What you are playing is a dungeon. What is being built is the machine that runs it — and the machine, rather than any particular dungeon, is the point.
Most games of this kind are a thing you complete. You clear the dungeon, the story ends, and the software has nothing left to do. This one is aimed somewhere else: at being a place campaigns run, where the rules are the product and any given dungeon is something laid on top of them.
There is one campaign at the moment, and it is being made while the engine under it is still being welded together — the plane assembled in flight, in the open, by one person. That is a deliberate way to work rather than an accident of scheduling: a rule only proves itself once something has been built on top of it and played.
A dungeon here is a file. Its corridors and doors, the ground that is difficult and the rooms that swallow light, what is locked and what is hidden behind the lock, what waits in a particular chamber — all of it is authored as content and read by an engine that knows nothing about that specific place.
That goes further than a floor plan. A place owns its own dangers. Which creatures can be met there, how large a band of them arrives, how often anything finds you at all — those are not settings buried in the program. They belong to the map, so two dungeons built on the same engine can feel nothing like each other.
This runs in a browser, and that is a decision rather than a convenience — no download, no install, the same party waiting for you on whatever you happen to be sitting at. But a game in a browser has a problem a game on your own machine does not: the browser is not a place you can keep anything hidden. Anything sent to it can be read by whoever is sitting there.
Which matters enormously for a game whose whole substance is finding things out. A campaign is only worth playing once if nobody can simply read ahead.
So the rule this engine is built on is that your browser is only ever told what your party has actually earned. Not "sent everything and shown some of it" — genuinely not told. The map you are exploring arrives a piece at a time, and the parts you have not reached are not sitting in there waiting to be uncovered. A wall you have not seen through is described to your browser as a wall, because as far as your party is concerned it is one.
The same applies to everything the world is made of. The full roster of what can be found, what it does and what it is worth lives on the server; you are shipped the ordinary things anyone would recognize, plus whatever you have personally come across. Something unusual that you are carrying but have not worked out yet arrives as what it looks like — its weight, its shape, the name you would give it — while what it actually does stays behind. The creatures and the arithmetic of a fight are not sent to you at all. Even the pictures are served under meaningless names, so that no filename can announce what is coming.
And because the browser cannot be trusted with the answers, it is not asked the questions either. When something needs deciding — what a roll came up, whether that wall is really a wall — the server decides it and tells you the outcome.
Content that lives in files needs something to write those files, so a fair share of what has been built is not the game at all.
There is an editor for maps: draw the floors and the walls, hang the doors, mark where the stairs go and which ground is treacherous, plant what is guarded and what is concealed, and decide what wanders those halls and how likely it is to find somebody. There is an editor for creatures: what a thing is, what it fights with, what it shrugs off, what it is worth killing. And behind both, plain lists of the weapons, items, spells and lessons the world can contain.
The game reads exactly what those tools write. They are not a workshop off to one side that produces something which then gets translated into code — the file the editor saves is the file the server serves. Which means anything new you meet in play got there by being authored, and could have been authored by somebody who never opened the source.
Today those tools are the designer's alone. Putting them in other people's hands, so that anyone can build a campaign and share it, is the direction all of this is pointed — and it is a direction, not a date.
Everything in the game resolves through the same small set of machinery. Every roll anybody makes — swinging, defending, searching, picking a lock, siting a camp — goes through one dice engine. Every blow goes through one resolver. Every object comes out of one catalog.
That is not tidiness for its own sake. It is what makes new content trustworthy: a weapon authored a year from now rolls the same dice as the one in your hand right now, and a dungeon somebody else builds will behave in ways you already understand.
It is also the reason this wiki can exist. The rules described on these pages are not the rules of this dungeon. They are the rules, everywhere, for anything anyone builds.
You are playing a playtest, and it is worth knowing which parts of it are solid.
The numbers will move. Prices, difficulty, how much a thing hurts, how fast anyone improves — all of it is being tuned against actual play, and some of it is deliberately unbalanced while it is looked at.
The rules move much more slowly. What is written on these pages is the settled part — how the dice work, what a round is, what stamina and light and mana each cost you. When something here does change, it changes on purpose.
And the world itself is the most replaceable part of all. It exists to prove the machine works, and the machine is built so that a world can be swapped out without disturbing any of it.