In a kingdom devoured by plague, only the desperate remain. Take what you can. Carry it home. Or leave it on your corpse for the next soul brave enough to come looking.
The plague does not ask permission. It only asks who is next.
Four-direction strikes. Stance work. Parries that demand timing, feints that demand nerve. A duel is a conversation written in steel — and you must learn to read it before it reads you.
Carry your loot to safety, or die with it on your back. Insure what you can afford to lose. Hunt the ones who took the rest. The road remembers your debts.
Bandits in the treeline. Undead in the crypt. Beasts in the deep wood. Every enemy fights with the same grammar of war as you — there are no shortcuts, only sharper steel.
No fireballs. No second chances. Your skill is your sorcery, your armour is your prayer, and stamina runs out faster than the sun.
Steel is honest. The man holding it, less so.
Once shepherd of the cathedral. He still preaches — to a flock of bones.
He hears your sins through the visor of his helm. Penance is paid in blood.
A treaty written in plague-blood. Those who signed it no longer remember why.
— if you would read further, the codex opens for you —
By order of the Crown: travel by daylight, bury your own dead, trust no shepherd.
Hope is a candle in the wind. Bring more than one.
Mortmain is a small workshop devoted to games at the edge of medieval imagination. We are interested in what survives when the world doesn't. Squalor is our first dispatch from the dark.