A Year at the Ferry

You keep a rope ferry on a wide, cold river, with a town on each bank. People come down to the slip, and 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 on a river crossing.

You are not a hero and there is nothing to defeat. You keep a boat, a rope and two slips, and the river brings you everybody who needs to be on the other side. Some of them tell you why. Most of them do not.

You play one evening at a time:

🎲 Roll for who comes down to the slip.

🎲 Roll for what they want.

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

If the two rolls do not fit together — a drover with two hundred sheep, on the morning the fog sits on the water — 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 crossing

▪ 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 crossing is yours.

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

Three for the place — the crossing, the boat, and what needs doing before winter.

Then you give it a name. Each town calls the ferry something different, and neither of them is what is painted on the boat.

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🍂 FOUR SEASONS, AND THE RIVER BEHAVES DIFFERENTLY IN EACH

🌱 SPRING — The river comes up

The snow in the hills lets go all at once. The river climbs past the second step of the slip, and everybody who waited out the winter wants to cross in the same week.

☀️ SUMMER — Low water

The river drops until the sandbars show. The boat scrapes at the far slip, and half the valley decides it can wade across upstream instead.

🍁 AUTUMN — The drove

Every animal in the hills goes down to the autumn market, all of them have to cross here, and none of them want to.

❄️ WINTER — The ice comes in

Ice grows out from both banks a little further every night and the channel narrows, and there will be one morning when the boat does not go at all.

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⚖️ THREE THINGS YOU ARE KEEPING

🪢 Rope 🪣 Tar 🤝 Goodwill

Anything heavy you carry takes a Rope. A crossing in fog, flood or dark takes a Tar. 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

"A man coming home from a long way off, who stands at the slip a long time before he pays."

"Two people from the two towns, crossing an hour apart, each paying you extra not to mention the other."

"A bottle comes down the river with a letter inside, and it is addressed to the ferry."

"To thank you for a crossing you do not remember, eleven years ago, on the worst night of their life."

"You sit on the slip and count what the river brings down: a hat, a gate, and a very surprised duck."

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✨ THIS IS FOR YOU IF

▪ You like rivers, boats and the people who wait 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 ferry carries over, so you inherit whatever they did to the rope.

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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 something arrives that you cannot solve, you cannot solve it, and you write that down.

It is a river, two towns, and four seasons of people who need to be on the other side.

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📚 THE A YEAR AT… SERIES

This is the third book. A Year at the Wayside (an inn on a quiet road), A Year at the Lending Library (a small town library) 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, and all four are also sold together as one bundle.

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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.