Marrowgate
- story-driven
- Difficulty: intermediate
- About 1200 min
- solo
- Game Systems: Quest-Gated Recruitment (New), Ambient Audio (Live), Dynamic Portraits (Live), World Map (Live), Party Members (Live)
- dark-romantasy
- court-mystery
- no-combat
- all-forge
What you do
You arrive in Marrowgate an ordinary stranger, and within the hour its failing Door opens for you alone. Five powers in the city want the person it chose. Ask, charm, negotiate and command your way through the city's three rings. Along the way, work out why the Door is dying and why it picked you. Some people join you once you have taken on their story. There is no combat and you cannot lose: a bad choice makes a harder story, never a dead end.
Marrowgate is a small, old, rich, frightened city grown in three rings around one ancient door. One step through the Midnight Door crosses the continent, a journey that otherwise takes a season. For centuries it has opened between dusk and dawn and at no other hour, and every crossing paid a toll here. Three years ago the Door began to fail. A crossing came late, one night it never opened, and this past winter it stayed shut a whole month. The toll money that carries the city is bleeding out.
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 City the Door Grew
You have come to Marrowgate, a city built in three rings around one ancient door. You came the ordinary way, for your own reasons, with no standing here and no history. Nobody here owes you anything.
That door is the Midnight Door. Between dusk and dawn it carries travellers across the continent in a single step. Every crossing pays a toll at the rail, the toll counter. Everything the city has hangs on that hinge. Within your first hour you cross the Threshold, the innermost ring.
The Hour It Opened
For three years the Door has been failing. Doors do not break, travellers say; they forget. This past winter it forgot for a whole month, and the toll this city lives on bled away.
Then it opens: once, cleanly, in daylight, with no toll paid and no name given. The rings of lamps around it lean inward, ring by ring. The floor loses its heat between one breath and the next. The whole square turns to see who it opened for. It opened for you.
By Dark, Everyone Knows
In twelve generations of the charter, the Door has never opened for a person. The legends say it has happened before, long ago, and they do not say it kindly. By dark every house in Marrowgate is asking the same question about you. Each wants a different answer.
There is a knife inside that question. The charter-court belongs to the House of the Latch, the family that holds the Door. It keeps an executioner, and her oath binds her to the charter's oldest and worst line. That line says: what the Door sends, the Latch may have to close. Nobody knows yet whether she will have to keep it. She does not know either.
Five, and One at a Time
Five powers hold this city, and every one needs the Door working. The vampire asks permission and means it. The werewolf says almost nothing. The fae names a price and keeps to it. The dragon decides what you are worth. The witch said it was dying first.
You can ask any of them to walk beside you, but only one at a time. Everyone in Marrowgate wants the Door's chosen: you. And the Door's chosen gets to want somebody back.
The lamps are lit, the rail is open, and the whole city is waiting to see where you go first.
What Awaits
- A dying door, a rich frightened city, and one question everybody is asking about you
- Five powers worth wanting, each of whom needs the thing that chose you
- One companion at a time, so every yes is also four refusals
- The court's executioner: an office, an oath, and no opinion about you yet.