A Register of Vanished Hands — A Solo Journaling RPG of Trades No One Remembers

Clerk — You are being written to because the Register of Hands is short of workers again, and because your name was offered by  someone we trust. You will not be told who. That is how the Second Guild has always done this work: quietly, and from the back of other guilds, and never from the front. You will be given, as those before you were given, a leather folio, an inkstone, a soft pencil, and thirteen commissions. Each commission is a pair of hands. Not the hands of the famous, and not the hands of those the official registers care about. These are the hands of people who practised a craft that was lost — crushed by factory, by law, by occupation, by migration, by the dying of a village, by the small cruelty of a change in fashion. For each pair of hands you will draw three small things in your folio: the tool, the mark, and the last work. And beside the drawings you will write what you have been able to recover. A REGISTER OF VANISHED HANDS is a solo journaling roleplaying game about lost labour, archives, and the small act of drawing a thing that no one is left to draw. It plays over an hour per commission, or the whole folio in a long afternoon. WHAT'S INSIDE • 54 pages, illustrated storybook layout • Thirteen commissions — a seal-cutter, a mapmaker of tongues, a bell-tuner of a suppressed monastery, a night-weaver, a water-clock winder, an ink-mother, a thatcher, a finger-reader, a woodsinger's apprentice, a knotter of nets, a shadow-puppeteer, a dyer of three blues, and a clerk who refused to sign • A card-based Tool / Mark / Last Work draw system — no dice except for the Dust Tally • The Dust Tally: a running cost mechanic that takes something from the archive if you work too hard, too fast • Three Honest Hours to spend on the one hand that mattered to your Clerk more than the Register allows • Six possible endings , from The Folio Bound to The Folio Not Submitted • A Clerk-creation ritual using a standard deck — name, bench, reason for the work, small object in the folio's pocket WHO IT'S FOR Solo journalers. Anyone who has ever thought about a craft their grandparent practised that nobody now knows how to do. Readers of The Vanished Atlas and A Book of Vanished Suppers. People who like quiet games with weight in them. No RPG experience required. FOR FANS OF The Vanished Atlas · A Book of Vanished Suppers · Thousand Year Old Vampire · Apothecaria · Last Tea Shop · old library archives · a shelf of unlabelled leather folios From Hearth & Quill Press — atmospheric solo journaling games for one quiet hour at the table.