A Year at the Witch’s Cottage

You keep the last cottage before the trees, and the village walks out to your door with whatever it will not say in daylight. 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 as the witch at the edge of a village.

You are not a hero and there is nothing to defeat. You have a cottage, a candle and a reel of red thread, and the village brings you what it cannot fix by itself: a lost ring, a bad dream, a new barn that wants a charm against lightning. The magic is small, and you are never quite sure it was the charm and not the walk home.

You play one evening at a time:

🎲 Roll for who comes to the door.

🎲 Roll for what they want.

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

If the two rolls do not fit together — the vicar's sister in a veil, on a borrowed horse, asking for three dry days for a wedding — 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 cottage

▪ One night 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 cottage is yours.

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

Three for the place — the cottage itself, what hangs from the beams, and what needs doing before winter.

Then you give it a name. The village already has one for it, which they use when they think you cannot hear.

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🍂 FOUR SEASONS, AND THE VILLAGE KNOCKS FOR DIFFERENT THINGS IN EACH

🌱 SPRING — Sowing and asking

The ground opens, the lambs come, and everybody who sat out the winter wondering about something walks out to the cottage to ask it.

☀️ SUMMER — Short nights

The nights are barely dark, the fair comes and goes, and people walk out to the cottage in the long evenings wanting things they would not ask for in daylight.

🍁 AUTUMN — The turning

The apples come in, the evenings close up, and the dead are on everybody's mind at once, so the knocking starts a little earlier every week.

❄️ WINTER — The long nights

It is dark by four, the lane is ice, and the people who walk out to the cottage now have usually left it until it could not be left any longer.

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⚖️ THREE THINGS YOU ARE KEEPING

🕯️ Candles 🧵 Thread 🤝 Goodwill

Anything worked by candlelight takes a Candle. Anything knotted, tied or bound takes a Thread. 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

"The vicar comes to you at night by the back path, and you have never told a soul what for."

"Three dry days for a wedding, and they will pay whatever it costs."

"A charm for the door, against something they will not name, which turns out to be the landlord."

"Carol singers, who sing your door last and fastest, and are gone before you can open it."

"You bake, badly, for nobody, and eat all of it."

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✨ THIS IS FOR YOU IF

▪ You like cozy witches, candlelight, folk charms and the people who knock after dark

▪ You want magic that is quiet and small, not fireballs

▪ 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 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 cottage carries over, so you inherit whatever they did to the candles.

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🚫 WHAT IS NOT IN IT

No combat. No monsters. No stat blocks, no spell slots and no character sheet.

Nothing here is fought. There is magic, but it is small: a knot, a candle, a lost thing found. If somebody knocks with something you cannot help, you cannot help them, and you write that down.

It is a cottage, a village, and four seasons of people who need something small and strange.

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📚 THE A YEAR AT… SERIES

This is the sixth 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), A Year on the Salt Road (a salt cart on a long road) and A Year at the Apothecary (a country apothecary) 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.