A dragon is dying in a sea cave.
Every morning, a girl brings it a basket of fish.
No one in the village knows why.
What the Sea Keeps is a complete narrative adventure, and a mystery wrapped around a grief. A fog-bound herring village wants the wounded red dragon beneath its dark lighthouse dead. On foggy nights, the drowned walk up out of the harbor and knock on the doors of the living. A kind old man met on the road is not who he says he is.
And the answers, when they come, are not really about monsters. They are about a family, a debt that can never be repaid, and the question every character at your table will eventually have to answer: what do we keep, and what do we let the sea have?
It is built to be the session your players are still talking about years from now. Not because of treasure or kills, but because of a girl with a basket, an old man with a tin whistle he never learned to play, and a light on a cliff that has been dark for six years.
- 67pages
- 17scenes
- 5conversations
- 6set pieces
- 8characters
- 4endings
What makes it different
Played like a film
Players earn Embers, the adventure’s rewards, for vivid, honest, cinematic play, and spend them on advantage, rerolls and flourishes. Rolls land in four tiers, and players narrate their own triumphs. Every fight has stakes beyond hit points.
Conversation as play
Five structured downtime scenes, each a small game: a soldier’s scar game, a net-mending ritual, a children’s game on a long night watch. Every character’s answers are written out, layered with what they aren’t saying.
Wonder, horror and grief
A cave lit by glowing anemones. The drowned walking in the fog. A dream told in smoke. A finale on the highest tide of the year.
Characters with something to hide
Every major character has a surface, a subtext and a breaking point, with the exact words they say when the truth finally erupts.
Nothing is wasted
Small details planted in the first hour return in the last. A one-page map traces every one, from the joke where it first appears to the moment it pays off.
Any table, handled with care
Companions scale the story from one player to four. Six open backstory Threads let players write themselves in. Content guidance and marked scenes help you set how close the camera goes.
Moments your table will carry home
- A drowned father, knocking softly at his son’s door in the fog, asking to be let in.
- A girl feeding a dragon herring one at a time, and the number she says when the basket is empty.
- A village song, and the verse a fisherman wrote for his daughter.
- A box beneath a hearthstone, and what an old man finds inside it.
- A tin whistle that has never once been played.
- A light on a cliff that was dark for six years.
“A person who did something terrible a long time ago. Something really terrible. And then spent the rest of their life being good. Tide or ember?”
Act Two · The Long Watch
Look inside
Pages from the free preview. Click any page to see it larger.
What’s in the free preview
The opening chapter, the rules for story-first play, the backstory Threads, the village of Saltmarrow and its song, and the first three scenes of Act One, with the page numbers of the full edition so you can see where you are in the book. It ends with three short glimpses of later scenes, chosen to show the heart of the story without giving away its secrets. Read the preview.
