Duskmile
- story-driven
- Difficulty: beginner
- About 1800 min
- solo
- Game Systems: Dynamic Portraits (New), Ambient Audio (Live), World Map (Live), Party Members (Live)
- road-town
- social-investigation
- consequential-choices
- found-community
- no-combat
- all-forge
What you do
You arrive in a road town that makes its living from travellers. You come just as a new door, a portal, threatens to cut weeks of road down to days. Pick one of five ways in. Then talk, lend a hand with repairs, deliveries and searches, and make your case to the seven families who keep the town running. There is no right family to back and no set answer to the door. The town decides who you are by the work you do and the promises you keep. People you win over can travel with you.
Duskmile is where the Wheelway, a long road, stops for the night. It is a warm, hard-working town of amber lamps, wet slate roofs and muddy yards. For generations, seven families have kept travellers fed, mended, shod, sorted, guarded, lodged and moving. Bright survey ribbons now stand in the hayfields for a costly new door: a portal that could turn weeks of road into days. It could also turn the town’s proudest work into memory.
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 Mile at Day’s End
The Long Way
Duskmile is a road town on Farhome, where doors are for the few. A door is a portal that cuts a long journey short. Doors are rare, ruinously expensive and kept open by guild skill. Most people still go the long way: boots on stone, wheels in ruts, letters under oilcloth, cattle breathing mist into the morning. The Wheelway is the road between the portal cities of Ninegates and Silverthrough. It takes weeks to walk. Duskmile sits at its middle, and every traveller knows to stop there for the night.
A Town That Receives You
Duskmile has made a trade of the day’s end. Its lamps come on before you ask. Its yards can hold a whole caravan, and its kitchens always expect one more bowl. Its smiths, healers, letter-sorters, drovers and freight brokers have spent generations sending people back to the road. Seven old families carry those trades. Every promise, rivalry, kindness and unpaid favour between them has had time to settle deep.
Ribbons in the Hay
This season, bright survey ribbons stand in the hayfields beyond the last roofs. The Shortway Concern, the company behind the survey, means to build a portal on the Wheelway. That door could turn weeks of travel into days for anyone able to pay. It may bring new work. It may also end the reason Duskmile exists. Nobody here agrees which of those truths matters more, though everybody will offer you supper while explaining why.
Your Place at the Table
You arrive with your own reason for stopping. You may be travelling free, with no ties, or just finished with an escort job. You may be named in a stranger’s letter, or hired to hold the survey’s measuring chain. Or you may be stranded beside a broken axle. You belong to none of Duskmile’s old arguments yet. That makes you useful. It may also make you the only person people will tell the truth to, though never straight out.
What Awaits
- Walk a large, lived-in road town where nearly every room holds work, company or a story.
- Build standing across seven families whose loyalties and livelihoods pull against one another.
- Solve practical troubles through conversation, investigation, nerve, craft or kindness.
- Find friendship, companionship and courtship without being forced into any of them.
- Help a town choose what it owes its past—and what it can promise its future.
Choose how you reached Duskmile, step into the lamplight, and decide whose question you will answer first.