Unhoused

You know this town.

You know which doorways hold heat longest. You know which shelter has the intake worker who doesn't look at you like that. You know what the temperature means.

Tonight it means something.

UNHOUSED is a solo journaling RPG set in a small Ontario city on a single night in late fall. You are one person — the Long-Timer who has been outside for a full season and carries that knowledge like ballast, or the Recently Unhoused who still reaches for their keys before remembering. You have no bed for tonight. The session covers 6 PM to 6 AM, the decisions you make in that time, and what they cost.

Two resources track your night. SHELTER measures the practical landscape — what options are still open, what doors haven't closed. SELF measures something harder to name: dignity, the continuity between who you were and who you are. They pull against each other. The shelter's intake gets you warm and costs you something. You can comply and be warmer, or hold your ground and be colder. The game does not judge either choice. It asks you to write about it.

Six tables. Two dice. A journal.

The systems in this game — the shelter, the warming centre, the outreach worker — are not villains and are not heroes. They are institutions with real power over your life, staffed by human beings operating under constraints, some of whom are genuinely trying and some of whom are not. The game renders them accurately.

This game does not offer a redemption arc. The session ends when you find somewhere safe for the night, or when the night defeats you. Either way, you wake up tomorrow and the situation is the same as when you started. UNHOUSED witnesses one night. It does not fix anything.

What's in the trifold:

• Two archetypes: The Long-Timer and The Recently Unhoused
• Six 2d6 tables: The Street, The Option, The Service, The Encounter, The Interior, The Morning
• The Temperature Rule — after 10 PM, the cold compounds
• The Known — a wildcard moment of human recognition that restores what the night takes
• Resource tracks for SHELTER and SELF (0–6 each)
• Complete rules on a single two-page, six-panel print-and-play sheet

What you need:

• Two six-sided dice
• A journal or notebook
• A pencil
• One to two hours

Expand the night into a season — UNHOUSED: THE LONG WINTER (in development) takes one person through five sessions, November through March. A third resource, GROUND, tracks housing applications, caseworker relationships, the slow institutional machinery of a winter spent trying. Coming to jgesq.itch.io post-playtest.

UNHOUSED was designed in Napanee, Ontario — a town of sixteen thousand with a shelter, a warming centre, three meth clinics, and tents down by the river. It was built from research, from memory, and from a conversation with a man named Shane outside the Mission on West Ave, who was kind to my dogs.

Pay what you want. One dollar suggested. Print it, fold it, sit with one night.

Julian Grant Games — solo RPGs built from history, community, and the people who don't usually get to be the protagonist.

jgesq.itch.io | jgesq.substack.com