Overview

On the night of the Hunter’s Moon, the Gray comes ashore. The town falls into a sleepwalking trance, the four Watches come under attack, and the heroes must hold them until dawn, then reach Gideon Shale at Saltmarsh Cove before he calls the Gray in for good. This is the scariest part of the campaign, and it’s built so the heroes always win. How much they save depends on what they do.

The secret history, the Watches, and Gideon’s story are in the Campaign Guide, under “The Secret Behind It All.”

Before you play: a scarier game, safely

• A week or so before, tell the players privately that the finale will be much scarier, and ask each to write anything that’s off-limits on a card. Respect it without discussion.
• Keep the Pause and Skip cards on the table. The moment anyone reaches for one, bring the lights up and play a lighter version.
• The fog’s voices are always characters from the game (Ada, Jess, Eliza, a hero’s NPC friend), never the players’ real family.
• Scary here means dread, silence, and things almost seen. No gore, and no hero is ever badly hurt. The danger is to the town, and to being forgotten.
• Quiet is part of the horror. A player who stays still and watchful is playing it perfectly.

Finale rules

• Watch strength. Each Watch card starts at 3 strength, plus 1 if the heroes restored it in its mystery. Each ally posted on it adds 1 more, up to 5. At 0, the Watch goes dark.
• The Gray Clock. An 8-slice clock (in the printables). Fill one slice at the start of every scene, and one for each “Not yet” roll. At 6 slices, the moon stands at its highest and Gideon begins the calling: go to Session 3. At 8, dawn comes and the Gray must go back to the sea.
• The Gray strikes. At the start of each scene in Session 2, the Gray also attacks one Watch the heroes are not at. It loses 1 strength, unless an ally is posted there. An ally turns their name card sideways to take the hit, once each.
• Whispers. When the fog whispers to a hero, they roll Brave or Kind. On a 3 or lower, they take 1 Fright. A Spooked hero in the finale doesn’t just freeze up: they start walking toward the sea. A teammate must reach them with a Help card or a Kind roll. No one walks alone.
• Holding hands. Heroes who stay together, side by side, roll whispers as a team: one roll, plus 1 die for each hero holding on. At the table, players can show this by putting their tokens together.
• Forgetting. When a Watch goes dark, turn two clue cards on Ada’s case board face down. The town is starting to forget. When a Watch is relit, or at dawn if the heroes win, turn them back up.

Cast

GM tools: the fog

Roll a die whenever the heroes move through the foggy streets, or whenever things go quiet:

1. A streetlight goes out. Then the next one, and the next, coming toward you.
2. A friend’s voice calls your hero’s name from the next street over.
3. Wet footprints appear on the pavement beside yours, keeping pace with you.
4. The letters on a shop sign are fading. You can’t remember what the shop was called.
5. A figure in old-fashioned oilskins stands perfectly still at the end of the street. When you look again, there are two.
6. Total silence. No waves, no wind, not even your own footsteps.

Session 1: The Hunter’s Moon Rises

The heroes put the whole picture together, search Gideon’s empty shop, rally every friend they’ve made, and watch the fog roll in at sundown.

Scene 1: The completed board (20 minutes)

Run this right after the players pin the last clue card from the fourth mystery, or open the session with it.

The back room of Finch’s Books & Tea is quiet except for the kettle. Twelve cards are pinned to the corkboard now, connected by string. Four symbols. Three dates, a hundred years apart. And in the middle of it all, a man in a gray coat, again and again. Ada takes off her glasses very slowly. “The Hunter’s Moon,” she says. “Oh, my dears. That’s tonight.”

Lay out option cards for anything the heroes want to ask Ada. She answers each with what she knows:

• Hannah Gale: the healer who brought the first settlers here in 1726, and gave the town its name. “My grandmother said Mother Gale taught us to keep four things awake, so the town would never be forgotten.”
• The Watches: the light, the bell, the stone, and the hearth. If all four sleep, the Gray wakes.
• Mr. Shale: quiet, polite, sad. Came to town in June. “He bought a great many old things, didn’t he? Old things from very particular places.”
• What happens if the Gray comes ashore: Ada doesn’t know. But she remembers the Constance, and that no one could remember her crew’s names. “I think we’d be forgotten. All of us. As if Gale’s Landing had never been.”

Scene 2: Shale’s Curiosities (40 minutes)

The little antique shop on Water Street has a hand-lettered sign on the door: GONE TO THE SEA. The door isn’t locked. Inside, every clock in the shop has stopped. They all show the same time: 3:04.

The heroes can search wherever they like. Use a fog happening or two to keep it creepy, even in daylight.

• The shop floor: shelves of ship models, glass floats, and old maps. With Look, a hero finds the iron band from the meeting house bell’s clapper, marked with a star in a circle, sitting on the counter like a paperweight.
• The back room: four charcoal rubbings pinned to the wall in a circle: the light, the bell, the stone, the hearth. Someone has drawn a red ring around the Stone. Beside them, a map of Gale’s Landing with Saltmarsh Cove circled again and again.
• The cut pages (Ghost Report payoff): in a drawer, the twelve pages cut from Haunted Harbors of the North Atlantic. One line is underlined: “The Gray hungers for memory, but it keeps none of its own.” A hero who played The Ghost Report prologue recognizes the book at once.
• Upstairs: a narrow bedroom. The bed hasn’t been slept in for days. The walls are covered in photos of a small boy in a yellow raincoat, laughing on a beach. Draped over a chair is a child’s yellow raincoat. It’s dripping wet, and it smells of the sea. (1 Fright to anyone who touches it, unless they play Wait or Talk.)
• Gideon’s diary: open on the windowsill. Give the players handout FN-1. The last entry reads: “Tommy says tonight. Tommy says I only have to open the door.” Taped inside the back cover is the counting rhyme the brothers made up as boys.
• The window: it faces the cove, and it’s fogged over from the inside. In the fog on the glass is a handprint, much too small to be Gideon’s.
• Heart Sense: anywhere in the room, a Listener feels a grief so deep and old it’s hard to breathe, and under it, something that isn’t grief at all: a cold, patient hunger.

Make sure the heroes leave with the diary, or at least the rhyme. If they miss it, Ada or Jess picks it up on the way out.

Scene 3: Rallying the town (30–45 minutes)

The heroes have the afternoon to prepare. Lay the four Watch cards on the table, and the name cards of every ally the heroes have befriended. The players place each ally on a Watch. Each ally adds 1 strength there (up to 5) and gets a short scene agreeing to help. Some suggestions:

Jess goes wherever the heroes go, unless they ask her to stay somewhere safe.

Victoria’s return. If the heroes played the Lighthouse Mystery, Victoria Thorne knocks on Ada’s door, rain on her coat. She holds out her great-grandfather’s diary, open to October 1926: Cornelius wrote that the fog called to him in his dead father’s voice, and only Eliza’s light kept him from walking into the sea. “I don’t expect forgiveness,” Victoria says. “But I’ve read this, and I believe it now. Tell me where you need me.” She can be placed on a Watch like anyone else.

Promises. This is a good moment to ask each player, quietly or with a card, how their hero’s promise fits into tonight. Acting on it in the finale is worth its Courage, and more.

Scene 4: Sundown (15 minutes)

Put the Gray Clock on the table. Turn the lights down.

The sun goes down red over the harbor. Then, as the Hunter’s Moon rises, huge and orange, a wall of silver fog slides in over the harbor wall without making a sound. It doesn’t drift like fog. It moves like something that knows where it’s going. One by one, the streetlights on Water Street shrink to pinpricks. Somewhere a dog starts barking, and then stops.

And past the window of Finch’s Books & Tea, slowly, eyes wide open and empty, walks the first sleepwalker. It’s someone you know.

Pick an ally the heroes like who isn’t posted at a Watch. End the session here.

Session 2: The Gray Comes Ashore

The heroes race through a fogbound, sleepwalking town to hold the Watches as the Gray attacks them one by one. The session ends when the Gray Clock reaches 6 and a single lantern appears on the beach.

How this session runs

1. Start each scene by filling one slice of the Gray Clock, then have the Gray strike one Watch the heroes aren’t at (see the finale rules).
2. Lay out option cards for the Watches and anything else happening, and let the players choose where to go. Show them the Watch cards: the weakest Watch is usually where they’re needed.
3. Play the scene. Each Watch scene ends with one defense roll using the stat that fits best:

A Watch at 0 goes dark. Turn two clue cards on the case board face down. Heroes can relight a dark Watch by visiting it and rolling a 5 or higher on its defense roll, which brings it back to 1.

Scene: Leading a friend home (opening, 15 minutes)

Start here, with the sleepwalker from the end of Session 1.

Out in the street, the fog is so thick you can barely see your own feet. Your friend walks steadily toward the harbor, murmuring something over and over. As you get close, you hear it: your friend is saying your name. Not calling you. Saying it, as if trying to remember it.

• Waking a sleepwalker suddenly is a bad idea. Bringing them back takes a Talk card or a Kind roll, and something only a friend would know: a shared memory, a joke, a moment from an earlier mystery. Players can say it, write it, or hold up a card or handout that reminds them.
• On a 5 or higher, the friend blinks, shivers, and remembers. They can be posted at a Watch.
• On a lower roll, they keep walking, and the heroes must try again. Each new try costs 1 Fright to someone, as the fog whispers louder.

Watch scene: The Hearth (the Harbor Inn)

The inn’s windows glow gold through the fog, the only warm light on Water Street. Inside, Pearl is feeding the great fire log after log, but the wind howling down the chimney keeps pressing the flames flat. Shapes drift past the windows. Some of them stop and press close to the glass.

• The Last Room payoff: if a hero played that prologue, the four-pointed star frosts onto every window of the inn, and the shapes can’t come closer than the glass. The inn becomes a safe place: sleepwalkers led here wake up on their own.
• Defense roll: Clever (keeping the fire fed and the chimney damper right) or Brave (running out to the woodpile in the fog for more logs).
• Kenzie and Professor Fenn, if they’re here, rig every lamp in the inn to blaze at once, which counts as a Help.

Watch scene: The Bell (the Old Meeting House)

The bell rope is stiff with frost, though it isn’t cold enough for frost. Up in the belfry, the bell hangs perfectly still, and the fog has crept all the way up the ladder. From below, Ada’s voice calls up softly: “Come down, dears. It’s cold up there. Come down and rest.” Ada is nowhere near here.

• Each hero hears the whisper (roll Brave or Kind, or roll together if holding hands).
• Defense roll: a team effort on the bell rope, Brave, with every hero and ally adding a die (up to 4). With each toll, the fog rolls back a street.
• Josiah: if the Bell was restored, a second pair of hands takes the rope above the heroes’, old and strong and sure, and the smell of pipe smoke fills the belfry. Josiah’s help turns a 1–2 into a 3–4.

Watch scene: The Light (Whisper Island)

Captain Tibbs’s boat feels its way across the harbor with its engine barely ticking. The fog is so thick that the island appears all at once, a black shape right in front of you. High above, the lamp in the tower is burning, but it’s dim and flickering, like a candle in a draft.

• Getting there: only Tibbs can cross in this fog. Without him, it’s a hard Brave roll in a rowboat.
• The 112 steps: dark, with fog pouring down the stairs like water. Footsteps climb behind the heroes and stop when they stop.
• The Dream payoff: in the lantern room, the old brass lantern from the dream sits waiting on the floor. Eliza (if the Light was restored) places it in the dreamer’s hands. Once per session, its light can push the fog back from one place: a street, a doorway, a friend.
• Defense roll: Kind (talking to Eliza, keeping her company) or Clever (trimming the lamp, fixing the clockwork that turns the lens).
• Eliza: if the Light was restored, she appears clearly and holds the beam steady with both hands. Her help turns a 1–2 into a 3–4.

The Stone (Saltmarsh Cove)

The Stone can’t be defended until Session 3: it’s underwater, and the cove is where the Gray is strongest. Lenny and the fishing families, if posted there, ring the cove with lanterns from their boats and slow the Gray down. If the heroes go to the cove early, start Session 3 right away.

Street encounters

Between Watches, the heroes cross the town. Use a fog happening, or one of these:

• The crew of the Constance. Silent figures in old oilskins line the street, faces hidden by fog. They don’t move. To pass between them, a hero must hold up a light, or play Bold. Anyone who looks closely sees they have no faces at all, only fog. (1 Fright, or none for a hero who plays Wait and lets them pass.)
• A familiar voice. Someone the hero cares about in the game calls from an alley: “Over here! Quick!” Following the voice leads to the harbor wall and the water. Holding hands, or a Help card, keeps everyone together.
• Fading names. Every sign on Water Street is blank. Finch’s Books & Tea, the library, the inn: all just painted boards. A hero who reads a sign aloud, or writes its name on a card, makes the letters come back. A small, defiant act of remembering.
• The fog’s question. The fog gathers in front of a hero and whispers: “What is your name?” Have the player point to their name on their character sheet. If they hesitate, a teammate can point to it for them.

Ending the session

When the Gray Clock reaches 6:

The moon stands straight overhead, white as bone. And through the fog, far off along the beach toward Saltmarsh Cove, you see a single lantern moving slowly toward the water.

End the session here.

Session 3: Saltmarsh Cove

The heroes cross the beach through the Gray’s strongest whispers, hold the cracking Stone, and reach Gideon in time to show him the truth. Slices 7 and 8 of the Gray Clock fill during this session. When the last slice fills, dawn comes.

Scene 1: The beach (20 minutes)

Lights as low as they go. Let the silence stretch before you start.

The beach is white under the moon. The fog has pulled back from the sand, as if making a path, and at the end of the path, out in the black water, a lantern glows. The sea is perfectly flat. There’s no sound at all. Then, from everywhere at once, the whispering begins.

• This is the hardest whisper of the night. Each hero hears the voice of the character they care about most in the game, begging them to stop, sit down, rest, come into the water where it’s warm.
• Roll whispers as usual. Heroes holding hands roll together, which is the best way across.
• The sea glass, button, and other keepsakes: any prologue item or keepsake can be held up against the whispering, adding 1 die once.
• Halfway down the beach, the footprints of a small child appear in the sand beside the heroes, walking toward the water. They stop at the edge.

Scene 2: The Stone (20 minutes)

Lanterns bob on the water all around the cove: Lenny’s boats, if he’s here, holding a ring of light against the fog. In the middle of the ring, the water glows faintly where the Stone stands below. Even from the shore, you can hear it: a deep grinding crack, like ice breaking on a pond.

The Stone needs holding while the heroes reach Gideon. This is its defense roll, and it uses the Stone’s Watch card.

• In the water: wading out waist-deep and bracing the Stone takes Brave. Fixing the crack takes Clever.
• The button (Ada’s Letter payoff): pressed against the Stone, Hannah Gale’s brass button glows warm, and the crack seals itself. Treat it as a 6.
• The lucky stone keepsake: it fits the small round hollow in the Stone. Also treat it as a 6.
• If the Stone goes dark, the cove’s water turns completely black, and the grinding stops. Keep going: the heroes can still win.

Scene 3: Gideon (30 minutes)

Gideon stands waist-deep in the black water, his gray coat floating around him, holding a lantern high above his head. In front of him, the fog has gathered into something enormous, a dark shape like a wave that never breaks, leaning down over him as if it’s listening. And from somewhere deep inside it, a little boy’s voice is calling.

“Giddy! Giddy, I’m here! Just open the door. Just one more step.”

Gideon doesn’t turn around. “Please,” he says quietly, to you or to no one. “Please don’t. He’s so close. I’m so close.”

Gideon won’t listen to arguments, warnings, or force. He’s waited thirty years for this. Lay out option cards:

• Talk to Gideon: a Kind roll lets the heroes get close enough to be heard. He listens, but he doesn’t believe them. Yet.
• Show him the truth: hold up the diary, the counting rhyme, or the photo of Tommy from the shop. Ask the voice to finish the rhyme.
• Signal with light: the dream lantern, a flashlight, three flashes. It makes the Gray flinch, and gives the heroes a moment.
• Wait and watch: a Seeker or Listener who waits notices that the voice never says Gideon’s real name, only the nickname it heard him think.

The rhyme. This is the turning point, and it can be done entirely without speaking: a player can hold up handout FN-1, point to the rhyme, and point at the fog.

If the heroes found the wax cylinder at the Harbor Inn, they already have the answer. The bridge of the old song says: “If you hear your name come off the water, in a voice you used to know, ask it for the end of the old song, love, and if it can’t, don’t go.” A player can point to that line on handout WI-4 instead of the diary.

“One gull, two gulls…” the little voice sings, bright and eager. “Three on the… three on the…” It stops. The fog shivers. “Three on the…” There’s a long silence. Then the voice says, very flatly: “Come into the water.”

Gideon’s lantern trembles. “Four for the boat,” he whispers. “And home by my hand.” He looks down at the black water around his waist as if he’s never seen it before. “You’re not him,” he says. “You were never him.”

If the heroes don’t have the rhyme, any question only the real Tommy could answer works: what he called his brother, what color his bucket was, the name of their dog. The Gray keeps no memories of its own. It can’t answer.

Scene 4: The Watches flare (15 minutes)

Gideon drops the lantern into the sea. Now every Watch still burning answers at once.

Out on Whisper Island, the lighthouse blazes so bright it turns the fog white. Across town, the meeting house bell begins to ring, and doesn’t stop. A column of firelight leaps from the Harbor Inn’s chimney. And under your feet, the Stone hums like a struck bell. The four lights meet over the cove, and the great dark shape in the fog rears back, and back, and slides away into the deep, and is gone.

This is a final team effort. Everyone, heroes and allies, adds a die. It always succeeds. The result decides only how bright the morning is (see the Epilogue).

If every Watch has gone dark, the heroes become the last Watch. They stand together at the water’s edge with every light they have: the dream lantern, flashlights, the keepsakes. Read the scene above, but the light comes from them. Hannah Gale’s voice says, from nowhere and everywhere: “There you are. I knew someone would keep watch.”

Tommy. Then, in the quiet, play this slowly:

The water is still. The fog is thinning to nothing. And from somewhere very close, a different voice speaks: small and warm, a little out of breath, like a boy who’s been running on the beach all day. “Giddy. It’s okay. You can go home now. I’m not cold anymore.”

Gideon sinks to his knees in the shallows and cries, the way people cry when something they’ve carried for a very long time is finally set down. Over the water, just for a moment, the first light of dawn touches a small figure in a yellow raincoat, who waves. Then he’s gone, too.

Fill the last slice of the Gray Clock. It’s morning.

Epilogue: Morning

The night is over, and the town is still here. This can be the last part of Session 3, or a short fourth session of its own, with cocoa.

How bright the morning is

Count the Watches still lit at dawn.

Turn every clue card on the case board face up again.

Scene: Hannah Gale (5 minutes)

Walking back along the beach, you notice a woman standing at the top of the dunes in a long, old-fashioned cloak, her hair silver in the dawn light. She looks at each of you in turn, and nods, the way a teacher nods when you’ve finally understood. Then the sun comes up behind her, and there’s no one there at all.

If a hero played Ada’s Letter, the brass button in their pocket is warm, and stays warm.

Scene: Breakfast at Ada’s (15 minutes)

Everyone crowds into Finch’s Books & Tea: allies, friends from every mystery, fishermen still in their boots. Let each player choose a few of these to see, with option cards:

• Gideon sits by the window with a blanket around his shoulders and a cup of tea he hasn’t touched. He asks, quietly, if he could look after the bell from now on. Mabel says yes.
• Victoria (if she came) hands Ada her great-grandfather’s diary for the historical society, then leaves without a fuss. On the way out, she stops at Eliza’s plaque.
• Dunk, Kyle, Kenzie, and Jolene (whoever’s here) compare notes on how strange it is to be on the right side of things for once.
• Jess shows the heroes one last photo she took at dawn: four columns of light meeting over the cove.
• Ada opens an old leather book, the list of Keepers, and adds the heroes’ names below Hannah Gale, Josiah Pell, and Eliza Marsh.
• Pearl (if the heroes found the cylinder) has carried the old phonograph over from the inn. She winds it up and plays Keep the Watch one more time. This time, everyone in the room knows the words.

The last word

Ada takes the case board down from the wall, slowly, card by card. Underneath, pinned to the cork where it’s been all along, is one more envelope you’ve never noticed. It’s addressed to “The Keepers,” in handwriting you’ve never seen. The postmark is dated a hundred years from today.

What’s inside is up to you, and to a future campaign.

Promises and check-in

• Ask each player, with a card or a nod, whether their hero kept their promise. If so, describe how the town will remember them for it.
• Run the usual end-of-session check-in, with one extra card: Favorite moment of the whole campaign.

Spotlight checklist

Atmosphere

• Session 1: normal lights until sundown, then dim them all at once when the fog comes.
• Session 2: low wind sound, long silences, and the bell and foghorn sound effects at their Watches. Light a candle (or an LED candle) for each Watch, and blow one out whenever a Watch goes dark.
• Session 3: as dark and quiet as everyone is comfortable with. Bring the lights up slowly, all the way, as dawn breaks.
• Epilogue: full lights, cocoa, and breakfast food if you can manage it.