exam questions, six faculty with six questions each, the restricted stacks, the corridor between trials, and an irregularity table that fires whenever you roll doubles Six people who will help you, and what each of them wants back Six printable write-on sheets, including the portfolio itself One page of quick reference, for the table Original game, original setting — no other rulebook, licence or supplement needed. Two dice and a pen is the whole equipment list.