Made by people who would rather read the fight than watch it
Emberfall started as a question: what would a fantasy game look like if the writing came first and the numbers stayed honest? The answer is a story that waits for you when a choice matters, at a table that never fudges a roll.
The rules fit on a page, and the world is drawn on purpose. The campaign is written the way a games master prepares a session, with a few hard truths the players will find out in the wrong order and room for them to surprise the author.
Three things we will not do
Every die is rolled by the engine and shown to you with the number it had to beat. No narrator can decide you failed because it would be more dramatic.
Flags follow you across chapters. A kindness in the Greymoor is remembered in the Weald. So is the other thing.
No paywalls mid-scene, no energy meters, no coins. Chapter one is free. The rest is one purchase.
Things people ask
It is prose with choices, a party, fights, shops and a map, run by a rules engine. Closer to a gamebook with a games master than to a parser game.
No. The campaign is written in advance, scene by scene, and plays the same for everyone who makes the same choices. Every roll and every change to your sheet happens in the engine, in the open.
An evening: between one and three hours, depending on how much you poke at things. Chapters have a good many roads through them, and some more than one way out. Side tales are shorter, most of an evening.
Yes. Most defeats are rescues with a cost. A few are the end of the road.
It is built to be. The whole game plays by keyboard, the story is announced to screen readers as it arrives, text meets WCAG AA contrast, motion calms down if your system asks for less, and the single-key shortcuts can be switched off from the header. If something gets in your way, please write and say what.
It is a ghost story with a moral spine: grief, loss and courage, no gore for its own sake. Read chapter one and decide.
Without an account, it lives in your browser and goes nowhere. Signed in, it is kept on your account and follows you to other devices. Either way you can export it. The privacy policy says exactly what is stored.
For writing about Emberfall
Emberfall is a browser fantasy adventure that reads like a novel and plays like a night at the table. Its campaign, The Unsealing, follows a party of up to three across the continent of Aldermark as the nine seals that hold the voice-thieving Choir fail one by one, with eleven side tales off the road, six of them following a companion back to where their story began. The rules fit on a page, every die is rolled in the open, and the world remembers what players did. Chapter one is free; the campaign is a single purchase.
- Nine prisons. One guttering fire. Someone is opening the doors.
- A novel you play, at a table that keeps score.
- The dice are rolled by the game. Never by the storyteller.
- Platform: any modern browser, desktop or phone. No install; an account only to buy the full campaign.
- Campaign: seven chapters, all playable, roughly one evening each, and eleven side tales.
- Rewards: legendary weapons and armour, skills taught by the story, talent training, thirty-nine deeds with titles.
- Party: one to three characters; six Callings, six Folk, forty-odd spells; six ready-made companions with their own stories, and custom heroes with pronouns and a personal drive.
- Difficulty: Story, Normal, Hard, Brutal, changeable at any time.
- Modding: plain-text module format, documented, pasteable in-app.
The stage (travel map and battle), the party screen and the atlas are the shots that show the game. Play chapter one and capture at 1280×800; the interface is designed for it.