A Year in the Walled Garden

You keep an old walled garden, and the gate is open to anybody who asks: neighbours wanting seedlings, children wanting to see a seed come up, a cook with a list and no money until the end of the month. 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 in a walled kitchen garden.

You are not a hero and there is nothing to defeat. You have four old brick walls, a well, a shed full of saved seed and a glasshouse with panes missing, and the year brings you frost, drought, glut and bare earth. The town brings you everything else.

You play one evening at a time:

🎲 Roll for who comes to the gate.

🎲 Roll for what they want.

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

If the two rolls do not fit together — the judge of the town show, in a straw hat, pretending to be just passing, and wanting something to win the show with — 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 garden

▪ 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 garden is yours.

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

Three for the place — the garden itself, what grows against the wall, and what needs doing before winter.

Then you give it a name. The town already calls it something, usually after whoever had it before you, and that will take years to change.

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🍂 FOUR SEASONS, AND THE GARDEN ASKS FOR SOMETHING DIFFERENT IN EACH

🌱 SPRING — The first sowing

The soil warms a finger at a time, every sowing is a bet against the last frost, and the whole town remembers at once that it meant to plant something.

☀️ SUMMER — Glut

Everything ripens in the same fortnight, the evenings are long enough to water by, and you give away more over the gate than you could ever sell.

🍁 AUTUMN — Picking and keeping

The apples come down, the onions go up in ropes in the shed, and every evening is a race against the first frost to get everything in.

❄️ WINTER — Bare earth

The beds are dug and empty, the frost holds the ground like iron, and the garden is all bones and promises until the light comes back.

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⚖️ THREE THINGS YOU ARE KEEPING

🌾 Seed 💧 Water 🤝 Goodwill

Anything sown or planted takes a Seed. Anything watered by hand takes a Water. 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 boy sent with a basket for a pound of strawberries, who asks how many he is allowed to eat on the way home."

"To borrow a spade. They will bring it back, and you both know how that goes."

"The fig ripens. One fig, after all these years, and you do not tell a soul."

"The seed merchant, with his catalogue and his stories, who stays three hours and sells you nothing."

"You sit on the upturned barrow and watch the beans grow, and are almost sure you can see it."

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✨ THIS IS FOR YOU IF

▪ You love gardens, allotments, seed packets and the smell of the earth after rain

▪ 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 garden journal, or always meant to, and want prompts that build on each other

▪ 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 garden carries over, so you inherit whatever they did to the beds.

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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 to the gate with something you cannot help, you cannot help them, and you write that down.

It is four brick walls, a gate, and four seasons of people and weather.

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📚 THE A YEAR AT… SERIES

This is the eighth 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), A Year at the Apothecary (a country apothecary), A Year at the Witch's Cottage (a cottage at the edge of the wood) and A Year at the Café (a café on a town square) 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.