A world made of words
Everything here is text,
which is exactly why there is so much of it.
No engine to satisfy, no assets to budget for. A room can hold anything a sentence can describe, so the world got wide instead of shiny.
Play it on an iPad, or from a terminal in 1994
The same character, the same world, whichever you use. The apps add tappable exits, a live map, macro buttons and a searchable help pane; the terminal gives you everything the game does, over a connection older than most of the people playing. Neither is the second-class one.
The world, and getting through it
Four realms, real weather, and a map you earn rather than open.
- An overworld of over a million cells, the deep, an ice shelf, and the Remembered
- Charts against the fog: bought in Deepfall, won from crown surveys, or walked
- Mounts you own, stables that keep them, and finders when one wanders
- Terrain that costs what it should: a pass is slow, a road is not
- Ships you own, moor and sail yourself
The fight
Ground and reach decide it, and the record remembers it.
- Positional combat: closing, withdrawing, reach by weapon
- Afflictions with causes and cures, not just a poison icon
- Duels, an arena, and tournaments with brackets worth losing in
- The annals: every battle written down, read at the Hall of Records
Who you become
A character is a path walked, and the paths have authors.
- Twelve callings, each with an eight-chapter story told by its own mentor
- Rebirth: walk a second path without surrendering the first
- Two bloodlines for the twice-reborn: the vampire out of the Remembered, the wolf out of the deep
- A cleansing, for the cursed who want out, at a hall on the ice
Making things
Seven professions and the gathering that feeds them. Most of what is worth wearing was made by somebody.
- Twelve tiers of material, from hillside ore to what world bosses drop
- Fishing you play: cast, bite, hook, and a struggle in stages
- Cooking and alchemy: buffs you can share, potions built from properties
- Runes, gems and tempering, into the slots gear already has
- Discipline quests: requesters in the plazas who pay for real work
Other people
The parts that only work because somebody else is there.
- Clans with charters, renown and wars, and a hall to hold it in
- Housing and gardens
- Eight gods, favor you earn and never lose to decay
- Crown missions: work for your kingdom, rank in its banner
- A card game whose deck is composed from the world, met monthly
- Four seasonal festivals, with results written into the record
When the easy things run out
For characters who have stopped dying to ordinary monsters.
- Raids in four brackets, phased bosses, a journey threaded to each door
- World bosses, and the ancient weapons only they carry
- The Spire: a tower that resets, for as long as you keep standing
- Seasonal battlegrounds on land and at sea
- A bestiary that sharpens the more you fight a thing
A dragonkin scourge burned Vashen, the old capital fell, and the survivors inherited roads rather than a kingdom. Read the Oath of Roads →
All of it is already running
None of the above is a roadmap. The professions, the festivals, the Spire and the sieges are in the world now, and the Hall of Lore is generated from that world every patch, so you can go and check.