A Year at the Wayside

You keep an inn on a quiet road. People come up it, and you write down what happened. That is the whole game — one die, one pen, about twenty minutes an evening.

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🌙 WHAT THIS IS

A solo RPG journal — a solo journaling game about a year in one place.

You are not a hero and there is nothing to defeat. You run a house beside a road, and the road brings you people. Some of them tell you the truth about why they are travelling. Most do not.

You play one evening at a time:

🎲 Roll for who comes up the road.

🎲 Roll for what they want.

✒️ Write three or four lines about what you gave them, and what it cost you.

If the two rolls do not fit together — somebody who wants only to be warm, arriving on the night the firewood ran out — 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

▪ 3 ending tables — which one you roll on is decided by how you played

▪ 8 journal sheets — 232 ruled lines, 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 place is yours.

Three for you — why the inn is yours, what you are good at, and the one thing you do not say about yourself.

Three for the house — what it is, the road it sits on, and the thing that needs doing before winter.

Then you give it a name, and the year begins.

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🍂 FOUR SEASONS, AND THE ROAD BEHAVES DIFFERENTLY IN EACH

🌱 SPRING — The road opens

The ground dries out, the first carts come through, and everything that was put off in the autumn is now overdue.

☀️ SUMMER — Everyone is moving

The busiest months, and the ones where the work is heaviest and the daylight is long enough to hide how tired you are.

🍁 AUTUMN — Everything gets counted

Rents, tithes, stores and debts all fall due within six weeks of each other. Everyone knows exactly what they have.

❄️ WINTER — The road closes

Weeks where nobody comes at all, and then somebody comes who should not have set out. Firewood becomes the only number that matters.

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⚖️ THREE THINGS YOU ARE KEEPING

📦 Stores 🪵 Firewood 🤝 Goodwill

They go up and down one at a time, and 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 how it ends — and all three endings are written out at the same length. None of them is the good one.

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📖 A FEW LINES FROM INSIDE

"Nobody. Four days of nobody, and you start talking to the horses."

"Only to be warm, and to be left entirely alone about it."

"A drover with sixty sheep and nowhere to put them, asking for the far field for one night."

"You walk to the top of the lane for no reason and stand there a while."

"Somebody sends word ahead. Nobody has ever done that before."

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✨ THIS IS FOR YOU IF

▪ 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 are looking for a solo TTRPG that is played entirely by writing

▪ You keep a journal and want a prompt that builds on itself 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 inn carries over, so you inherit whatever they did to the woodpile.

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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 also not a personality quiz about your aesthetic. It is an inn, a road, and four seasons of people arriving with something they want.

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📚 THE A YEAR AT… SERIES

This is the first book. A Year at the Lending Library (a small town library), A Year at the Ferry (a rope ferry on a wide 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, and all four are also sold together as one bundle.

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📄 THE FILES

▪ A4 — colour

▪ A4 — ink-saver

▪ US Letter — colour

▪ US Letter — ink-saver

The ink-saver build drops the tint and prints the rules grey. 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.