The Winter Kings

*A solo horror journal for one player, a deck of cards, a stacking tower, and a marker.* **For readers of A Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones, The Terror, and winters that last too long.** --- You are the last **chronicler** of House **Vossen** — a line of northern kings whose seat is a grey keep called **Harrowhold**, built on a bluff above a frozen fjord in the kingdom's northernmost province. Your office is not noble. You were a scribe's apprentice taken in off the roads thirty winters ago. The maester died six weeks ago of a cough; his master died the autumn before him; no replacement has come from the Citadel of letters. So the chronicle has fallen to you. The current lord — Rorik Vossen, the Grey — is sixty-one years old. He has outlived three wives and both his sons. His last living child, a daughter called Isla, rode south in the first week of autumn to negotiate a marriage that would secure the succession. She has not returned. No letter has come. The road south closed three weeks ago under snow. The high passes closed earlier. Something is coming down them. You have heard it twice from the belfry. Winter is ninety-one days by the old count. The old count has not held in sixty years. You will write until one of these things happens: a rider is seen on the south road carrying banners, the tower collapses and the keep falls, or the deck runs out and Harrowhold is empty of Vossens. --- ## How it plays Draw one card per in-game day. Write one chronicle entry in the voice of a scribe. If the card instructs, pull a  block from the tower. **Every block you pull, you write one word on it** — a name of a Vossen dead, a cause of death, a lost banner, a lost holding, or one word taken from the day's entry. Words accumulate. By the end of the game, your tower is the genealogy of House Vossen — a lineage or a wreckage. Three endings: - **The Heir** — you draw the King of Hearts, and a rider is seen on the south road carrying banners; the house continues under a new hand - **The Fall** — the tower collapses; you read the words in the order they landed, and that reading is the fall of House Vossen - **The Silence** — the deck runs out, Harrowhold is empty of Vossens, and you read the standing tower top to bottom as the final entry of the chronicle 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 in the chronicle* 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 - A content note, a daily practice, and an epilogue - Editorial documentary layout, single column, print-friendly - 27 pages, delivered as a single PDF, with five original interior photographs ## Content note This is a game about being the last person to keep a book. It touches on dynastic failure, grief without a body to bury, the slow emptying of a great hall, and the specific loneliness of a chronicler who outlasts the family they were hired to record. There is cold horror in the margins — something is coming down from the passes, and you will see it before anyone else — but the dread is quiet and civic, not violent.                                          Play only if that sounds interesting today. *The chronicle does not need you to be a king. It needs you to be the one still writing.*