Inkslinger

Your brother's in the angels' keeping, and the clean way out is closed. A solo gamebook played in pen: no dice, no stats, just the marks on your body, each one a power and a price. Halfway through, you turn, and they start coming to you.

The Hide. A city of canals and laundries and painted stairs, where angels walk the streets like cops and speak only in the Plain. The ones they catch go into the keeping, and at dawn they're made clean: every mark taken off them, and everything under the marks.

The night. Your brother Tam got a scratcher's sling gone bad, and now the light at the top of the Weir stairs has him. To get him out you'll need a mark of your own. Pilot Rue will sling you on a folding chair under the only working lamp. Mother Sable takes names. Old Hasp takes whatever you carry. The cut-wife takes nothing. That's the point.

The turn. Every mark inks a box on your Blank, and when the last box goes, you become what you were afraid of. The Shine stops answering. The dirties come to your door with a loaf and a candle stub. Then the itchy come up the Row, one after another, with their kin in the keeping and the need on them, and look at you the way you looked at Rue. Now you're in the chair.

How it plays:

• Size: 240 numbered passages, about 48,000 words.
• No randomness: no dice, no stats, no deaths, no failure endings.
• Two sheets: The Page, your body (the Blank, your slings, keels, fetches and the Tab of who you owe), and The Hide, the world (ten greens and the names of the people you mark).
• The needsmust: the clean way through is always closed. You choose how you're marked and with whose ink, never whether.
• Thirteen marks: each a gift and a debt. Each reads a third way after you turn.
• Endings: three Forms and six endings, plus a last page for the reader who inks the whole city.
• Voice: a street argot you pick up by ear, with no glossary.

You need: the two sheets (in the book; print them or copy them out) and a pen. Nothing you write gets erased.

Format: EPUB, validated with EPUBCheck. Every "turn to" is a live link. Set in IM Fell DW Pica. PDF Print & Play Edition for home printing. Paperback available on Amazon.

Price: pay what you want, $5 suggested.

Sounds like: witch house, drone, darkwave, Eno's ambient records.

Content note: body horror, self-marking, ritual scarification and religious transgression. Angels are real in it, and they are not on your side. Nothing in it is shown for its own sake.

Credits:

• Text, design and art direction: Julian Grant. Art made with Midjourney.
• Built with Gamebook Builder by Shaine Hinnant (amphitheatermatch): https://www.etsy.com/listing/4585447685/gamebook-builder-interactive-fiction
• Set in IM Fell DW Pica, cut by Igino Marini (SIL Open Font License).
• Published by Julian Grant Games.