The Academy Above & Below
- story-driven
- Difficulty: intermediate
- About 2400 min
- solo
- Game Systems: NPC Possession (New), Ambient Audio (Live), Dynamic Portraits (Live), World Map (Live), Party Members (Live)
- academy
- magic
- npc-possession
- good
- evil
- no-combat
What you do
You enter a magic academy that stands in two realms joined by a portal, and you need the endorsement of both. One side's power heals at the giver's cost; the other trades in another person's loss. You can step into another person at the academy and act as them, with their face, rank and debts but none of their thoughts. Read people, test their stories and trace who did what, knowing the people close to you may catch you. Nothing is solved by fighting, and nothing runs on a timer.
The Celestial-Infernum Academy fills two buildings joined by a working portal. In the Lowered Path, power heals and shelters, and the giver pays. In the Hoarded Warmth, rank is bought with another person's cold, humiliation, or loss. You arrive an adult Soul-Forged Apprentice and need both endorsements. You can possess another named adult and act as them: their face, name, rank, and debts, none of their mind. Eight formidable people get close enough to matter, and close enough to catch you.
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
Two Buildings, One Name
The Sponsorship
You arrive at the Celestial-Infernum Academy as an adult entrant, with your own face, history, power, and prior life intact. A realm has sponsored your place, not authored your past. The rank waiting for you is Soul-Forged Apprentice. It means only that you are new to the academy's joint method of teaching in both realms.
The Crossing
The academy has one building in each of two realms, the Celestial Gardens and the Infernum Depths. A working portal joins them. The Lowered Path, the Gardens building, gives water before rank and bends stone toward the burdened. The Hoarded Warmth, the Depths building, raises its warmest seats on heat drawn from colder rooms. Two signing plates wait in The Acknowledging Room. Both realms must register the same entrant.
The Other Body
You can step into another named adult here and act as them. You get the body: their face, their name, their rank, the welcome the corridors give them, and every debt already standing against them. You do not get the mind. A borrowed body opens doors; it does not tell you what its owner knows, owes, or promised last week. Whatever you do while wearing them stays on them after you step out.
What Awaits
- Two independent endorsement webs, each taught in the opposite realm. Each is the study path to one realm's endorsement.
- Eight dangerous relationships, each open to companionship and slow-burn romance
- Records to trace, rooms to study, stories to test, and public acts to own
- Hymn, a true Graceborn angel who chose corruption within the law. His outer light is becoming burning while the academy argues over what his lawful descent means.
- A path to the threshold of Soul-Forged Mastery, with no single moral score and no side you must join
Take your place, cross in your own body or another's, and decide which acts will still bear your name.