Our biggest update yet. The demo stops being a corridor with a door at the end: the guided first contract now opens onto the free game, with a living realm, a real economy, and a company that reads like people instead of stat blocks.
Your company reads like people now
• Thirteen callings in the classic tabletop mold, and each fights its own way: wizards conjure, clerics pray, bards play, rogues strike from cover. Nobody is forced onto brute steel anymore.
• Seventy-five origins, ten per calling, and no two people on your side of the game share a past. Some of those pasts are secrets worth uncovering.
• The hiring market now sells every rank of the ladder, at the rarity it deserves: a small guild sees the green and the wandering; the veterans start knocking as your renown grows, and they are born expensive.
• Attempting a skill you do not know now teaches it: the attempt rolls on the base attribute and earns practice in that very skill, the way any tabletop would have it.
• The mercenary sheet is one panel with living bars for morale, loyalty, health, growth, teaching and ambition; relationships got faces; your people keep their secrets until you learn them.
Events, rewritten end to end
• Every scene demands one specific skill. Whoever lacks it answers with the raw attribute, and the card says exactly what is being tested: one reading, once, machine-checked.
• Fight and flee only appear where there is actually something to fight, and the fight button names the foe when the scene knows it. All four commands explain themselves on hover.
• Every scene now ends in its own words: hundreds of new outcome texts, none shared, and a success never reads as a delay again.
• The outcome screen was redesigned into three tabs: the event summary with the mission objectives, your mercenaries with portraits and personal notes, and the outsiders involved.
• The mission is decided by the scene it was hired for: win or lose that scene and the contract follows. Optional objectives are extras, and a full mission no longer gets random noise on top.
A realm that is drawn fresh each run
• Who rules each region, who covets it, and what is stirring there is rolled anew every campaign. Places got short names the stories actually use.
• The realm is never short of trouble: the War Desk always has work, and losing the company is now an ending the demo can actually deliver.
• Your Guild Master is worth more than the people you hire after, and the founding candidates arrive with their past on the table.
Economy with teeth (and fairness)
• Growing your company is no longer a mathematical mistake: crew shares are capped, the master's cut is a quarter instead of near half, and a company of three turns a thin profit.
• A failed contract pays no one their cut, blades cost what a contract is worth, and missing the right skills no longer punishes you twice.
• The demo opens in autumn, so winter arrives inside your run and the seasons teach instead of ambushing.
And a mountain of polish
• Over sixty fixes, among them: four ways a run could soft-lock, a scene that could repeat fourteen times, thousands of silent errors, portraits that jumped, and a campaign that could poison the next one.
• The demo now keeps to its own shelf on your disk and never touches the full game's future saves.
• Everyone in the demo has a face, and no two people share one. The road to the full game runs through feedback like yours. If something reads wrong, fails silently, or just feels off: tell us in the community hub. We read everything.