World One · A Horror Story
Every door is open to you. Every door costs something. One of them leads out.
Free demo out now · The full book, early 2027
The trailer
What it is
This is a horror RPG that hands you the wheel. You read it, you picture it, and then you decide, and the deciding is not decoration. Every choice moves something, and the story you get is the one your choices built. Seventy-six endings are written out, each with its own painting and its own account of how you got there. One of them is the way out. Reaching it takes a specific run of choices across the whole book, and so far no one has made them.
Counted, not estimated
Forty-four of them are deaths, each with its own painting and its own written account of how it happened.
Read to you
Both roads are read aloud, 4,674 recordings of them. Two reading voices, one for Ashe's road and one for Granite's, are synthesized. The third voice, the half of you that is not driving, is the author's own.
Under the reading there is a sound body. Places have their own air, and it changes with the hour. Fights have their cues, the things at the mine have their noises, and the dice land on felt. All of it switches off in Settings whenever you like.
Your head does the rest
You read it, and a voice reads it with you, and between the two of those the mountain assembles somewhere behind your eyes. That part is yours. No camera decides what you look at and no cutscene does the work for you.
The paintings are there when a place or a person needs a face. Everything else in Silverhead you build yourself, which is why no two people who finish this book have been to quite the same town.
Weight
A door will tell you what it costs, in Anger or Fear, and sometimes its odds. Nothing on a door tells you it was the one. You can walk past the thing that would have saved you and never learn it was there.
Some of what you decide comes back for you. A name you were given, a thing you admitted to, a door you left standing open. The book remembers a handful of those and builds later doors out of them, and it never says which ones counted.
What it does keep is a list, in your own handwriting, of the things you said you would do. It will hold you to none of them.
When it goes wrong
Bare hands are worth two dice and a die lands on five or better. Whatever you are holding adds to the pool. Seven slots of armor, and every hit a piece turns costs it something, until the hit it cannot turn. Every fighter sizes up what you bring and throws more dice for it, and the extra dice go for whatever you left bare.
A round is two beats, called together, from a hand you build as you go: four cards to start and up to nine, each new one bought with what your fights pay, and every life starts over. Whatever is in your left hand deals one more: a flame, a beam, something to pry with, a lid, or a keepsake to steady you. Swing, cover, take hold, slip it, brace, feint, riposte, sweep the legs, go to the body, or wind up the big one and stand wide open while you do. The hard calls cost wind, digging in buys it back, and a fighter out of wind throws fewer dice. The page tells you what they are about to do, as much as your Insight can read, and you answer into the beat they left open.
Before the first swing the book gives you one breath to dress for it: press Gear up and your kit opens, and the first swing shuts the bag. How you finish counts too. Put a man down and stop when it is over, and it does not harden you. Finish him with both barrels and it does.
The dice are real dice. They tumble in a felt trough at the foot of the table, every round, the full throw. Thirty-five things in this book will fight you. Kill one and it changes you: Brutality opens powers a gentler road never sees, and the town starts closing its doors.
Mid-throw. The dice land where they land, and you read the roll off the faces.
One breath before the first swing. What you put on here is what you fight in. The nine-card hand and this screen are in the demo as of version 6.
At the mouth of the mine
Before any light is lit in the Ironsides there is a round room, and something in it. It wears a different coat every life: the Bruise, the Meat, the Rust, the Ceiling, the Pond, the Drowned. There is no way around it.
Walk away from it and come back, and half of what you did to it is still there. Kill it and it goes in your binder, and it does not come back until all six are in.
The collection
When a life ends you get a card. The painting on the front, with the name, the place and the number. The account of how it happened on the back. Seventy-six are written and painted, forty-four deaths and thirty-two endings, and the collection holds every one you have found. The rest lie face down until one of yours finds them.
The book also binds each life you finish, every page you turned and every door you took, as a book of its own that you keep. Close the game mid-life and it puts a bookmark in. There are no saves and no going back.
The collection. Face down until one of yours finds it.
Say it out loud
Every page takes a typed line. Ask about a thing in the room, a name you heard, a word that snagged on the way past. There are 865 written answers to typed topics in this book and not one of them is on a menu. An empty line whispers type / for commands, and a slash lists everything the page will answer right now, so you are never guessing at a parser.
Under the story there are meters. Health, Fear, Anger, Composure, Insight, and a needle for what you are turning into, with a bar past either end that keeps paying once the needle can't go further. Composure is not a mood, it is a pool, and what it buys is the word no. Spend two of it to cool Anger a step, or two Insight to bring Fear down a step (three Composure when the Insight runs out), whenever you like, even between the rounds of a fight.
Everything you carry has a weight in pounds, and your bags have a ceiling: buy a second one and your two biggest carry as one load. Your left hand holds up one thing, a light, a keepsake or a tool, and some doors only open to what you're holding. Sixteen badges are earned by things a life actually did, and three of them can be worn into the next one.
The sash. Sixteen badges, earned by lives that are over. Wear three into the next one.
Who you meet
Manager of the Atlantic Sands. Ask how long he has had the desk and you get a year that doesn't quite square with the year he gave you last time. He does the crossword in pencil and never erases, and he grants each tenant one kindness on the way in and one true sentence on the way out. Most people are three states gone before they work out which was which.
Fifteen years of other people's best and worst nights in Miami, until the clientele got ambitious. He bought into Nick's for the slow nights, kept a dead man's name on the sign, and pours heavy for locals and the recently divorced. He introduces certain people to certain people, for reasons he keeps.
He managed a marina once. Payroll, slips, the whole clean-shirt life, until it turned out to be a laundry for somebody's uglier business. He took one lesson off watching men in suits get walked down their own dock: be small, be cash. Not evil. Worse, in a way. He would sell to a nine-months-clean stranger without blinking.
Twenty-six, a swallow tattooed on her wrist, and nine hundred of the twenty-four hundred she needs for Nashville hidden in a coffee can she thinks nobody knows about. Gaetano knows. He rounds her checks up. There is no other face. She is exactly what she looks like, and what you do with that is the whole point of her.
Two roads
Ashe Morrison · out of Hollywood, Florida
Granite Wilson · out of Hollywood, Florida
Both roads run the same ten days. Neither of them tells the same story.
What you carry
Where it happens
It opens in Hollywood, Florida. The Broadwalk, the bandshell, a motel off the beach and a bar with a taxidermied marlin in it. Then it drives west, and the towns on the way up are the ones that are actually there: Denver, Idaho Springs, Black Hawk, the road climbing into the Front Range.
Silverhead is not real. Neither is Garnet Creek, which burned in 1911, nor the mine standing above it. They are set into the true geography of the place, on roads you could drive tomorrow, and that is the point of them.
The demo
Hollywood, Florida. One of four openings, either road, the Broadwalk, one place to go, and what is waiting when you come back out onto the pavers. Then the drive west, the last miles up the mountain, and the first night at the cabin, until bedtime. Fully voiced, one life. Die first and you begin another. Your first PLAY opens with a short tour of every meter, read aloud, and the fights get a chapter of their own just before your first one. Skip either one any time.
Ages 18+, and it does not hold back.
It runs on a Windows or Mac computer, not a phone or tablet. Leave your email and the link will be in your inbox when you sit down at one.
The link, then no more than one email a month.
Each download is about half a gigabyte. The Mac app is signed and notarized by Apple: unzip it and double-click. The Windows build is not signed yet, so Windows will say it protected your PC; click More info, then Run anyway, and keep the .exe and the .pck together.
Played it? Tell me what you thought.
One way out
There is a single route through this book that reaches a door out, and taking it switches off the thing that has been running you. It is not a puzzle and there is no trick to it. It is a specific run of choices across the whole story, and it asks for restraint in a book built to reward the opposite.
I wrote that door. I have never walked the road to it. Neither has any tester, in any life, so far.
Reach the way out, screenshot it, and send it in. First verified screenshot takes it, one prize per stage, and your name goes on this page underneath it.
Send it to andre@storymastergames.com. I'll be the judge, because there is nobody else to be.
Both hands
Two paintings, one for each of them: the man in the middle, the cold one on his left, the steady one on his right, all three wearing the same face. They are on the lake the story ends beside.
Download the wallpaper pack, free — both of them in four shapes, desktop and 4K and ultrawide and phone, with the title and without it.
For anyone who has reached an ending
A hardcore mode that opens after your first real ending. A life on the hard road starts with less: eight dots of health instead of ten, less money, one refusal fewer, and a night that mends one dot instead of two. Everyone who can hurt you is tougher, and the thing that keeps the door of the mine is worse.
It is still one life. You can still put the book down at night and pick it up later, but on the hard road that costs you a dot, and the page says so.
Every one of the story’s endings you reach on the hard road pays two points onto a new badge, The Hard Road. Spend them on what you walk in with: a dot of Health, a point of Composure or Insight, or fifty dollars. Worn on the sash, the spend rides into every life after. Eight endings, sixteen points. Nobody will get them all quickly.
Devlog
Every update to the demo and the game, written up on itch as it ships. Newest first.
The studio
A small studio building story-driven games on StoryMaster, a system made for carrying any genre: an engine, a builder, and a plain-file format that treats prose as the thing being engineered rather than the thing wrapped around it.
Ashe & Granite is the first title and the proof of the system. There will be more, and they will not all be horror. Every title screen reads A STORYMASTER GAME.
Be told first
Wishlisting is the one thing that decides whether Steam ever shows this book to a stranger, and it takes a second.
The Steam page is next, with Steam's Halloween fest this October on the way to Next Fest in February. Leave an email and you'll hear first.
Or leave an email and hear it first.
No more than one email a month. Nothing else, ever.