A recovered diary. Nine forbidden engravings. No GM, no dice. The Silvestri Journal is a cosmic-horror storytelling game set in 1790s Modena, where art becomes the engine of the mystery.
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Il Diario Silvestri: First English Edition · 23 following
A recovered 18th-century Italian journal. Nine forbidden engravings. A mystery that reveals how the apocalypse began.
The Silvestri Journal is a GM-less, dice-less cosmic horror storytelling game. Study impossible images of Modena, reconstruct the lost pages of Guglielmo Silvestri’s diary, and uncover the event that doomed your world.
You live in the aftermath of an unexplained catastrophe.
No chronicle survived. No official account explains when the world began to fall apart.
There was only one witness: Guglielmo Silvestri, an Italian engraver who lived in Modena at the end of the eighteenth century. He saw impossible things hidden inside familiar streets, gardens, and palaces. He tried to preserve them in his engravings. Then his diary disappeared.
Now it has been recovered.
What happened in Modena in 1790 was not an isolated nightmare. It was the beginning.
Silvestri Journal
What is The Silvestri Journal?
A cooperative tabletop storytelling game in which art becomes the engine of the mystery.
No Game Master. No one prepares the story in advance.
No dice. The engravings and your choices decide what happened, not a roll.
No prep. Everyone builds the mystery together, at the table, in real time.
Everyone at the table studies the recovered documents, contributes characters and disturbing details, and takes turns narrating a lost page in Silvestri’s voice.
The journal gives the story its structure. The engravings reveal what should not be there. Your choices decide what happened — and what can no longer be undone.
How the investigation unfolds
Choose the engravings. Select the images and the cosmic presence hidden within them. Together, define the apocalypse that transformed your world.
Reconstruct the journal. Travel through Modena in 1790. Take turns narrating Silvestri’s lost pages, drawing people, places, omens, and impossible details from the artwork.
Discover how the world fell. Give every recovered page a title. At the end of the game, read the titles together and uncover the chain of events that led to the catastrophe. Then decide whether humanity still has any hope.
Art is not decoration
In most games, illustrations show you the world.
In The Silvestri Journal, the illustrations create it.
Engraving preview: the Cathedral square in Modena.
Engraving preview: Porta del Castello, Modena.
A figure beneath an archway.
A symbol that was not there yesterday.
A face reflected in the wrong window.
Something enormous moving above the rooftops.
Every detail can become a person, an omen, a conspiracy, or the first visible sign of the apocalypse.
No two groups will recover the same diary.
Four of the nine engravings are being revealed in detail before launch. The rest remain inside the archive.
Inside the archive
Here is what we can confirm today. Additional campaign details are still being finalized.
The Journal: the rulebook, written and read as Silvestri’s own diary.
A historical map of Modena.
Nine full-page engravings, each hiding a Great Old One and two narrative themes.
Production preview: the historical map of Modena used during play.
These images show production in progress. Final components and presentation are still being finalized.
The Silvestri Journal opens the SpazioCOBE Archive: a collection of playable narrative artefacts.
Not merely books to read. Objects to open, investigate, and bring to life around a table.
Author: Simone Covili
Graphic design: Elena Bertacchini
Quick answers
What kind of game is The Silvestri Journal?
It is a cooperative tabletop storytelling game of cosmic, liminal horror. There is no Game Master and no dice: the group builds a shared mystery using a journal, a historical map, and nine engravings.
Will every group recover the same story?
No. Each group studies different details and makes different choices, so no two groups will recover the same diary.
Are the photographs and components final?
No. The current images show production in progress. Final components and presentation will be shared before launch.
When will the BackerKit campaign launch?
The BackerKit campaign will launch on December 1, 2026. See the official pre-launch page below to be notified when it goes live.
THE DIARY HAS BEEN FOUND.
Its final pages are still unwritten.
Follow The Silvestri Journal on BackerKit and enter the archive before the investigation begins.
The Silvestri Journal: New Launch Date (December 1) and Some Good News
Dear investigators,
Dreaming Kadath, another game from our collective, is a finalist for Gioco di Ruolo dell’Anno, Italy’s Role-Playing Game of the Year award!
We’re proud of what we’ve achieved with this game, and we don’t want to miss the award ceremonies. They’re a chance to celebrate with the Italian role-playing community and catch up with many of the people who have supported our work over the years.
But the ceremonies overlap with the original launch date for The Silvestri Journal. After talking it through, we’ve decided to move the BackerKit launch from November 1 to December 1, 2026. Running a crowdfunding campaign while travelling between events would leave us stretched pretty thin, and we’d rather give the Journal our full attention from the first day.
We’re not putting the diary back in a drawer until December, though. We have more material in the works, and November gives us time to develop some of the ideas we’ve been wanting to explore. We’ll also be sharing more from Silvestri’s world and preparing exclusive content just for those of you following this prelaunch page.
Thanks for sticking around while we juggle our calendar. See you on December 1!
In the meantime, keep an eye on the archive. We might just let a few secrets slip before its doors officially open.
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