What happened, and why anyone would walk north

Everything in this world runs off one decision somebody made a long time ago, in a hurry, and nobody has been able to undo since. The ring went into the fire. The war stopped. And then, years later, the mountain started handing the metal back.

The old ring

A smith made it. That is nearly all anyone can tell you about him with confidence — he was a smith, he worked the mountain because the mountain was the only fire hot enough for what he was doing, and by the time anyone in the south knew his name he already had the north.

What the ring did was not complicated. Whoever held it got what they wanted. Deals went their way, harvests went their way, arrows went past them, and the people standing nearest to them lost whatever the holder had gained. It was luck, and it ate. A man who wore it long enough would find himself very rich and entirely alone, which is roughly what happened.

It was made in that fire, so it could only be unmade in that fire. That is the whole reason anyone ever had to go north.

The war and the throw

The war was everyone else trying to take it off him, and it went badly for a long time, because nothing goes badly for a man holding a ring like that. The southern holds spent a generation on it. The line moved north and then stopped, roughly where the dead forest starts now, and stayed there long enough that people were born and buried on it.

It ended when somebody got the ring away from him and carried it the only direction that was any use — toward him, toward his own forge, because that was the one fire that could take it apart. Nobody knows their name either. The holds have four competing versions and each one is from a hold that wants the credit.

When it went in, he went with it. He had been tied to the thing for so long that unmaking it unmade him. The war did not end in a surrender or a treaty. It stopped, mid-order, in the middle of a sentence, all across the north at once.

The dead

Nobody collected the bodies. There were too many, they were too far north, and the people who would have gone to fetch them were mostly among them. So the war's dead stayed on the ground where the line had stood, through a winter and then another, and the south told itself that was a thing it would get to.

They got up instead. When, exactly, and why, is the question the south has argued about for as long as there has been a south to argue in. What is agreed is that it began in the north and has been working its way down ever since, and that it stops at anything burning.

Most of what walks up there is simply the unburied — the war's own casualties, still on the ground they died holding, which is why they are thickest at the old line and thin near the Cut. They do not see well. They hear extremely well, and better in the quiet, which is why a whistle at midday is a small mistake and a whistle at midnight is a large one.

Light does not kill them. It makes them unwilling. Under a lamp that is actually burning they will not come in, and in daylight they are slower to rouse and hit softer, and the holds stopped asking why the day they found out it worked. Cloud is a problem for the same reason a sunset is: it brings the dark early, and the smoke off the mountain has been thickening the sky over the north for years.

The pour

The metal did not leave when the ring did. It went down into the mountain, and the mountain has been slowly giving it back — a run of molten rock down the flanks every so often, mostly thin and worthless, carrying a trace of what the old ring was made of.

A ladle of it, taken while it still glows and carried south while it still glows, cools into a small ring. Not the old one. Nothing close. But it does a little of what that did, and everyone in the south has heard exactly how much "a little" was worth to the man who had all of it.

This is the part that turns an old story into a stampede. The pour is not rare enough to be a legend and not common enough to be a trade. It happens, the mountain lights up its own smoke, and every hold on the Cut opens its crossings, and everyone who was ever going to try is trying at the same time.

Twenty-five kilometres, south to north, with the mountain sitting exactly at the top of it. The south end is farmland. The north end is a caldera. Everything between those two facts is the game.

The Cut

The Cut is a trench running east and west as far as anyone has walked in either direction, and it is the largest thing the southern holds have ever built. Eleven years of digging, done after the road failed and before anyone admitted the road had failed. Its south face is dressed stone and undercut at the lip, so that anything which only walks cannot get up it. The dead only walk.

That is the whole line. Everything south of the Cut is farms, holds, law and boredom. Everything north of it is open ground where nothing you do is anyone's business. The dead never come south of it, and neither, for the most part, does anything resembling a rule.

There are crossings every few hundred metres: seventy metres of open deck on stone piers, a lamp burning at the south end of each, no cover anywhere on them. Going out, a crossing is nothing — you are carrying a stick and nobody wants it. Coming back with a full ladle, in the dark, with your own light announcing you, it is seventy metres of the worst decision-making you will do all season.

The road and its stations

Before the Cut, the holds tried something more optimistic. They put a line of stations up the middle of the world, each one a lamp on a post and a stone cache underneath, and for a while there was a genuine road north with people on it.

The stations are still there. About half of them are still burning, which sounds better than it is — a lamp that has gone out is exactly the kind of dark, sheltered, permanent thing the dead will settle into, so relighting one is not a chore, it is a fight. And the lamp housing is the lock on the cache below it, so an unlit station is a cache you cannot open even after you have cleared it, until you get the light going.

What is in the cache is not treasure. It is what the holds thought a road party would need, packed by people who had a clear idea of the three jobs on such a party: somebody fast enough to scout and get away, somebody solid enough to stand in a doorway, and somebody who could shoot. A cache is stocked for all three and you take one thing from it, which means most of the interesting decisions on a run are made standing over an open box arguing with yourself.

The deeper you go into one of those kits, the better the rest of it works, because it was packed as a kit. Half a scout's load and half an archer's load is two halves of nothing.

The ground, south to north

The world is usually described in five stretches, which is a convenience rather than a truth — each one holds several genuinely different places, and the edges are arguments rather than lines.

The captains

The smith kept officers. When he went into the fire he took his own life and the war's ending with him, and left every order he had ever given standing, with nobody in a position to countermand one.

So they are still out there, and they are still commanding. You do not meet one in the first few kilometres — they held the north and they are still holding it, and roughly four and a half kilometres past the Cut is where you start finding them. The dead near a captain move like a unit rather than a crowd. Kill it and the ones around it come apart for a few seconds while they work out that nobody is telling them anything, and those few seconds are frequently the whole reason a run survives the dark.

None of the above is a quest. There is no order, no patron and no plan. A claimant is a person who heard the mountain was pouring, walked to a crossing, and went over it, and the whole story of Going North is what that person does for the next hour.

What a claimant does

The goal is stupidly simple and the execution is not. Get to the mountain. Fill a ladle. Get back across the Cut while it is still glowing. Nothing else counts — not the distance, not the kills, not how impressive the trip out was. A claimant who reaches the caldera and dies at 400 metres from home has done precisely as well as one who never left.

A full ladle is not subtle. It glows, it throws light, and it can be seen at a distance by exactly the sort of person who has spent the last forty minutes failing to fill one of their own. Every other claimant on the map gets a rough fix on where a carrier is, updated every couple of seconds and always slightly out of date, which is enough to hunt with and not enough to ambush with cleanly.

Going out you have nothing anyone wants. Coming home you are a lamp walking through a country of people who need one.

Customs of the road

There is no writing to be done out here and no way to send a message. Reaching another person means making a noise, and a noise is heard by everything in range, which means every social act in this world costs something.

• The whistleThe quiet call. Carries far enough to find someone you have lost and not much further. It is what you use when you still care about not being found.
• The yellThe loud one. Carries a very long way and brings everything that hears it. Used to warn, used to gather, and used deliberately as a lure by anyone with the nerve for it.
• Shaking on itThe road custom. Two people close enough to touch, hands taken inside a breath or two, and that is a deal: allies, names exchanged, nobody's business but theirs. It holds until they part. There is no oath in it, no ceremony, and no way to enforce it, which is the point — the north has already seen what happens to people who swear things they cannot get out of.

The name over another claimant's head is the name they gave you when you shook. Everyone else on the road is a shape at a distance, and telling a claimant from a captain at four hundred metres in bad light is a skill people are quietly proud of.

The last glass

A pour does not last. The mountain runs for a while and then it stops, and the holds have no way of knowing when except by watching who comes back. So the custom is this: the first ladle to cross the Cut settles the claim, and the crossings stay open for the length of one glass afterwards — ten minutes, near enough — so that everyone else still out there can get home and be counted.

Which turns the last ten minutes of a season into something quite unlike the fifty before it. Everybody who is holding a ladle knows exactly how long they have. Everybody who is not knows exactly where the people holding one have to go. The ranking is by the clock: the first one home sets the time and everyone after them is counted behind it.

If nobody gets one home before the pour cools, the claim goes to whoever got furthest, which is a consolation nobody has ever been happy with.

On dying

Claimants are not sent north, but they are backed. A hold that fancies its chances will stake a name — kit, a place in the queue at the crossing, and a share if that name comes home — and if the person carrying that name falls, the hold has every reason to send the next one out before the pour ends.

So a claimant comes back into the world at a station whose lamp is burning, with whatever that station had cached for them, and without whatever the last one had picked up further north. The hold knows what it packed. It does not know what you found.

The rest is the working half — what things are called, what is fixed, what is still open, and where all of this came from.

The words

Plain English doing heavy work. Nothing invented, nothing capitalised that has not earned it. If a name sounds like something a farmer would say, it is right.

Settled and unsettled

Settled

• There was one ring and it is gone. Nothing anyone finds is it. What you carry is raw material with a trace of it.
• The smith is dead and there is no surviving will in the north. The captains are momentum, not a villain.
• Winning costs nothing and means nothing beyond what you got. There is no curse, no burden, and no destiny attached to a ring you forge.
• The metal sets south of the Cut and nowhere else. This is the rule the entire game hangs from.
• The holds are plural and do not agree about anything, including which of them ended the war.
• No magic exists on screen except the metal itself and whatever raised the dead. Everything else is people, weather and iron.

Open, and fine to leave open

• Why the dead rose, and why it started when it did. Four holds have four answers.
• Who took the ring north. Also four answers, also self-serving.
• Whether the Cut works because the holds dug it, or whether they dug it along a line that already worked.
• How far the world goes east and west. Nobody has walked to the end of the Cut.
• What the holds actually do with a ring that comes home. This is where a future faction layer would go.

Ahead of the build

Written above because the world needs them. None of it is in the game yet, and some of it may never be.

• The smoke going black when the mountain pours, and the holds ringing for it.
• Holds as an institution — backers, staked names, a share of what comes home.
• Crossings being opened and closed rather than simply existing.
• Pre-war town ruins reading as pre-war, and the dry band's ruins reading as military.
• Any sword or shield. The arsenal in the build today is a stick and a bow.

Sources, and what we never use

The premise is openly in debt to a very famous story, and the debt is fine as long as we borrow from the same place that story did rather than from the story itself. Cursed rings are old, and the ones we are drawing on are all long out of copyright.

• Andvaranaut, from the Völsunga sagaA gold ring taken from its maker under duress, which multiplies the wealth of whoever holds it and destroys every one of them in turn. This is where our ring's behaviour comes from — luck that eats — and it is the furthest thing from a ring that dominates other minds.
• Wagner's cycleThe same ring made into a story about the metal wanting to go back where it came from, and about everyone in the drama wanting one for themselves. Our scramble is closer to this than to anything else.
• Plato's ring of GygesA ring whose entire function is to remove consequences, posed as a question about what a person does when nobody can hold them to account. That question is the Cut.

What we take from the modern telling is one structural beat, which is not protectable: a ring that can only be unmade in the fire that made it, and a war that ends when it goes in. What we do not take is anything anybody wrote down.

Never

• Any proper noun of theirs — place, person, object, people or phrase. The explicit list is kept in the repo, in docs/story.md, so that this page does not have to reproduce somebody else's trademarks to say we are avoiding them.
• Any of their sentences, rhythms or invented languages, quoted, adapted or gestured at.
• Their species and the trade dress that goes with them.
• Domination as the engine. Theirs is about one will subjecting others. Ours is about scarcity, and about a hundred people wanting the same pour. Keeping those two engines different is the single most useful thing this document does.
• Naming the influence in marketing copy, on a store page or in a trailer. Talking about it in a devlog or an interview is a different context and is fine.

This is a design document written by the team, not legal advice. If any of the setting ever goes onto a store page, have a lawyer read this section first.