BEFORE IT GETS LIGHT 

Julian Grant Games | jgesq.itch.io A Solo Gamebook

Content rating: Contains mature themes (violence, trafficking reference)

Twenty-five years as a Chicago cop, and Ned Miller never once drew his weapon. Tonight, in a rest area in the Pennsylvania woods, somebody knocks on his cab door. By first light he'll have to decide what happens to the fourteen-year-old girl in his passenger seat, and what happens to him.

November 2016. US 62, the Allegheny National Forest, fourteen minutes past eleven.

Ned Miller buried his wife a year ago and his mentor six months after that. Gus left him a tractor, two trailers, and a cassette that says keep rolling. Tonight Ned is deadheading home to Indiana, asleep in a rest area off a dark two-lane road, when the knocking starts.

The book begins with that knock. What happens in the next three minutes, you live through. What happens after is yours to decide.

There's a girl in your cab now who says her name is Pat. There's a law that will see tonight very differently from the way you do. And there are six stretches of road between you and first light: the forest, oil country, the state line, a Turnpike service plaza at three in the morning, the long dark along the lake, and Toledo.

How it plays

Before It Gets Light is a solo gamebook of 150 passages and about 18,000 words. Every passage gives you two or three concrete choices. Two numbers decide how your night ends:

• Heat is how much the law knows and how close it is. It rises fast and rarely comes down.
• Trust is the girl's. It rises slowly and drops in a moment. She can only leave when the truck stops, and she will.

You carry four things that matter: your logbook, your retired-officer badge, the Colt you'd never drawn in the line of duty, and Gus's tape. The badge opens doors, and she's watching every time you show it. The Colt ends scenes, which is the problem with it.

Along the way: a paper logbook in which you write your own lines, true or false. A Level III roadside inspection. 16 codewords, three d6 tables (The Wire, The Phone, First Light) and nine endings, none of them a rescue.

Read the footnotes.

You need: two six-sided dice and a pencil. The Sheet and The Log are in the book and in a separate printable PDF. Reading on a phone or e-reader? Keep your numbers in a notes app.

Format: EPUB (validated with EPUBCheck, no errors), with live passage links throughout, seven halftone illustrations, and IBM Plex Mono embedded. Plus a two-page printable PDF of the Sheet and the Log.

Price: Pay what you want, $5 suggested.

Content note: This book contains a shooting, grief, and the trafficking of a minor. The trafficking is never shown: the book stays with the man who has to decide, not the child he's deciding about.

If you or someone you know needs help: in the United States, the National Human Trafficking Hotline is 1-888-373-7888 (text 233733). In Canada, the Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline is 1-833-900-1010.

Credits: Text, design and illustration: Julian Grant (illustrations made with OpenArt) Adapted from Julian Grant's short story "Miller's Junction." Built with Gamebook Builder by Shaine Hinnant (amphitheatermatch) — https://www.etsy.com/listing/4585447685/gamebook-builder-interactive-fiction. Set in IBM Plex Mono (SIL Open Font License). Published by Julian Grant Games