The Game

Welcome

You are about to take the throne of a city that should not have survived. The waters came, the empires drowned, and the old order is gone. Out of that ruin, your city still stands — battered, isolated, and yours to command. The Flood itself is a year and more behind you now; your task is not to survive it but to rule what it left.

This game is played by letter, about one turn a week. Each week you write to the Game Master describing what your ruler intends to do; the Game Master gathers every player's letter, weaves them together, and sends back what happened — together with a world newspaper, the Edö Messenger, carrying the news, rumours and lies of the age. Then you do it again. Out of this, week by week, a whole history is written, and you are one of its authors.

1. The Shape of the Game

Every game runs on a fresh, newly-named world. The Game Master opens a new world for each game and gives it its own name; from that point on, that world develops entirely on its own, shaped by the players who live in it. No two games share a history.

Every player begins the same way, on the same day: the first day of the first month of Year 1 — a little over a year after the Great Flood, once the waters have fallen and the worst of the chaos is past. In the disaster region where the game begins, every old realm has collapsed. What remains are scattered survivors — and you rule one of them.

What is the same for every player

Whatever else you choose to be, four things are fixed at the start. They are deliberately equal, so that no player begins with an unfair advantage and every story starts from the same low, hopeful base.

• A city that survived the Flood, standing in a region where all the surrounding realms have collapsed.
• A small population — the souls who made it through and now look to you.
• A small treasury — what is left of your city's wealth.
• A clean slate. The world around you is open, fragmented, and waiting to be reshaped.

What is yours to decide

Everything else about your city is for you to invent. You are encouraged to describe, in as much or as little detail as you like:

• Your ruler — their name, character, age, ambitions and flaws.
• Your history — where your people came from and how your city came to be.
• Your culture — customs, language flavour, values, the feel of your streets.
• Your religion — what your people believe, or whether they believe at all.
• Your government — monarchy, oligarchy, council, theocracy, merchant republic, or something stranger.
• Any speciality — a famous trade, a secret, a relic, a peculiar law, a feared regiment, anything that makes your city itself and no other.

Tip: when you are ready to invent your realm, the Realm Creation Helper will walk you through every question and compile a tidy description to send to your Game Master.

Where you start on the map

You do not choose your spot on the map; the Game Master places you. Where you begin is decided from the description you give of your state — a sea-trading city is set on a coast, a horse-people's realm on the open steppe, a mountain fastness in the high rock. The more you tell the Game Master about who you are, the more fitting your place in the world will be. Describe yourself well and the world will make room for you accordingly.

2. How a Turn Works

The game moves in turns, roughly one a week. A turn closes once everyone's letters are in, so the pace can quicken in dramatic stretches and ease over holidays. One turn is one week — and a week passes in the world for each turn you play, so the game's calendar and your own run side by side.

Your part: the weekly letter

Once a week, before the deadline, you send the Game Master a letter — your turn. In it you describe what your ruler intends to do: orders, plans, building works, diplomacy, trade, war, schemes, festivals, journeys, whatever you wish. You may write a terse list of instructions or a page of vivid narrative; both are welcome.

Write as your ruler would think. You command your own realm — you do not command the world, the weather, or your neighbours, and you cannot simply declare that you have won. State your intentions; the resolution decides the outcome.

What you know, and what you don't

You only ever learn what your ruler could plausibly know. News from far away arrives late, distorted, or not at all. The public newspaper carries rumour alongside fact. Spies lie. A neighbour's secret scheme is secret from you until it isn't. Part of the game is acting wisely on incomplete information — just as a real ruler must.

The Game Master's part: resolution

After the deadline, the Game Master gathers every player's letter, adds the events of the wider world — weather, rumours, the doings of realms no player controls, the occasional turn of fortune — and resolves the whole week at once. An AI assistant helps with the heavy lifting, but the Game Master is always the final authority: the AI proposes, the Game Master decides. Nothing reaches you until a human has reviewed and approved it.

What comes back to you

After each turn is resolved you receive two things:

• Your private turn result — a letter describing how your orders played out: what succeeded, what failed, what you learned, what others' actions did to you, and what new situations now face your city.
• The world newspaper — a public account of the visible events of the age, written in the voice of an in-world press, full of report, rumour and bias. Everyone receives the same newspaper. Reading between its lines is a skill worth cultivating.

Often a new or updated map arrives too, showing how the world has changed — a shifted border, a fallen city, a new port, a plain reclaimed from the flood.

3. Writing a Good Turn

There is no required format. Still, a few habits make your turns more effective and more fun to resolve — which usually means better outcomes for you.

• Be clear about priorities. If you want three things this week, say which matters most. Resolution follows your intent.
• Play to your strengths and your character. A merchant city schemes with money; a warrior people with steel. Acting in character reads truer and resolves better.
• Give reasons, not just orders. "Fortify the harbour, because I fear Droni's raiders" tells the Game Master how to handle the unexpected on your behalf.
• Mind the world's limits. No gunpowder, no firearms; magic is rare, dangerous and widely outlawed. A plan that ignores this will not survive resolution.
• Leave room for surprise. The best turns set things in motion and let the world answer. You are co-writing a story, not solving a puzzle.
• Stay within reach. Your ruler acts through real people, real resources and real time. Grand ambitions are welcome; instant miracles are not.

4. The World You Have Inherited

The deep past: the Age of Wonders

Long ago the world held two kinds of power. The small energy — a natural force present in all living things, sensed not by reason but by feeling — and the wonder-energy, a far greater power driven by the legendary Wonders of the world: ancient, mighty things whose nature is now wholly lost. In those days magic flowed freely, and great civilisations rose around it.

Then the Wonders vanished, all at once, for reasons no one ever learned. The great tide of magic ebbed. Since that day, raw magic survives only as Magic Winds and Tides, shifting and unreliable, and a magician needs a rare crystal — a catalyst worn on the body — to work even modest spells. Such crystals are scarce, and wear away with use.

The Age of Mysticism: the rule of the mages

With the Wonders gone but their crystals scattered through the world, the working of magic spread. Schools and academies rose; a whole caste of magicians came to rule. For a time the world belonged to them. But magic is perilous — it binds the mind of the worker to the forces they touch — and the mages split into bitter camps: those who urged restraint and harmony, and those who sought absolute power, dreaming of bending the world to pure will and even of conquering death itself.

The Dark Years: the Mage Wars

The quarrel became a century of war. The mage-kings dragged the whole world into ruin; cities died; whole regions were left poisoned and deserted, scarred by uncontrolled magic. The old order of magic broke and never recovered. In the same long darkness the Elves — an ancient, very long-lived people — began to dwindle and withdraw from the world, a fading that continues to this day.

Adjagard: the empire of the One God

The Dark Years ended not with a battle but with a dream. The One God revealed himself to ten thousand humans at once, all dreaming the same image: a gushing geyser on a vast plain. There the dreamers gathered and built a city — Adjagard — and the wars ended. From it grew a great, loose empire that bound much of the world together for more than a thousand years under elected Emperors on the Geyser Throne. Adjagard taught that magic is God's business, not man's — that humanity's task is to understand the world God made, not to remake it. Universities flourished; an age of learning began. For a long age, the world had a centre.

The Great Flood: where your game begins

Then it ended. A volcano erupted at the church's holiest monastery; the sacred geyser of Adjagard dried; and water burst upward across the whole world as if the seas were being pressed from beneath. Coastlines drowned. Salt poisoned vast lands; elsewhere, new country rose from the waters. The city of Adjagard sank without trace. The empire collapsed. This is the Great Flood — and the world it left, a little over a year on, is where every game of The Flood Chronicles opens. The map is broken and open. Into this shattered, hopeful, dangerous dawn you arrive — not to live through the disaster, but to rule what it left.

5. The Peoples and the Powers

These are the kinds of peoples, forces and institutions that exist in a world like yours. Treat them as the palette, not the painting: your world will have its own versions, under its own names, behaving in its own way.

The peoples

• Humans — the most numerous and various people, builders of cities and empires, keepers of most of the world's faiths and trades. Your ruler and most of your subjects are almost certainly human — though they need not be.
• Elves — an ancient, extremely long-lived people, now fading and few. Their society is built around great age and inherited role; as their lifespans fall, that society is dying. Much of the old wisdom about magic and the soul descends from them.
• Dwarves — not jolly warriors but a displaced civilisation of engineers, scientists and naturalists, dwelling deep underground. They believe in natural law rather than gods, build works of impossible precision, and keep their knowledge to themselves. In the broken post-Flood world their neutrality and skill make them quietly powerful — as engineers, as keepers of a far-reaching communication network, and increasingly as bankers whose notes are trusted everywhere precisely because they belong to no one's side.
• Orcs — "predators plagued by intelligence" — not mindless monsters but a complex people torn between fierce instinct and high social order. They dream of a lost unity and await a leader to restore it. In some lands they are persecuted as foreigners; in cosmopolitan cities they hold high office. Their realms can be as disciplined as any human state.
• Naineshi — water-breathing people of the oceans — sinewy, long-fingered, speaking in colour and in clicks and hisses. They build cities in coastal bays, farm and hunt the sea, and largely ignore the affairs of the land. They have grown stronger since the Flood.
• Dragons — once rulers of the sky, now mostly gone or sleeping. A few hoards remain; in one mountain land a dog-witted breed is tamed for war and guard. True intelligent dragons are rare and legendary. Strangely, dragons have begun appearing more often of late, and no one knows why.

The powers and institutions

A world like this tends to grow certain kinds of institution out of its ruins. Yours may echo any of these, or none:

• A dominant faith — a great church or rival churches, claiming to explain the Flood, often hostile to magic and to foreign peoples.
• A banking and credit network — a neutral, trusted system that lets value move across a fragmented world; the glue of post-Flood trade.
• A news guild or press — travelling journalists and reading-rooms that carry word across the world, watched warily by every ruler.
• Mystic schools — the scattered, hunted remnants of the old magical orders, surviving in secret where magic is outlawed.
• Fighting orders and guilds — martial brotherhoods, mercenary companies, sworn guards, each with its own code and craft.
• Successor states — the kingdoms, city-states, oligarchies and merchant republics that rise from the wreck of empire. Your city is one such survivor. So are your neighbours.

6. The Rules of the World

These are the deep constraints that keep every game recognisable. They are not optional flavour; they define what is possible. Plans that break them will not survive resolution.

Magic is rare, dangerous and feared

Since the Wonders vanished, magic is hard, unreliable and perilous. It needs a rare crystal catalyst to work at all, and it binds the worker dangerously to the forces they touch. In most of the world it is outlawed and its practitioners hunted. Magic exists — but it is never common, never safe, and never a casual tool.

Technology is pre-modern — and there is no gunpowder

The world stands at roughly a late-medieval to early-renaissance level, with pockets of surprising advancement (the Dwarves especially). But there is no gunpowder and there are no firearms. No cannon, no guns, no explosives. War is fought with steel, muscle, siege engines, ships and cunning.

The world is broken and decentralised

The unifying empire is gone. There is no central authority, no single law, no common coin. Power is local and contested; trust is scarce; distance is dangerous. This is precisely why your isolated city has room to grow into something — and precisely why your neighbours are a problem.

Distance, travel and the map

Your game is played in the Western Reaches — a region roughly four hundred miles by four hundred that took the brunt of the Flood, walled off to the east by the Great Accursed Mountains and opening, far beyond them, onto a wider continent the charts have not yet reached. Your nearest neighbour sits at least sixty-five miles off, and the ground between is not empty — minor settlements, marsh, ruin and contested country lie in the gaps, so you cannot strike at or court a neighbour without crossing them first.

Travel is slow and weather-bound. A rider manages about thirty miles a day on broken roads; a relay courier more, but only if you have built and paid for relay posts; a ship more again when the wind is kind and nothing when it is not. So a neighbour sixty-five miles away is about two days' ride: a letter and its reply fit inside a single week — which is one reason a turn is a week. Mud, rain or storm can halve every one of these speeds. The full travel table is in your Map & Travel reference; plan as a real ruler would.

Time and the calendar

The year has 365 days, divided into three months each of spring, summer, autumn and winter, with regional variation. The game opens on the first day of the first month of Year 1 — the new reckoning the survivors keep since the Waters — and the calendar advances as the turns do. Each turn is one week, and one week of world-time passes with it.

7. Quick Reference

The waters have gone down. Your city still stands.
Now write your first letter.