LichLight Imprints is a small publisher focusing on solo RPGs. Just over a week ago, the company launched The Archivium, a journalling game about mystery, knowledge and dread.
You’ll be a university student drawn into a secret society in the game. You’ll have to balance class and coursework during the day and dangerous work in the Archive by night.
Designed by Astraelith, The Archivium is a 220+ page book and uses cards.
I took one look at the book and thought – wow – and then asked Astraelith for a breakdown of how the play works. Very kindly, they agreed.
If you’re an audio learner, there’s also this very clever (and Notion-using) How to Play video.
The Archivium – How to Play
By Astraelith
The Archivium is a soloRPG about building a strange, shifting (and possibly haunted) library—one book, one relic, one secret at a time. You play a first-year university student drafted into working at a dangerous Archive, given far too much responsibility and way too few explanations. Your job is to organize, investigate, and survive.
The game plays with a deck of cards and a single six-sided die (1d6) to guide events, encounters, and discoveries.
World Building
Before your first shift, you’ll establish the setting of your university and the secret society that runs the Archive. Are they an old-money institution with deep ties to forgotten knowledge, or a scrappy, upstart research group that stumbled onto something best left alone?
The Foundational Charter guides this worldbuilding, ensuring that no two playthroughs are the same. It also shapes the Archive itself, determining what kind of books and artifacts find their way onto its shelves. The appendices twist the game into one of four different horror subgenres, each with their own prompt tables and oracles.
The Shifts
Your job begins when the doors of the Archive close behind you. Every shift, you will contribute to the collection—creating books, relics, and catalog entries while navigating the increasingly strange behaviors of the space itself. How much detail you bring to its records is up to you. Each book, relic, or record you handle is determined by a draw from the deck, guiding its subject, significance, or hidden properties. From there, you decide:
- Do you just record a title and move on?
- Or do you go deeper—crafting an index, a blurb, maybe even a passage from its pages?
- Perhaps a relic’s history calls for sketches, annotations, or warnings scrawled in the margins.
The more effort you put in, the richer and stranger your Archive becomes. Each addition shapes the world in subtle ways, leaving behind records that future custodians (or even your future self) may rediscover.
Not everything in the Archive behaves as it should. Some books refuse to be shelved, appearing on your desk again after you’ve already filed them away. Some arrive blank—until you start writing in them, at which point the ink begins to respond.
Most of these are minor occurrences—strange, but not necessarily dangerous. Whispers in the stacks, flickering candlelight, a book that seems heavier than it should be.
But sometimes, the Archive pushes back. Full combat encounters emerge when the wrong book is opened, a relic reacts to your presence, or a visitor arrives who should not be here.
Downtime
Between shifts, you’ll have time for socializing and exploring.
- Socializing lets you build NPCs using a four-card draw system—matching suits to determine personalities, connections, and tensions. Friendships, rivalries, and romances form dynamically based on your choices and the cards drawn.
- Exploring can lead to side mysteries, strange occurrences, and hidden aspects of the university.
An Expanding World
The game is designed to work with regular Codices—mini-expansions—adding new encounters, tasks, and mysteries to uncover.
- Some will introduce new mechanics or game systems, forcing you to rethink how you interact with the Archive.
- Others will focus on building out relationships or adding more academy into dark academia.
- Some will bring standalone adventures and moments out of time, easily insertable in between your regular schedule shift work if you need a change of pace.
The Long Game
Two forces track your progress:
- Influence – Your standing with the secret society. Gain enough through your work during shifts, and doors open. Every five points unlocks a story beat, leading to one of sixteen possible endings.
- Resistance – The Archive is patient. Lose too much, and it will reshape you in ways you won’t recognize. Or outlive.
Some players lean into this progression, embracing their role as archivists or their slow unraveling. Others ignore it entirely, opting for a sandbox experience.
So go ahead—pick up a book. See what it wants to tell you.
