The Lighthouse at the End of the Universe, and Writing It Down

The Lighthouse at the End of the Universe belongs to a sub-genre of Solo RPGs, the Journaling RPG. Lighthouse is, quote: “best played at nighttime before bed or for when you can’t sleep. You are the current lighthouse keeper of the Lighthouse. Record your duties, thoughts and observations. Your notes in the logbook will be a record of your time in the lighthouse and the lighthouse itself.”

Journaling RPGs lean heavily into the narrative side of RPGs. A lot of Solo RPGs have some form of journaling or record-keeping as part of their system, but Journaling RPGs force this part of the game to the forefront. The purpose of the game is rarely to beat the Foozle or get the McGuffin, but rather the act of journaling itself.

Like most Journaling games, Lighthouse requires a small collection of tools; in this case a d6, a deck of cards, and a coin to flip. These tools are used to consult Oracles and generate the random events that occur in the game-narrative that you, as the lighthouse keeper, will react to and journal about.

A game of Lighthouse goes like this: You date and sign the top of your journal-entry and describe the game-narrative weather. Once you’ve measured its wind-speed, humidity, and temperature, you try to light the lighthouse by flipping the coin and turning over a card. You might light the wick, or you might not. Keep trying until you do. Write about how it went. Why did it take that many tries? Are you worried about something?

Now you choose what to do next. Observe something happening nearby? Perform maintenance? Does an event occur? Roll the die and flip a card to find out what. Write about what you see. How you think. When you feel.

If you like, you can get supplies by playing a beach-combing minigame. Then you can write about that too.

When you’re finished, you close the journal, and that’s it. The game is over.

Usually, Journaling RPGs provide some kind of denouement, though not always a concrete “ending.” A narrative arc has rising and falling action, and so some Journaling RPGs center around some specific event. They can be about overcoming a crisis, providing medicine to adventurers, living in a magical cottage, forging a weapon of legend, or remembering the pre-apocalypse. A lot of Journaling RPGs are about relationships. RPGs based on the Carta system usually end once the target card is reached and you complete your journal of your exploration, homecoming, migration, or treasure-hunt.

A single game of Lighthouse is a single night of managing the lighthouse. No more, no less.

So you play again. And again.

You play Lighthouse as many times as you want, as often as you want. Your journal gets longer. The lighthouse changes. It becomes darker and more isolated, or brighter and more populated. You meet people. You say goodbye. You’re sad, or happy, or angry, and every night the lighthouse changes. You change. Remember the weather you measure at the beginning of every game? It changes based on how you are feeling when you open the journal. Your life outside the journal influences what you are asked to put into it.

Lighthouse is less a game about “what happens next,” and more about the meditations and explorations of ourselves in an otherworldly space. It is something to take us out of ourselves so we can journal afresh; a ritual that puts us in a mental space suitable for introspection.

Few RPGs are ever designed to be played more than once like this. Oh, the system is meant to be played repeatedly, but never the same adventure over and over again.

The saying goes: “you can never step in the same river twice.” So too can you never play an RPG again. Your character, your party, your GM…something will always be different, if not most everything. Even playing the same adventure module will turn out differently, depending on die rolls or player decisions. You will find new things you had missed before, or perhaps go in entirely different directions.

In Lighthouse, like most Solo Journaling RPGs, the game changes with you. The result is a game that is as much a reflection of the player as it is a set of rules.

One of the most interesting things for me is how most every Journaling RPG is, by necessity, system-first. It seems incongruous with the bare-bones narrative nature of journaling, but it couldn’t be any other way; if a journaling game were fiction-first, then that’s just journaling; why have dice or cards at all?

The binding of your play to oracles forces your creativity down a random path. The cards have provided a seed of inspiration, and now you have to follow it, wherever it may lead. You have to come up with excuses and explanations for what you are given, not create your own fiction free from the grounded confines of a manufactured reality.

This underscores my instinct that terms like “fiction-first” or “rules-heavy” are not comprehensive. The division of Story versus Rules can be used to describe the goals of a system, the inclination of a GM, the instincts of the players, or even the ethos of a single game session.

As the only participant in a Solo Journaling RPG, the rules exist only as far as you yourself are willing to engage with them, and there is nothing wrong with that; you are the only person who has any say. If you want to stop listening to the cards and just start writing, go to! Rules have no more control or power over us than we allow them to have, and there is no moral obligation to follow rules that do not provide us what we need.

Journaling has a long history in our culture: children’s diaries, vacation-house logs, ship logbooks…the recording of our experiences has been around since writing itself. Journaling allows us to remember details our fallible memories might overlook. It allows us to express emotions that we might otherwise repress. It gives us a safe and secure space to organize and sanctify our experiences. It can ease stress, encourage self-discovery, and provide us tools to help in times of struggle.

So why play a Journal RPG at all? Why not just journal?

As others have said before, RPGs can be a great way to explore emotions, experiences, and to an extent, ourselves. We can practice being angry, sad, brave, heroic, romantic…

Journaling RPGs are perhaps the most distilled form of this kind of roleplaying tool. These RPGs can inspire our creative sides, but they also provide us the perfectly safe environment to explore ourselves.

Small wonder, then, than so many Journaling RPGs explore the dark, strange, hopeful, painful, aspirational, and deeply personal aspects of life.