A text-based realm
One shared world. Earth time. Text in a browser. The Reach keeps running when you close the tab.
A persistent dark-medieval text MMORPG.
Dead Kingdoms is a shared continent people still call the Reach. You play in the browser. There is no download, no instance, no private copy of the map. If you take flax from a seam, that flax is gone for everyone until the ground grows it back. Buildings finish while you sleep. Corpses rot on a clock. NPCs keep hours, get sick, and die. Their seats can be taken.
The clock is the Earth’s. One real day is one day in the Reach. Energy returns five points every ten minutes. HP returns five every fifteen, unless you are sick — then nothing returns until you act. Mana returns every ten minutes. Sanity slower, and only if you are not rotting from the inside.
You grow forever. There is no level cap and no end of the book. Skills rise by doing the work. Insight comes from skill ranks and virtues. You spend Insight on the body you have, not on a class tree.
The sun went out in the eleventh year. Nothing has left since.
In the eleventh year the light failed. Nothing has left since: not heat, not the dead, not a rumour of the sun. The ground under the Reach is treated by some as a document. A sentence was signed by something that is not a god. People still farm, still keep books, still hang thieves.
Grimhollow is the first roof most of you will know: peat smoke, a bell that rings for raids, Maren’s tally. Carts still come in. Names still go into the books. Beyond the thatch: black fen, ash waste, glass shore, barrows, a wood that grows doors, and things that used to be kings.
Ash in the pack is dust, cheap and useful. Ash in the header is corruption — the Reach getting into you. Spells and rites add it. It barely fades. At twenty you are ash-marked. That is not the same as a handful of ash in your bag.
What you learn in talk, graves, and books stays on your Lore page. The world has its own chronicle. You are late to it.
The left list is the game.
Leave is in the top bar. It ends the session and puts you on the front door.
The long bars are HP, Energy, Mana, Sanity. The small ones are food, water, warmth, and ash (corruption). Keep food, water, and warmth up. Keep ash down.
Hunger and thirst empty in real time. Cold kills on the waste. Sickness stops HP and energy return. Bleeding will not wait. Eat, drink, sit with a fever, find a healer or an antidote if you want the illness gone.
You arrive by an origin. That choice is permanent. It colours your first hours and your face. It does not lock a class.
Search the ground for what the last war left. Harvest named nodes (fish, peat, flax, ore). Tools help and they wear. Craft at a station: hands, fire, hearth, forge, bench. Recipes with low skill you can work out; the rest you are taught or you find.
Talk to people. Maren keeps the store and the books. Others teach, buy, send you out. Their trust is a number. Kill the wrong person and you are an outlaw for a few hours.
Hides. Dig a hole with a spade (Here). One hide per tile, three in the whole Reach. Only you know it until someone else searches well enough to find it. Pack: Hide 1, put silver, take it back while you stand on that ground.
Found a settlement if you have the will and the timber. Feed it, wall it, lose it. NPC villages are the same kind of place. Some seats are empty on purpose.
Beasts hunt. A wyrm will usually ignore a weak newcomer. About one time in six it still notices you. A merely stronger thing warns, then the first hit is capped so you can Escape or Hide. Stay, or strike first, and it hits full. Rats and dogs do not care how new you are.
Players can kill players. Murder makes you outlaw for hours. Killing an outlaw is lawful. Newcomer protection is for PvP, not for beasts.
Hide in cover on Here before the charge. Escape is on Fight while it has you. A beast death leaves the pack more often than a human death. Search the body. Butcher for meat and hide.
You die. You choose a contract. There is no bloodline save.
A share of the pack stays on the ground where you fell until it rots. Sign, stand up, go get it if you still want it.
A smith. A tally-keeper. A hunter. A founder of walls. A murderer with a short memory of the law. A whisperer whose header fills with ash. A person who only ever fishes the staithe and sells saltfish to Maren. All of that is the same sheet, growing.
The continent is dozens of places, six NPC settlements at the start, markets that move, quests that do not hold your hand, and other players on the same roads. The scope is: live in a dead kingdom until you are something the Reach has to notice.
Played in the browser. One world. Dead Kingdoms v1.0.0.
Banners are player houses: raise one at your hall or in Grimhollow (80 silver, and a Seal, a Charter, or Leadership III). Invite and swear. Lords name war; twelve hours to muster; then you raid enemy halls and fight on their ground without the murder law. Roads are still murder. Yield or last seven days. One banner each.
Every object in the pack — what to wear, eat, fill, craft, or sell — is in the item manual.