A gothic romance RPG told on silver plates. In the valley of Vantry the dead talk only from old photographs, and the one way to stop them is to stand still long enough to take another.
Polish the plate slowly with your cursor or finger to find her face. Rush it and the silver clouds over.
In development for PC and PlayStation 5.
The Covenant of Vantry
Seven old families share the valley of Vantry. Long ago they made a promise: every generation sits for one portrait, so no face in the family is ever lost.
The plates kept more than faces. The ancestors started speaking from them, and the families got used to it. They ask the silver about marriages and harvests and who should inherit the mill. The silver answers, and the families do what it says.
Act one
The plate
Odile Marrow is twenty-seven and photographs for a living, valley to valley, with a walnut camera on her shoulder and a case of polished plates. When she was nine, the only portrait of her mother was buffed clean and reused for a stranger's wedding.
The Sables ask her for a family plate. Seven of them sit. Six come out clean. The seventh is a pale smear in a white dress beside her mother. Pia Sable, eight years old, is standing right there in the parlour. On silver she is almost gone.
Odile has watched a plate forget someone once before. She agrees to stay the winter.
Seven sat. One is fading.
Odile Marrow, 27Travelling plate photographer. Has never let a plate forget anyone.
The rule of the plate
Ten seconds, no breath
Stand still for ten seconds and you make a plate.
While you do not move, the plate fills, and anything it can see is struck by the silver. Move and the plate blurs. Whatever was in it walks out.
In the Sable nursery two of the Held step out of the wallpaper. Odile does not run. She lifts the lens cap and counts. At four the room sharpens. At seven the figures pull against something they cannot see. At ten the silver bites down and they stay where they stood, pressed flat like moths in a book.
Hold Still
Press and hold the plate, or hold Space. Press Enter to count without holding. Any move, scroll or other key blurs it.
The plate is open. Two of the Held are in the room.
You move: the plate blurs and the Held walk out.
Five counts: the room sharpens and they slow.
Ten counts: both are fixed in silver.
Act two
Seven portraits
Each family keeps one portrait behind velvet and one secret behind the portrait. Odile has to sit every house for a new plate, and every new plate shows what the old one was hiding.
Lord Evander Sable, fifty-eight, heads the Covenant and keeps the dead on their plates. He watched an unsettled grandfather empty Sable House of sleep in a single winter. He would rather the ancestors stay in silver, where they can be heard and cannot touch anyone. He has started to suspect the plates take a child in return, and he has told no one.
The seven houses
SableThe nursery has stayed locked since the winter of the grandfather.
CraneTwo sisters on one plate. One name scratched off the case.
AshbyThe father on the plate never came back from the quarry.
VellThe plate is new. The case around it is two hundred years old.
DunmoreThey sit every year, not every generation, and will not say why.
QuillThe youngest son sat facing away from the lens.
OrrinNobody in the family smiles on silver, except the dead.
Every plate hides one thing.
Lord Evander Sable, 58Head of the Covenant. Keeps the dead where they can be heard.
Act three
The long exposure
The last portrait needs ten minutes without a single movement. Odile sits for it herself, in the glasshouse above Sable House, with Pia standing somewhere beside her where she is not allowed to look.
If she holds, the plate keeps Pia's face and lets the rest of the Held go. If she moves, every family in Vantry loses the faces it still has.
Ten minutes. Do not look at her.
Pia Sable, 8On silver she shows up only where the plate is soft.
What she leaves behind
When it is over, Odile leaves one plate in the Sable case. She blurred it on purpose. It is the only portrait in the valley with nobody on it.
Follow the Reveal
We are showing Tarnishmoon one plate at a time.
Leave your email and we will write when the next one is developed. Once a month at most.
Behind the glass
The papers every studio keeps. Open a plate to read it.
