The story in play
Why each system of the game is the way it is, told from inside the world.
Everything you keep, you will carry into heaven.
Each system below has a reason in the world. The rules behind them are on the overview, and where the two disagree, the overview wins. Drafted by Claude's lore team and kept by Alex on 25 October 2026; the proposal blocks are still open. Round 2's additions were marked for Alex by a Claude stand-in, at his request.
Hordes
Every monster is a piece in play, marked with a faction's white. Pieces in play attack anything not of their side, and even your own faction's troops don't know which side you took. The dead go back into the board and are made again, so the hordes never end.
Loot
Pieces are armed with what the world makes, and the dead drop what they carried. Nothing of the world rises to heaven unless a fallen carries it, which is why heaven needs you. Each fallen sees by its own coal, and the coal shows each one its own share, until it is given.
Men work fire too, badly: that is a magic item. A rare was worked by a fallen once; a unique was carried by one with a name.
Currency and crafting
Every orb but one is fire, and fire answers a coal best: a fallen works it into iron, and can't feed on it. There is no gold. The faithful, the Apostates' cells and the go-betweens deal in what is useful.
Proposal
Where the fire comes from. The orbs are the cold embers: coals of fallen who guttered before they touched any fire, angels heaven never got back. They lie thickest in the deep where the fallen wake, and wherever the world has dug. A fallen can work one into iron because it is grace, and can't take it back into itself because it is someone else's. Every orb you spend was an angel. The one orb that isn't fire, Quenching Water, stays with the Tide, which is still open.
Nobody asks whose it was.
Levelling
Every kill leaves a little white on your hands, shared with kin near enough. It is strength and the corruption coming back at once, and the ember's light grows colder with every level. The passive tree is where the white settles, drawn as the heaven you remember: the Rose.
Skills and factions
Every way of killing below is open to any fallen. The faction you choose at the top adds its own few skills on top of any build, and takes nothing away.
Death
A fallen gutters and relights at the last fire it touched, or at once from a friend's warmth. In the endgame you are your faction's champion, worked from your seat. Losing it costs the piece, not you, and each map takes only so many. In the endgame a taken piece loses the white it hadn't carried home, and a friend's warmth can't reach a coal in a piece. There is no third fall: nobody knows what a third cut does.
Hubs and the stash
The hubs are where the faithful of the forbidden faith keep their fires, with traders and an Apostate cell among them. They keep your things as relics, safe across a century, and the same hoard is in your seat once you have one. Between hubs you step from one of your fires to another.
Co-op
Kin are fallen who share a fire, so a party is kin from the moment it sets out, whatever banners its fallen chose. Kin grow from each other's kills, relight at the party's fire, and can't be made to burn one another.
Bosses and memories
Each act's boss holds the way up, and past it a memory comes back with the height. The last boss of each climb is the fallen who keeps heaven's gate. More on the second climb.
The second climb
The Apostate who raised you asks for one more fall in return for the climb she gave you. A coal that keeps its memories falls slowly, she says, and you wake a century on, keeping all you remember, with every fire you lit gone out. See the second climb.
The hideout
Your seat in heaven: the hearth you carried up, your things, and the go-betweens of the secret trade who come to deal. From it you work your champion on the board. Kin come and go through your door whatever their banner.
Your seat is white; only what you carry up has colour.
Maps and tiers
A map is the way down to one region, carried up on something that holds its name: a key, a seal, a torn banner. Kill its champion and the hold breaks, and your faction pays for it whoever held it. A map's tier is how near the House the region's twin above stands. More in Maps and the hideout, which still describes the earlier endgame.
Pinnacles
When ground bound to a place that matters lies broken, the place above opens, and you go up in person to settle it against the champions it draws. Beaten, you relight where you set out and go again while the fires lit to it last; whoever holds the field at the end takes it.
Leagues
Each league is fought below, and at its end one place nearer the House changes hands. Places behind it are lost again, and the court has one more stair than anyone counted, so the war never reaches the door. A player can win every fight and the board is still not won: the grind never ends.
Hardcore
Some fallen swear that no fire will relight them. When one gutters, nothing relights it, not even a friend's warmth, and a sworn fallen's piece takes its coal with it. An ended sworn fallen goes back to the long war. Some fallen take nothing from another's hand (solo self-found).
New characters
Each new character is another angel cut loose, and it wakes knowing nothing you know. Its hands remember what it was, though it doesn't, and that is where it starts: the archetypes proposed on the builds page. Nobody skips the campaign; every new fallen climbs both times.