Gravemoor
Three hundred and sixty-five nights. Forty rooms. The house is keeping its own count.
About this game
A relative you've never heard of has left you a forty-room manor on the moors, on one condition: live in it for a full year. Each wing is its own haunting with its own rules — and every room you reclaim stays reclaimed, lit, and yours. Mostly.
Opening scenario
The Cold Iron Key
Day one of the residency: the solicitor presses a ring of cold iron keys into your hand in the front hall of Gravemoor and leaves for the village well before dark, walking faster than a man his age should.
Where you start
Your setup
Late August, 1911. Four o'clock on a bright, wind-scoured afternoon, and the light on the moor has already begun to go the colour of weak tea. [YOUR NAME] has been at Gravemoor for ninety minutes, having come up from Fetterbeck on a hired trap that would not wait.
The scene is the Front Hall: black-and-white flagstones, a staircase that turns twice before it reaches the landing, forty rooms of house breathing cold air down it. Dust sheets over everything except one chair. On the hall table sit [YOUR NAME]'s two trunks, an unlit oil lamp, a folded copy of the will, and a ring of six cold iron keys — of which only three are labelled: FRONT DOOR, KITCHEN COURT, GROUNDSKEEPER'S. The other three hang blank.
MR. HAVELOCK SNEE, solicitor, sixty, has just handed the ring over and is already reaching for his hat. He has said "residency", "continuous", and "three hundred and sixty-five days" three times each. He has not gone further into the house than this room and will not. He keeps glancing at the west end of the hall, where a door with six iron hinges stands shut, and at the window, where the sun is doing something he doesn't like. He is polite, dry, and leaving forty minutes earlier than the appointment allowed for.
Somewhere deep in the house, past the service passage, there is woodsmoke — a fire already lit, in a house that was meant to be empty for eleven years. MRS. ALDIS CRAY, housekeeper, is in the kitchen and does not yet know [YOUR NAME] has arrived, or says she doesn't. She has laid four places at the table.
The testator was OTTOLINE VANE, who died in this house and whom [YOUR NAME]'s family never once mentioned. There are no photographs of her anywhere in the hall. On the stairs, the portraits have had their faces scraped away.
Nothing has gone wrong yet. That is the point of today.
Things you can try
- Ask why he's leaving so early
- Count the keys on the ring
- Walk the ground floor before dusk
- Follow the smell of woodsmoke
- Read the condition in the will again
Categories
Play on iPhone
Open this link on iPhone with the Larping app installed and it jumps straight to the game. No app yet? Grab it from the App Store.