Development progress · PermaCampaign

Where it starts

Twelve classes, level 1 to 20.

Every SRD class and subclass, with all 319 spells behind them. Describe who you want to play and the game fills in the sheet, or fill it in yourself. Either way the hit points, the armour and the saves are worked out by the rules.

The character-creation screen: a form headed Create your character with name, sex, race, class, background and alignment filled in for an elf wizard called Ilyana Vesk, the elf and wizard rules facts printed beneath the fields, and a painted illustration of a female wizard casting on a mountain road beside it — An elf wizard with a Sage background. Every line under the fields is the rules doing their work as you pick: the elf's ability bonus, the wizard's hit die, the saves she gets.

A turn, as it happens

The dice are shown, and they're allowed to lose.

You type what you'd do. The difficulty is set before the dice go, the roll is printed where you can see it, and the story is written from what the roll actually did.

One exchange: the player's typed line in a bubble, then the Narrator's reply headed by a readout showing Perception d20 3 plus 1 equals 4 versus DC 15, marked failure, followed by prose in which the companion notices the thing the player just missed — A real turn. **Perception, d20 3 + 1 = 4 against DC 15. A failure.** She misses the light in the window, and her partner is the one who spots it. Nothing gets quietly bumped up because it would have made a better scene.

What the game keeps

It writes things down when they happen.

Not summarised afterwards, and not held in a chat window. Three of the panels you can open at any point in a session.

The Chronicle panel: a story-so-far summary naming the partnership, the forged seals discovered at Cwrnavael and the fight in the garrison hall, followed by a dated day-by-day timeline — **Chronicle.** What has happened, in order, by day.

The Inventory panel: a purse showing 135 gold and zero platinum, silver and copper, attunement slots, and items grouped into weapons, armour, consumables and gear with equipped tags — **Inventory.** Carried, worn, and counted in copper. You can run out of money.

The Bestiary panel: an A to Z list of creatures, each with a painted plate, its size and type, challenge rating, armour class and hit points, with a counter reading 0 of 336 encountered — **Bestiary.** All 336, painted, and it marks off the ones you've actually met.

Painted when the world is made

Every world gets its map.

A painted map of a high valley ringed by snow-capped mountains: forest and field walls along the rivers, marshy lakes to the north-east, and a collapsed rockfall closing the pass at the southern end

The Shut Vale

A valley closed off by a rockfall for sixty years, painted from the world the game actually built. The rivers, the field walls, the marsh at the top end, and the blocked pass at the bottom that used to be the only way in.

Distance on it is real. Where you can get to today depends on where you are standing right now.

Play The Shut Vale

Underground

And so does everything under it.

Some dungeons are written by hand for a campaign. The rest the game builds on its own: the rooms, the ways between them, and what is waiting in each one. Both kinds are below and each one is labelled. The painting is made from the floor plan, so the room you walk into is the room on the map.

Painted overhead plan of a cave: a daylit mouth at the upper left opening onto a broad stone floor, a small side alcove with a lit lantern, and a warm chamber to the right holding a campfire, a bed of bones and a wooden cage with a man inside it — AuthoredHighfang Cave, from The Beast Above Aldwyn. The module writes the den, the fire, the cage and the thing asleep across all of it. The game works out the shape of the rock.

Painted overhead plan of a stone crypt: a flooded hall at the upper left lined with empty burial niches, brick vaults and stairwells linked by narrow passages, sconce flames along the walls — Procedurally generatedThe Ossuary Under Marrowgate *(campaign still in development)*. Nobody wrote this one. A flooded hall, the vaults off it, and the niches where the bones were meant to go.

Painted overhead plan of a pale limestone burrow: irregular tunnels branching in every direction with no straight lines, a small fire at the centre, bones piled in several of the far ends — Procedurally generatedSowback Deep *(campaign still in development)*. Also unwritten. A burrow instead of a lair, with bones left in the ends of it.

Closer in

And the rooms inside them.

Each room is drawn on its own, lit and furnished, and you move through a dungeon one room at a time.

Painted overhead plan of a flooded burial vault: black standing water across the flagstones, three carved stone biers, one lid shoved half off, bone litter at the waterline and a single lit candle — **A flooded vault.** Standing water, three biers, one lid off.

Painted overhead plan of a smugglers' cellar: crates and barrels stacked along the walls, coiled rope, a tipped hand-cart, an open floor hatch and a hanging lantern — **A smugglers' cellar.** Crates, rope, and a hatch left open.

Painted overhead plan of a disused underground shrine: a low stone altar with an offering bowl and melted candle stubs, a worn tile mosaic with pieces missing, and a fallen censer on its chain — **A shrine nobody tends.** Burned-down candles and a fallen censer.

Not production ready yet

Still being built.

Underway now. No dates. It ships when it's good.

Fine-tuning multiclass characters

Multiclass builds work. Spell progression across two casting classes is getting its own pass.

The more complicated abilities

Druid animal forms, the higher-level spells, and the signature moves that make a big monster feel like one. Some of this may come in a later phase.

Town and city maps

The country and the dungeons are drawn. Towns are being redrawn so the streets line up with what is actually in them.

Movement between areas

Fixing bugs in getting from one place to another, especially where a campaign has put something in the way on purpose.

The long-term consequences engine

Everything you do is already recorded, and it already feeds the story. What we are tuning is how far it travels. We want NPCs and factions to react when they would plausibly have heard what you did, instead of at arbitrary moments. It needs a lot of calibration, and it will need players to tell us where it feels wrong.

NPCs who act on their own

People already have their own personality and their own agenda. They accept, refuse, bargain, lie, and betray. Today most of that happens in response to something you did. Getting them to move on their own is the other half of the consequences work.

More campaigns in the catalog

The game is aimed at big worlds you can live in for months. That is also what makes those systems slow to test, because it takes months of play to find out. So the near-term work is more hand-written short campaigns. A few hours each, drop in and play, and you learn how the game works with the training wheels on.

Owning things, and holding them

Working out who owns what, whether that is you, an NPC or a faction, along with zones of influence, property you can buy, and money that comes in while you are elsewhere.

Development progress.