Ashe & Granite

Every door is open to you. Every door costs something.

You inherit a cabin twenty-five miles past a town called Silverhead, and you have ten days before the third of October.

This is a horror RPG that hands you the wheel. You read it, a voice reads it with you, and between the two of those the mountain assembles somewhere behind your eyes. No camera decides what you look at. No cutscene does the work for you. The paintings are there when a place or a person needs a face, and everything else in Silverhead you build yourself.

Fully voiced, read to you by AI and the voice of the author

Both roads are read aloud, 5,245 recordings of them. Two reading voices, one for Ashe's road and one for Granite's, are synthesized. The third voice, the half of you that is not driving, is the author's own. Under the reading there is a sound body: places have their own air and it changes with the hour, fights have their cues, the things at the mine have their noises, and the dice land on felt. All of it switches off in Settings whenever you like.

Nothing marks the right door

A door will tell you what it costs, in Anger or Fear, and sometimes its odds. It never tells you whether it was the one. You can walk past the thing that would have saved you and never learn it was there, and the book will not stop to tell you.

Choices compound quietly. Who you trusted on day two decides which doors exist on day nine, and the story keeps adjusting itself around the person you are turning into rather than the one you meant to be.

Fights happen, for real

Bare hands are worth two dice and a die lands on five or better. Whatever you are holding adds to the pool. Seven slots of armor, and every hit a piece blocks costs it something, until the hit it cannot block. Every fighter sizes up what you bring and throws more dice for it. The dice are real dice: they tumble in a felt trough at the foot of the table, every round, the full throw. Thirty-five things in this book will fight you. Kill one and it changes you.

Something keeps the door

Before any light is lit in the Ironsides there is a round room, and something in it. It wears a different coat every life. There is no way around it. Kill it and it goes in your binder, and it does not come back until all six are in.

Every death is a card

When a life ends you get a card: the painting on the front with the name, the place and the number, the account of how it happened on the back. Seventy-six are written and painted, forty-four deaths and thirty-two endings, and the collection holds every one you have found. The rest lie face down until one of yours finds them. Seventeen badges are earned by things a life actually did, and three of them can be worn into the next one.

You are not being punished for dying. You are filling a book.

One way out

Seventy-five endings keep you where you are. One does not.

There is a single route through this book that reaches a door out. It is not a puzzle and there is no trick to it. It is a specific run of choices across the whole story, and it asks for restraint in a book built to reward the opposite.

It has never been found.

Two roads

Ashe Morrison. A mother out of Hollywood, Florida, at the end of a black year. One duffel, twenty-one hundred miles to go.

Granite Wilson. A father out of Hollywood, Florida, at the end of a black year. One duffel, twenty-one hundred miles to go.

Both roads run the same ten days. Neither of them tells the same story.

Counted, not estimated

• 170,000 words of prose
  
• 5,245 voice recordings across both roads
  
• 1,151 authored choices
  
• 76 named endings, 44 of them deaths, every one painted
  
• 39 people, every one of them wanting something
  
• 120 things to carry, and weight is real
  
• 879 written answers to things you can type
  
• Plays entirely offline: no account, no launcher, no connection

Most people die. That's the book.