Afterimage

A solo and GMless tabletop roleplaying game about choices, relationships, and the weight of moments you can't unfeel, even when they never happened.

You are young. You live in a small town with buried secrets. One of you has a strange power: the ability to reach back, to undo, to try again. But every rewind leaves a mark. Reality frays. And something is coming that you can't undo.

What you play

One character, the Lens, carries the power. Everyone else, the Anchors, live forward in linear time, unaware of what's been undone. Five relationships anchor the story, a Confidant, a Flame, a Rival, an Authority, and the Town itself, each tracked on a tension scale between two poles: Trust and Doubt, Closeness and Distance, Belonging and Escape.

A standard deck of cards drives scenes, NPC reactions, and a slow-building crisis called the Threshold. Dice resolve the moments where the outcome is uncertain and the stakes matter. Index cards hold Snapshots (places you can Leap back to), Echoes (what you remember from timelines that no longer happened), and Fragments (pieces of the thing that's coming).

The cost of the power

Rewind is cheap and immediate: undo the last few moments, try the conversation again, take back what you said. Leap is expensive and total: return to a captured Snapshot and erase everything since. Both leave Static, the wrongness that accumulates toward an ending you can't stop, only shape.

The more you use the power, the more the people around you start to sense something's wrong. And the more that happens, the harder it gets to stop reaching for it.

Solo or GMless

Play the whole ensemble alone, or pass the Lens around the table scene by scene with a group. A Focused Mode is included for lighter solo sessions when tracking five relationships and two card systems at once feels like too much.

What's in the book

• Full rules for Threads, Resolution, Snapshots, Echoes, Static, and the Threshold
• A card-driven oracle: scene framing, NPC reactions, and prompt tables across all four suits
• Guidance for reading Fragments and building toward an ending you confront rather than discover
• A complete worked example of play, start to finish
• Care and safety principles for a game that goes to heavy places

Tone

Quiet. Melancholy. Bittersweet. Not action, not horror, not heroism. The fantasy isn't power; it's the unbearable weight of knowing what could have been, and choosing anyway.

Afterimage © 2026 Roberto Bisceglie. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0.