Grave Benders

A Nullsmith Interactive game

Rob the graves of the rich after curfew. Dig with your friends, which is loud, in a cemetery that listens...

A first-person co-op horror heist for 1–4 players.

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Quarantine Board

Notice of curfew

No person to be abroad after the curfew bell. Offenders will be detained.

After the curfew bell

The plague never went away. In 1947 the port still lives by the Quarantine Board's curfew, and once the bell has gone, the only people allowed in a burial ground are the beaked doctors of the Sanitary Corps.

You were one of those doctors until the Corps demobbed you. You kept the mask. Now you go out after curfew in a converted army ambulance with up to three friends and a shovel apiece, and you call yourselves grave benders. The rich are still buried in their jewellery, and it seems a shame to leave it there.

A night's work

A night starts in the back of the van. Kit off the rack, a job off the board, ring the bell, turn the key. Out at the ground a bell tolls the hours from eleven, and that's all the clock you get.

In-game: inside the crew's van under bare bulbs, one crewmate walks in while another, lens glowing verdigris, reaches across the ledger desk beside the kit rack. — The van. A job off the board.

Then you dig. Stab and heave, and the spoil heap climbs beside the grave. Every stab carries further than you'd like, and a buried stone goes CLANG. When the blade finally finds the lid there's a THUD, and the whole crew stops digging to listen.

Prise the lid and the coffin flies come up into your lamp. Somewhere in there is a set of gold teeth, or the two sovereigns laid on a dead man's eyes. They go in your pocket, carefully. Drop one and it clatters, and out here a clatter carries.

In-game, first person at Holloway: the shovel comes up out of a grave heavy with earth, beside a headstone and a grave lantern. — Holloway. A shovelful at a time.

Somebody always wants one more grave. Then at first light the bell gives the long toll, and the van goes, with you or without you.

In-game, first person: shovel in hand, heading for Holloway's lamplit gatehouse arch and the way out, under the moon. — Holloway. The gatehouse, and the way out.

Where the rich lie

There are five burial grounds worth robbing, and the job board in the van gives each of them one line. The crew's old book puts it better. Every ground is a different way to get caught.

In-game, St. Brannoc's: the crew walk with their shovels past a grave lantern towards the candlelit flint church, under the moon. — St. Brannoc's. Up the path, shovels and all.

St. Brannoc's Old kirk. One watchman, quiet dead.

An old flint church in the pine woods, and the ground every crew starts on. One watchman walks the yard with his lantern. The crickets in the hedge go quiet around anyone who passes, so a small hole in their song follows you from grave to grave. If you hear a hole you aren't making, it's one of yours, or it's him.

Pencilled in the crew's book: "One watchman"? Not for long. "Quiet dead"? Ha.

Holloway Necropolis Iron vaults, rich widows.

Where the port buried its money, up on the hill behind iron and bronze. The Quarantine Board shut it in 1931 and the ivy has had it since. Five family vaults are still locked. Pick a lock quietly, or put a crowbar to the door and let the whole hill hear it.

The Board's closure notice is still up, and under it, in pencil: "We bought Father's grave for ever." In the small hours a second watchman lets himself in at the gatehouse.

In-game, Holloway Necropolis: the Weeping Widow, pale and see-through, rises in the doorway of the THORNE family vault while three crewmates in beaked masks stand round it with their shovels. — Holloway. The Thorne vault was a mistake.

Gallows Hill. The searchlight, all night long.

Gallows Hill Stone rows, two wardens.

The parish hanged its felons up here for the best part of two hundred years. In the Great War the Army took the crown of the hill for its own dead, and the white stones still stand to attention under a searchlight that rakes the rows all night.

The board at the gate says BLACKOUT REGULATIONS IN FORCE. Put the light out at the switch if you like. The man in the tower sends up a flare instead.

Pencilled in the crew's book: The war ended two years ago. Nobody told the searchlight.

Quarantine Island Plague pits, bad air.

A mile out over a tidal causeway, somewhere in the sea fog. Whatever came off the plague ships went into the lime pits, down to the savings sewn into the emigrants' hems. Break the lime and the pits breathe on you. A cough is a noise.

Halfway through the night the sea comes back for the low ground, and under the tide table there's a warning in chalk:

The Sunk Row goes under first. Then the path round the wall. Then you.

In-game, Quarantine Island: three crewmates wade through the rising tide in blue sea fog, with a hulk's riding lights out on the water. — Quarantine Island. The tide is coming in.

The Undercroft. The Lodge sits.

The Undercroft Cult vaults, old horrors.

St. Lucy's chapel burnt in 1934 and its floor fell into the catacomb. The port says the brethren of the Lodge keep their seats down there, dead or not.

Three times a night the Lodge sits. The candles go out in a wave, and in the dark the hooded dead take their stalls and listen. Rob one of the brothers and he'll be in his stall at the next Sitting.

The man with the lantern

The Night Warden keeps the yard for the Quarantine Board. He walks the rows as if he owned them, and till first light he does. He hears footsteps and shovels and anything you drop, and he hears you talk. He stops to look at fresh earth. He can pick out a lit head lamp from a long way off, so when his lantern turns your way, douse yours and go to ground.

If he gets a hand on you, he has you by the collar and your pockets go all over the path. Then it's the cage until your crew comes to spring you, which is never a quiet job.

The graves are rigged as well. Since the Board's Defence Order of 1946 the old safeguards are back, so there's an iron mortsafe on the odd rich grave and a collar bolted round some of the lids. At St. Brannoc's and Holloway the tripwires run to cemetery guns. They only fire a blank, and it's still the loudest sound of the night. Gallows Hill strings trip flares instead.

Every ground keeps its own watch, and some nights a second Warden comes on duty with a lantern that burns cold white. The crew's book has a rule for him, pencilled in the margin: count the lanterns before you cross.

In-game, Gallows Hill: a trip flare burns white in the grass below the wire-topped wall and sends up a column of smoke, as three crewmates crouch away from its glare. — Gallows Hill. That'll be the wire.

Not every grave is quiet

Nothing on the stone says which. You find out by digging.

It starts with whispers. Then the lamps stutter, and there are footsteps nobody is making, or the earth starts sliding back into the pit you've just dug. Then it comes, through walls and stone alike. Its touch knocks you flat, and most of them empty your pockets while they're at it. Nobody has died of it yet. Holy water sends it back to bed.

The port has a story about each of them, and every story has a rule tucked inside it.

The Weeping Widow was buried with everything her husband gave her, and she follows whoever has it now.
The Restless Sexton dug these graves for forty years and won't have them disturbed. Dig soft and talk softer.
The Curfew Man lit the lamps at dusk and put them out at curfew. It is always curfew now, and that goes for your lamp too.
The Bell-Ringer was buried with a bell in case he woke up. He did. Be quick at the lid.
The Tallyman came round every Friday for the payments, and now he's come round again. You may meet him on the path home, between you and the van.
The Understudy waits until you lose sight of each other. Then it can fake a friend's lamp drifting across the yard, or the sound of them digging somewhere out of sight.
The Drill Sergeant drilled recruits for thirty years and still keeps the ranks on Gallows Hill. No running in the ranks.
The Drowned comes in with the island's tide, and he cannot abide a cough.

Pencilled beside the Understudy: stay where you can see each other

The book tells you what the dead do. It doesn't tell you which graves are theirs.

Holloway. The Widow, out of the Thorne vault.

In-game, first person on Quarantine Island's cart road: the Curfew Man, a pale, glowing lamplighter in a top hat, stands in the road with his pole and his eyes alight, as a crewmate crouches in the dark beside him. — Quarantine Island. The Curfew Man, out on the cart road.

In-game, St. Brannoc's: the Understudy, a pale rose figure with a glowing ruff, holds a beaked mask up on a stick as it drifts across the churchyard, while a crewmate waits under the lamp post beyond. — St. Brannoc's. That one isn't ours.

Who's who in the dark

Each head lamp's lens glows in its owner's colour, amber or verdigris or cobalt or ruby, so you can tell your friends apart across the yard. Usually.

You talk to your crew out loud and they hear you when they're near. So does the Warden. Down in the Undercroft voices carry through the stone, and someone always forgets.

Some jobs take two of you. A mortsafe needs two crowbars to lever it off, and a lead-lined casket needs two to carry it, or one to drag it, slowly and very loudly. A friend who turns up late arrives in the van, even halfway through a night. You can go out alone if you'd rather. It's quieter, and there's nobody to spring you from the cage.

In-game, St. Brannoc's: looking down into an open grave, where a crewmate in a beaked mask stands on the coffin and looks up into the light, his head lamp glowing amber. — St. Brannoc's. Somebody has to stand on the coffin.

Home by first light

Home is the old Ashcombe coach house, with a stove, plague masks on hooks and a football nobody admits to kicking. The crew's book lies on the map table, a year of night work set down by one crew for the next. Its bookplate asks you not to give it to the Warden.

The fence pays for whatever made it into the back of the van, and every three nights he wants his quota. Make it and the crew's name goes up. New grounds open on the board and better buyers start to deal with you. Miss it and the Corps strikes you off its books, and you start again with $5,000.

Candlestick, dropped in the avenue nil

Bail, one of ours, left in the yard at first light $1,500

What's stashed in the back is safe. You aren't.