We recorded our August dev chat earlier this month and it's now up — come watch us talk through some of the systems we've been building out this summer.
Here's what we covered:
Interior Spaces
We walked through the interior design work underway for Dagmar's Tavern and showed the current state of the decorated spaces. Grimmloch will have around 22–23 fully furnished interiors, and we're building a decoration tool so that staff characters — not just developers — will be able to customize their own spaces over time. The goal is for the world to feel like it belongs to the people who live in it.
The Location System
When you enter a room in Grimmloch, the world narrates your arrival — and it remembers what's happened there. The location system tracks roleplay changes to the environment at room granularity: the tap room and the back room are distinct spaces with their own state. If a table gets overturned in a scene, that becomes part of the room's description until someone rights it. We're also adding an @location command so players can actively check their surroundings. The system runs on the same underlying pipeline as NPCs, which means locations and characters share the same event model.
NPC and Player Tagging
We talked through the tagging system, which lets you direct an interaction at a specific NPC without other players being able to step in and break the scene. Dramatic events — fights, discoveries, emotional beats — can automatically trigger NPC responses, so the world reacts even if no staff is watching. The same tagging infrastructure extends to player-to-player interactions, with a notification layer so the person being addressed knows they're being spoken to.
The Canon Filter
This one generated some good discussion in chat. When you post something that might break immersion — anachronistic phrasing, an out-of-character aside, something that edges into copyrighted territory — Grimmloch surfaces a gentle prompt: "Grimm is weighing your words." You then choose how to handle it: wrap the post in an OOC tag, accept the suggested corrections, or open the edit window and fix it yourself. The filter isn't a wall — it's a collaborator.
No Levels. No XP.
We revisited our design philosophy on progression. Every character starts at the maximum combat level. Advancement in Grimmloch isn't about grinding — it's about reputation, relationships, and the social economy. Your standing in the world is built through roleplay, not through numbers.
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If any of this sounds like your kind of game, the wishlist button is right up top. It's the best way to make sure you hear from us when we're closer to launch.
— The Grimmloch Team