Bellstone
- story-driven
- Difficulty: intermediate
- About 1200 min
- solo
- Game Systems: World Map (New), Lore Journal (New), Ambient Audio (Live)
- Fantasy
- village-mystery
- warm-and-uncanny
- witness-rock
- grief
- no-combat
What you do
You come to a quarry town built of stone that remembers. You arrive signed onto a quarry crew or woken in a room someone else paid for. Cut, read and grade remembered moments, and get to know the town that lives off them. Follow the mystery under Keeper's Row as far as you choose to push it. Everything you learn is kept in a journal you can come back to. There is no combat and no clock: the deeper story waits until you push it.
A quarry town high on a mountain of witness-rock, stone that keeps what happens beside it and replays it at dusk. The replays are faint as breath, in the walls people live beside. Bellstone cuts truth for a living. Crews quarry remembered moments; assayers (stone inspectors) grade them. A factor (a stone trader) prices them. The Chapel of Veritas files away the ones nobody should own.
Plays in a web browser on a desktop or laptop computer.
Free to start, no card needed: 50 Embers on sign-up (approx 1 hour sample of standard play, estimate based on typical story play), then 15 a day.
Early Access
The Mountain Keeps Everything
A town built of evidence
Bellstone is a quarry town high on the mountain's shoulder, along a rock shelf called the Long Cut. It is built of witness-rock: stone that keeps what happens beside it. At dusk the grey walls play those moments back, faint as breath: a supper thirty years gone. Nobody stops to look.
Easy about its walls
Bellstone folk are easy about this the way harbor folk are easy about tides. Quarry Guild crews cut remembered moments from the rock. The Weighhouse grades them. The factor, a stone trader, prices them. The Chapel files away the worst. Wages are paid by the bell, per shift. The jokes are village jokes. One law stands over everything: each moment can be cut from its stone only once. Ruin the cut and it is lost forever. The town's oldest curse is may your hands learn what they ruined.
The quiet under the town
In a cellar on Keeper's Row, under new timber props, the town has found a vein of clear stone that holds moments. Nobody has been allowed to look at it, and everybody guards it. They call it the Hush. The Weighhouse wants it read first. The Guild wants it cut. The factor wants it sold. The Chapel wants it sealed and left alone. The great bell rings only when the whole town must decide. It has not rung, and everyone is listening for it.
And now there is you
Strangers are rare here, and the stone remembers them too. The first wall you passed on the quarry road has already kept your arrival. Some dusk it will play it back, whether or not anyone stops to look.
Bellstone has room for one more. The town is watching — kindly, and thoroughly.
What Awaits
- A working mountain: rock faces to cut, cloudy scrap stone to polish until it plays again, and veins to spot before the crews do.
- A town's worth of neighbors: wants, griefs, feuds, and forty years of things said quietly over ale.
- Truth you can hold: stones that each replay one moment, and the craft of showing them wisely.
- The weighing of the Hush, when the town decides its fate, and your word in it.
- Whatever the crews say walks the deep mine tunnels, where the lamps go quiet.