A Year at the Apothecary

You keep a country apothecary, and the town comes to your counter to tell you what is wrong with it, or most of it. You write down what happened. That is the whole game — one die, one pen, and about twenty minutes an evening.

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🌙 WHAT THIS IS

A solo RPG journal — a solo journaling game about one year behind the counter of a country apothecary.

You are not a hero and there is nothing to defeat. You keep a shop, a wall of drawers and a drying loft, and the town brings you whatever is wrong with it. Some of them tell you the truth. Most of them tell you most of it.

You play one evening at a time:

🎲 Roll for who comes in.

🎲 Roll for what they want.

✒️ Write three or four lines: what you gave them, what it cost, and what you did not say.

If the two rolls do not fit together — the vicar, with a sermon to give on Sunday, asking for rat poison and very much not wanting to sign the book — that tension IS the evening. You do not reroll. You write your way through it.

⚖️ You never roll to find out whether you succeed.

The die says what happens. You say what you did about it. There is no failure in this game, only what it cost.

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📦 WHAT YOU GET

▪ 162 written entries across 25 tables — every one of them rolled on a single d6

▪ 4 seasons, with 72 entries that belong to the seasons alone, and not one repeated

▪ 12 writing prompts, three per season, for evenings when you would rather write than roll

▪ 3 ending tables — which one you roll on depends on how you kept the shop

▪ One day worked through from the first roll to the written entry, so the first evening does not start with a decision

▪ 8 journal sheets, because in a game you play by writing, the writing space is the product

▪ 20 pages · 4 PDFs

Nothing here is a stub. Every table is written out in full.

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🗝️ HOW THE YEAR STARTS

Six rolls and a name, and the shop is yours.

Three for you — why the shop is yours, what you are good at, and what you do not say.

Three for the place — the shop itself, what is on the shelves, and what needs doing before winter.

Then you give it a name. The name painted over the window and the name the town uses are rarely the same, and you should know both.

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🍂 FOUR SEASONS, AND THE TOWN IS ILL DIFFERENTLY IN EACH

🌱 SPRING — The beds wake

Everything green comes up at once, the winter coughs finally break, and half the town comes in wanting something to make them feel like spring.

☀️ SUMMER — The drying season

The beds give more than you can use, every beam in the loft is hung with bunches, and the people who come in are the ones the heat has caught.

🍁 AUTUMN — Roots and berries

The last of the harvest goes into jars and the first colds come in at the door, and it is the busiest month of the year at both ends of the shop.

❄️ WINTER — The coughing months

Everybody is ill at once, nothing grows, and whatever you dried in the summer is all there is until spring.

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⚖️ THREE THINGS YOU ARE KEEPING

🫙 Jars 🌿 Herbs 🤝 Goodwill

Anything handed across the counter takes a Jars. Anything made up from scratch takes a Herbs. Anything kind gives a Goodwill. A day moves one of them, never more, and together they are the reason the year has a shape instead of being a pile of evenings.

Whichever one is highest when the year ends decides which ending you roll on.

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📖 A FEW LINES FROM INSIDE

"An old man who comes in every week for the same bottle, which you both know is mostly sugar and company."

"To pay you in produce: eggs, a cheese, a sack of plums you will have to do something with by Friday."

"Somebody takes all the lavender from the front beds in the night, very neatly, and leaves the roots."

"A child sent alone with a coin and a note, who reads the note aloud because you cannot read the writing."

"You count the money in the drawer twice and decide not to count it a third time."

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✨ THIS IS FOR YOU IF

▪ You like old shops, dried herbs, glass jars and the people who come in for them

▪ You want a cozy game that still has structure and consequences

▪ This would be your first solo RPG and you want one that explains itself

▪ You keep a journal and want prompts that build on each other instead of starting over

▪ You want twenty quiet minutes in the evening that are not a screen

▪ You are tired of combat and stat blocks

▪ You own one six-sided die and nothing else, and would like that to be enough

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🎒 WHAT YOU NEED

▪ This book

▪ A pen

▪ One six-sided die

▪ Somewhere quiet

That is the list. No deck of cards, no second die, no app, and no account.

It is made for one player. If you want somebody else in it, take a season each: read the other person's entries before you start yours, and do not discuss them. The shop carries over, so you inherit whatever they did to the shelves.

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🚫 WHAT IS NOT IN IT

No combat. No monsters. No magic. No stat blocks and no character sheet.

Nothing here is fought. If somebody comes in that you cannot help, you cannot help them, and you write that down.

It is a counter, a town, and four seasons of people who need something for it.

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📚 THE A YEAR AT… SERIES

This is the fifth book. A Year at the Wayside (an inn on a quiet road), A Year at the Lending Library (a small town library), A Year at the Ferry (a rope ferry on a river) and A Year on the Salt Road (a salt cart on a long road) use the same rules with a different place, different people and different things running out. Each book stands on its own.

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📄 THE FILES

Two zip files, one for each paper size, so you only download the one you print on:

▪ A4 — colour and ink-saver

▪ US Letter — colour and ink-saver

The ink-saver build drops the tint and the cover painting and keeps every word. Same book, same 20 pages, cheaper to run — and the journal sheets are the ones you will reprint.

⬇️ Instant digital download. Nothing is posted to you.

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🕯️ ONE GOOD EVENING

Games for a table, and for a chair by the fire.