Below the Murkline 1: A Life In Death

You come to in the Mason's Arms on Hellsborough Corner, with a pint of pale ale you didn't order. Look in the bar mirror. The bottles are there. The barmaid's shoulder is there. The corner of a table is there. You are not. The barmaid wipes the bar right up to where you're sitting, slows down, and carries on past. The landlord looks at a spot six inches to your left and keeps it there. That's the first page. The rest of the book is finding out why. A Life In Death is a "You Are the Hero" gamebook in the old style: two six-sided dice, a pencil, an Adventure Sheet, and you. No GM. No group. 354 numbered sections, and an ending you have to earn rather than arrive at. --- The job Ming Shalom's vault is real. It is the most heavily protected fortress in The Dark Peak, it is older than the calendar, and there are three key fragments standing between you and its door — scattered, in the way the plan always scatters things, across the people and places least likely to give them up willingly. You will need all three. You will understand why when you reach the door. The door will make it clear. It is not a subtle door. Between here and there: the Wisewood, and a Reaper with a clipboard who has been trying to die for longer than most buildings in Hellsborough have stood. The Hellsborough Hole in the bank of the Loxley, below the old weir. The kraken, which is back, and which may or may not be the one Van Hallam dealt with in the 77th cycle. And Ming Shalom's flooded tunnels, where the water is still enough to show you a reflection at last — and the edges of the figure in it are wrong. --- How it plays Three stats, split 3-2-1 between them: - Grit — physical endurance, brute force, taking a hit and staying upright - Wit — perception, cunning, noticing what shouldn't be there - Murk — dark matter sensitivity, psychic and supernatural resistance, luck in the fog A test is 2d6 plus the stat. Ten or more and you do it. Seven to nine and you do it, but something goes wrong. Six or less and the text tells you what happens instead. You start with 6 HP. At zero, the section you're reading tells you where to go — and some deaths end the book, and some don't, which should not surprise you given what you might be. Put your 1 in Murk and you have made this book considerably harder. That is a legitimate way to play it. Running alongside the stats is the Soulprint track : abilities that unlock at story beats rather than by dice or by spending. You don't choose them. They're revealed — Echo, Seep, Cognivise, Skin, Unname — and each one tells you something about what you are that the book has been declining to say outright. How many you have unlocked by the vault floor decides which ending you get. There is also a blank space on the Adventure Sheet headed *What I know about what I am*. It starts empty. Filling it in is the actual game. --- Five endings The Blub. The Revenant. The Bargain. The Reaper's Ledger. The Scerm. Two of them are wins. None of them are clean. The difference between walking out of that vault as yourself and walking out as something that used to be yourself is decided by how much of the Soulprint track you filled on the way — which means it's decided by choices you made in Act 2, before you knew the track existed, let alone that it mattered. Field note: you don't get to read the final record while you're still you. That's not cruelty. It's the condition. --- MURK RATING: III. Involuntary loss-of-self outcomes; sustained dread; invented in-world profanity. See hellsborough.com/murk-rating. About 61,000 words. EPUB and PDF (315 pages). Written by Bull Stuart, with field notes by Pip Rippon. Book Two, The Wharncliffe Account, is being written now. --- It's also free. A free account at hellsborough.com/signup gets you the EPUB at no cost, along with the full Postcard Adventure archive. The dollar here is for people who'd rather just click the button — and for anyone who wants to throw something at the next book. Set in the same Hellsborough as Foked (the solo tabletop RPG — the Core Rules are free), the Murk Lore zines, and The Hellsborough Chronicles novels. You don't need any of them to play this. Demonspawn Books and Games, Sheffield S6 · hellsborough.com