Mortmain Studio Presents
Squalor
Even the bells have learned to mourn.
A medieval extraction game
Join the Vigil
Descend
The kingdom rots. The fields are done. Those who stayed are those who can bear the cold, the blade, the plague. Take what you can carry home. Leave the rest where it has fallen. One will come, when you are gone — takes your gold. Takes you alone.
Do not breathe upon the door. Do not gather what is poor. Do not count the crows in flight — The third crow takes the light.
A unique combat system in the spirit of medieval battle. Steel rings down a narrow alley, the dead claw out of the dark, and around the corner steps another pilgrim with the same hunger as you. Lock-on, parry, clinch, the finishing blow — here every move decides who walks off with the sack and who stays in the mud.
Make it back with your spoils, or die beneath them. Insure what you can stand to lose. For the rest, go and take it back yourself. The road forgives no debt.
Bandits at the roadside. Undead in the crypts. Beasts in the deep wood. Every enemy speaks the same language of war as you — there are no light paths here, only sharper steel.
No fireballs. No second tries. Your skill is your sorcery. Your armour is your prayer. And strength runs out before the sun goes down.
Steel is honest. The man holding it, less so.
Twenty lives before the plague. Choose who you were — it decides how you survive, what you owe, and what you hear in the dark. No gift makes you stronger against another man.
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, in the year of the Second MourningHe who walks the night shall not come back. He who opens his door shall feel its lack. He who lets the shepherd through his gate — has set his hand upon his fate. Bury your own. Pray alone. Do not call your neighbour in — he comes not on his own.
The First Vigil — our closed test — will be called from these names.
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.