A medieval life, lived once. Death is final.

Born somewhere poor, in a year that does not care. Every choice stands. Then it ends.

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A single year in Unwritten: a paragraph of event prose, with the choices listed under it.

The register

Godric ♂︎

age 9 · 1491 · Western Christendom

StandingPeasant
ReputeUnknown
FortunePoor
HealthSound
MotherLiving
FatherBuried · taken by fever
SiblingsTwo living
MarriageUnmarried
ChildrenNone

There is no score, no level and no bar to fill.

What the game keeps, it keeps in words: where you stand, what people make of you, whether you are eating, whether you are well. Read it whenever you like. It changes as the years do, and it never once tells you how you are doing.

The years

The whole game is one event, one choice, the next year, until there are no years left. These are three of the 205 in the pool, as written.

age 11 · 1493

Winter is lean. There is one heel of bread left on the table and your brother is watching you from across the room, saying nothing.

  • Break it in half and share
  • Eat it before he can

age 29 · 1511

You have proof the lord's steward has been skimming the tithe barn for years, thinning every measure that passes through his hands. What you do with it is yours to decide.

  • Take the proof to the lord
  • Bury what you know
  • Sell your silence to the steward

age 44 · 1526

The roads to the great shrine are long and thick with bandits, but they say a true pilgrim comes home cleansed. Your knees are not what they were, and the road would take a year.

  • Take up the staff and go
  • Pray at home instead

What is left

  1. I was born on straw in the cold before dawn, under a roof I shared with the beasts, and no one thought to mark the hour.
  2. I let my brother take the greater portion. Blood was worth more to me than an ox.
  3. I said aloud what the others only muttered. It cost me, it changed nothing, and I would do it again.
  4. I married for love and against sense. We had little, but I have never once regretted the choice.
  5. I looked at the deer a long time and then I let it walk, because a hanged father feeds no one, and went home to the thin faces with empty hands and a whole neck.

Godric, 47, taken by fever

That is the whole of him. The chronicle is what a life leaves, and there is no going back into it to change a line.

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