The Contested World

Art in progress

The banner you cut down was mended by morning.

After the second climb you are one of the players. The endgame is played in the world, which heaven made as the board for its war: its regions are the maps, opened from your seat in heaven, which is your hideout, and every one is held by a faction. The rules of the board are decided, in the overview; this page gathers them for the journey, and what it adds is a proposal.

What you find

The same world you climbed twice, seen from above. Every region you passed through is a front: the Wardens' still, chained ground, the Heirs' crusade under banners, the Apostates' broken ground where the world's own things run loose. Heaven's white is on whatever a faction holds, and the more white a region shows, the deeper the hold. The world keeps its colours everywhere else.

How you go down

• As a piece. In the endgame you work your faction's champion from your seat, as every angel works its own, and your coal rides in it. Yours is the one piece that carries back up what it takes. Dying on a map costs the piece, not you: you set down another, and each map takes only so many before it is lost.
• In your true form. Warden porcelain and keys, Heir radiance and wings, Apostate plainness: the more your faction holds, the more of it shows.
• Together. Every map is open to every player, and a party of mixed factions fights together: kin share a fire, whatever banners they chose.

What the maps are

• Regions held by a faction, each with its own troops and modifiers. Your faction chooses which front you push and what you earn there.
• Tiers are nearness to the House. A region bound to an outer bridge of heaven is lightly held; one bound to a stair of the court is held by angels who look closely, through whiter pieces, and what is carried there is finer.
• Kill the champion and the hold breaks. The region is nobody's, and neither is its twin above. Most holds mend by morning, unless a fallen settles the place.
• Pinnacles are broken places that matter: a gate, a wing, a stair of the court. When your faction breaks the hold on one, it opens a fight in heaven, the one fight of the endgame you go to in person: fallen against fallen, in white courts where the angels watch.
• Leagues are fought below. At a league's end one place nearer the House changes hands, and the war comes closer to the door, and never reaches it.

How it plays

The maps are the game's long tail, as in Path of Exile. Today's build already has their core: a new cave from a seed every depth, a portal on, and monsters that grow harder with no floor to it. Maps and the hideout says how that scaling carries into the endgame. The regions of the climb, with their looks and monsters, are what the maps are made of; the Unlit, under the floor where you woke, may be the one region nobody holds.

On the second climb

The contested world is what comes after it: the second climb ends at the gate, and your seat is given back on your banner's ground. See the second climb.

In the game

The endless cave depths are in the build; factions, holds, tiers, pinnacles and leagues are not.

Rumours

• The court has one more stair than the last time anyone counted.
• Somewhere on the board there is a region whose twin above nobody has found.