Thirty Nights at Blackwell.

You are Eleanor Hartwell. You live in Edinburgh. A solicitor's letter arrives: a great-aunt you never met has died, and you are the last surviving claimant to her manor in the Welsh Marches. The will gives you everything on one condition. You have to spend thirty consecutive nights in the house.

You arrive in pouring rain. The driver refuses to take you past the gate. Three servants are waiting in the entrance hall. None of them speak first. The housekeeper has been waiting for you since before your mother was born.

The thirty-night clock is not a legal stipulation. It is the renewal cycle of a covenant your family forced on a Welsh cunning-woman they murdered in 1672. Seven generations of Blackwells have kept the bargain alive in the cellar beneath this house. You walk in knowing nothing. There is no one left to keep it after you.

No combat. Skill-by-use progression across four categories, Body, Mind, Voice, Hand. A crafting system built on Anwen's cunning-craft: gather, brew, use, with six brew families that swap in where combat would normally be. Per-NPC trust, both positive and negative. A five-tier Composure meter that degrades Eleanor's first-person perception across an authored variant tree at every tier. A daily structure of acts across thirty nights: discovery (1–10), commitment (11–25), execution (26–30).

• Five origins (Scholar / Journalist / Nurse / Governess / Clerk), each with a different starting loadout
• Four endings (Sacrifice / Avoidance / Bind / Redemption) plus a Public Justice variant, each requiring a different play pattern
• Click-choice menu for primary input, plus four locked "literary moments" where you type your own words and the narration quotes them back later
• Zero runtime AI, the prose is authored, the variants are pre-written, the engine is a pure lookup
• The bricked spring beneath the cellar is the central artifact; the bargain reaches its final renewal on night thirty

Electron + TypeScript on Node, with an xterm.js terminal inside the window. ASCII + ANSI color art for every room and scene, the visual lineage is Caves of Qud and SanctuaryRPG. Save anywhere. Local first, optional cloud sync later. Windows, macOS, Linux.

The literary voice is the moat. Every line of prose is gated by a written style sheet that documents Eleanor's first-person rules, NPC dialogue voices, a Welsh-restraint discipline, and an anti-AI-smell catalog. If the prose smells like a model wrote it, the entire positioning collapses. So nothing ships that hasn't been authored and edited against the sheet.

The Welsh-borderlands gothic is an underbuilt niche in indie text-RPG. The literary game audience is small but devoted, Roadwarden sold 100k as a solo dev, Citizen Sleeper crossed a million, Disco Elysium redefined what a CRPG could be. There is room for a quiet, slow, written game with real systems and one woman's voice carrying it. This is the slow build I keep coming back to.