Ballast

It is 1870. There is no transcontinental balloon flight — no one can steer a gas envelope, and no one pretends otherwise. What there is instead is a circuit: cities strung between New York and San Francisco where promoters stage judged ascensions, and a season's purses can add up to five thousand dollars for whoever holds the best record when the circuit closes.

You learned this from your husband, who learned it in the Union Army Balloon Corps and took it into the carnival trade when the war and the Corps were both finished with him. You stitched the envelope while he worked the crowd. He is three months dead — a weather accident, the word the newspapers use.

BALLAST is a solo journaling RPG for one player. You are either The Apprentice's Hands — technically exact, disciplined, flying precisely as he taught you because exactness is the only fluency you trust right now — or The Showman's Widow — steadier, already carrying real weight, less exact but more practiced at carrying it. This session is one exhibition day. One town. One ascent, judged.

Two resources run in parallel, not opposition. BALLAST is physical and finite — sandbags thrown to climb, to correct, to arrest a fall. What you brought up is all you have, and it does not restore mid-flight. GRIEF starts low and climbs as the day goes on — not a problem the session resolves by its final table, but the honest weight of three months into a loss and several hundred feet into a job that used to be his.

Six 2d6 tables carry the day in sequence: The Weigh-In, The Climb, The Record Attempt, Trouble Aloft, The Weight, and The Landing. The wild card — The Known — fires on double-2: a gust that has no business existing, arriving at the exact moment you need it. The crowd calls it luck. Your journal can call it something else.

The game is grounded in the real mechanics of 1870s aeronautics — hydrogen produced from iron filings and sulfuric acid, no engine, no rudder, vertical control only, real balloon-riot risk when a launch goes wrong. Nothing here asks you to imagine technology that didn't exist. You are doing exactly what real circuit aeronauts did, under the same constraints they lived with.

You need: Two six-sided dice (plus one for occasional 1d6 rolls), a journal, a pencil, one to two hours.

Format: Print-and-play PDF. Two pages, six panels. Fold, play, keep the journal.

Price: PWYW — $1 suggested.

A post-playtest gamebook expansion — running the full circuit, New York to San Francisco, with a persistent season-long GRIEF and a running tally toward the $5,000 purse — is under consideration.