City4 districts
Stonereach
The last lamp-lit city, carved into a vaulted cavern of cold stone.
Safe ground
Caves &
Lizards
The sun is dead. The arena is law.
When the sun died, the world went underground. In the endless dark beneath the broken crust, the old reptilian kin woke from their stone sleep and reclaimed the deep — drakes, basilisks, and the cold scaled folk who never needed light to see. You wake in Stonereach, last of the lamp-lit cities, where survival is measured in scars and the only law is the arena.
Enter the Caves
Free. In the browser. No downloads — only the descent.
Begin the descent
A World Without a Sky
Twelve charted places hang in the dark beneath the broken crust — a handful of lamps, and everything that hunts between them. The map is not a promise. It is a warning with names on it.
4Lamp-lit cities
6Hunting caves
2Open wilds
City4 districts
Emberhold
A forge-city built around rivers of slow magma deep in the rock.
Safe ground
City4 districts
Mistfen
A pale city of stilts above a vast underground marsh.
Safe ground
City4 districts
Graven Bastion
A fortress-city guarding the road into the deepest dark.
Safe ground
Cave3 chambers
Blackscale Hollows
Shallow starter caverns crawling with small reptiles.
Shallow
Cave3 chambers
The Cinder Vents
Scalding volcanic tunnels home to salamanders and fire-drakes.
Hot
Cave3 chambers
The Drowned Warren
Flooded tunnels beneath the fen where things swim in the dark.
Wet
Cave3 chambers
The Sunken Gallery
Drowned ruins of an elder reptilian civilization.
Holy ground
Wild2 chambers
The Glasswastes
A vast open cavern floored with razor volcanic glass.
Open dark
Wild2 chambers
The Spore Jungle
A towering fungal wilderness lit by glowing spores.
Don't breathe
Cave3 chambers
The Serpent's Throat
A vertical chasm spiralling down toward the ancient deep.
Roped teams only
Cave3 chambers
The Undermaw
The deepest known cavern, where an ancient horror sleeps.
It is still breathing
The Lore Book
Ten illustrated entries, collected in the dark and paid for in blood. Three are given freely at the gate. The rest must be earned — some pages open by setting foot somewhere, others only when a certain thing lies dead.
Entry I of X · History
The Sundering
There was a sun once. The oldest songs still hold the shape of it — a warmth on the upper world, fields of green, a sky.
Read the full leaf
Then came the Sundering, when the deep stirred and the crust of the world cracked from below, and the sky filled with ash and went black and stayed black, and the green things died, and the survivors followed the last warmth downward into the caves.
The scholars of Graven Bastion teach that the Sundering was no accident of stone but the waking-roll of something vast asleep at the world's root — that the cataclysm was simply the turning-over of a sleeping god. Whether that is history or terror dressed as history, none can say. But every city of the deep dates its founding from the year the sky died, and counts the long dark age since in the worn grooves of its lamp-lit stairs.
Unlocked — known from the first lamp.
Entry II of X · Factions
The Lamp-Faith
In Stonereach and the lamp-lit cities there is one shared creed beneath all others: that light is life, and the keeping of the flame is sacred. The Lamp-Faith is less a religion than a discipline — a vast, patient labour of oil-rendering, wick-trimming, and shift-watching that keeps the cities glowing and the scaled dark at bay.
Read the full leaf
Its lamp-wrights are a respected caste, half-priest and half-engineer, and its single commandment is never let the dark in. A gladiator may believe in any god or none, but every gladiator tends a lamp, for in the deep world atheism is a luxury the dark does not allow. To let a lamp die through carelessness is among the gravest of civic crimes.
Unlocked — known from the first lamp.
Entry III of X · Law
The Blood-Debt and the Arena
In a world with no surface to flee to and no coin worth more than survival, the cities settle their reckonings in the arena. The Blood-Debt is the deep world's oldest law: a debt of grievance, of money, or of honour may be discharged before a roaring crowd, blade in hand, and the sand does not lie.
Read the full leaf
This is why every city has its Pit, and why a branded gladiator holds a strange double station — both the lowest of debtors and a figure of awe. To fight well is to buy freedom, name, and a future; to fight poorly is to pay the debt in the only currency the deep never runs short of. The crowds come for the spectacle, but they stay for the truth of it, for in the arena there is no dark to hide a coward.
Unlocked — known from the first lamp.
Entry IV of X · History
The Elder Kin
Long before humankind crept down into the caves, the deep belonged to the Elder Kin — a reptilian people who built the colonnades now drowned in the Sunken Gallery and carved their serpent-faces into a hundred forgotten halls. They were no beasts but a civilization, with arts now lost, and the relic guardians that still patrol their ruins are the last obedient echo of their will.
Read the full leaf
What became of them, none can say. Some scholars hold they died in the Sundering they may have caused; others whisper they did not die at all but went deeper, down past the Throat and the Undermaw, to wait. The scaled folk of the caves — the spore stalkers, the gallery serpents — may be their fallen, feral descendants, or merely the beasts that inherited their ruins. The question troubles Graven Bastion's scholars more than they admit.
Sealed — unlocks when you set foot in The Sunken Gallery.
Entry V of X · The World
The Deep Fire
Beneath the mid-caves run the slow rivers of the Deep Fire — channels of molten rock that thread the lower world and give Emberhold its forges, its light, and its strange heat-loving kin. Where the cold dark elsewhere kills, here it is the heat that draws the line of survival, and the salamanders and drakes of the Cinder Vents thrive in temperatures that would render a man to fat and ash.
Read the full leaf
The smiths of Emberhold hold that the Deep Fire is the world's last living warmth, the same heat that the surface lost when the sun died, simply driven downward. They temper their finest steel in it and regard the flow with something close to reverence — a slow red god they feed with ore and from which they ask, in return, the only fire the deep world has left.
Sealed — unlocks when you set foot in The Cinder Vents.
Entry VI of X · The World
The Glow and the Spore
Not all light in the deep is honest lamp-fire. In the wet mid-caves a colder light grows — the bioluminescent glow of fungus, glow-worm, and spore that lets the lightless ecosystems of the fen and the jungle teem with life.
Read the full leaf
Mistfen farms it; the Spore Jungle is built of it; and where it grows, the deep world is at its most alive and its most treacherous.
For the glow lies. It draws the eye and the moth-brained alike, and many of the deep's deadliest hunters wear it as a lure or a camouflage — the gulper's dangling light, the myconid skink's glowing crust, the spore stalker melting into the canopy. Veterans of the wet caves learn a hard creed: trust the lamp you carry, never the light you find.
Sealed — unlocks when you set foot in The Spore Jungle.
Entry VII of X · Factions
The Watch of Graven Bastion
Where the other cities live, Graven Bastion merely holds. It was raised at the only pass into the truly deep places, and its sworn Watch exists for one purpose: to keep what crawls up out of the Undermaw from reaching the lamp-lit cities behind them.
Read the full leaf
They have failed, at times, and the scars on the Bastion's walls are the proof of every failure paid for in blood.
The Watch are a grim, close brotherhood, and they take in the boldest and most broken gladiators — those with nothing left to lose and a death-wish pointed in a useful direction. To earn the Bastion's black brand is to be told, plainly, that you are expected to die holding the line, and to find that the telling is a kind of honour. The deep world's scholars shelter behind that line, and most never thank the ones who hold it.
Sealed — unlocks when you set foot in Graven Bastion.
Entry VIII of X · Bestiary Myth
On the Basilisk Gaze
The old fireside tales say a basilisk turns men to stone. The truth the gladiators learn is grimmer and stranger: the basilisk's gaze does not petrify the flesh but the will.
Read the full leaf
To meet a fen basilisk's flat yellow eyes is to feel a flood of ancient dread lock your muscles stiff, your breath caught, your blade frozen halfway — for the heartbeats the creature needs to close the distance and coil.
The survivors pass down the only defence: never meet the eyes. Fight half-turned, by reflection in still water, by sound and instinct. A gladiator who masters the basilisk gaze learns something about fear itself — that it is a kind of stone we carry inside us, and that the deep is full of things that know exactly how to wake it.
Sealed — this leaf opens only when a Fen Basilisk lies dead.
Entry IX of X · Bestiary Myth
The Drake-Lords of the Deep
The drakes are the aristocracy of the deep's predators — wingless dragon-kin, solitary and territorial, each ruling a stretch of cave as a lord rules a hold. The cinder drake of the volcanic deeps, the swift glass drake of the wastes, the titan throat wyrm clinging to the chasm walls: each is cunning, patient, and proud, and each regards a hunter not as prey but as a rival to be punished.
Read the full leaf
Gladiators measure their careers in drakes. To wear drake-plate is to wear a killing earned, and the smiths of Emberhold can read a fighter's whole history in the scales of their armour. The old hunters say a drake never truly forgets the one who wounded it — and that the deep is patient, and the drakes are part of the deep.
Sealed — this leaf opens only when a Cinder Drake lies dead.
Entry X of X · Bestiary Myth
What Sleeps Below
There is a single sentence written above the lowest gate of Graven Bastion, in a hand worn nearly smooth: it is still breathing. The scholars argue endlessly over the rest of the texts, but on this they agree — that at the very root of the deep, in the lightless cathedral void of the Undermaw, the Elder Wyrm that sundered the world has not died but merely slept, and that its slow breath is the tremor the cities feel on still nights.
Read the full leaf
The boldest doctrine of the Bastion holds that the long age of dark will end only when some gladiator descends to the Undermaw and ends the Wyrm — and the most honest scholars admit they do not know whether such a thing can be killed at all, or whether to wake it fully is simply to finish what the Sundering began. It is the question at the bottom of the world, and every fighter who straps on a blade is, in some small way, walking toward it.
Sealed — this leaf opens only when the Elder Wyrm lies dead.
Kin & Callings
Four peoples came down into the dark, and four ways of fighting kept them alive there. Sixteen combinations — each with its own painted likeness, its own perks, its own way of dying badly.
The Kin — choose your blood
The Calling — choose your way
Every champion is then painted — a portrait made once, for that fighter alone.
Emberborn Marauder
Blood — Emberborn Bred for violence (+3 strength, +1 stamina, -1 agility), adding +1 damage to every weapon strike.
Calling — Marauder A savage all-rounder (+1 strength, +1 agility) with +8% critical-hit chance on every strike.
Class skills
Reckless SwingA wild blow at 1.5× damage that is a guaranteed critical — but you drop your guard and take 30% more damage until your next turn. Three-round cooldown, 10 mana.
BloodlustStrike and drink deep, healing for half the damage you deal. Four-round cooldown, 12 mana.
The Bestiary
Fourteen beasts stand between the gate and the root of the world, each one painted, each one catalogued in scars. The shallows bite. The deep swallows.
Cave Gecko
A skittish, finger-length lizard that nips at ankles in the dark.
Blind Newt
An eyeless amphibian that hunts by the trembling of the stone.
Scale-Rat Swarm
A boiling tide of scaled, rat-sized reptiles that strips flesh in seconds.
Ash Salamander
A heat-loving amphibian that spits clinging, burning resin.
Drowned Skink
A sleek aquatic lizard that drags prey under the black water.
Myconid Skink
A small lizard riddled with glowing fungus that bursts into spores when struck.
Gulper
A vast-jawed eel-like horror that swallows prey whole.
Fen Basilisk
A pale serpent whose gaze can lock muscle into useless stone-stiff dread.
Spore Stalker
A camouflaged lizardfolk hunter that melts into the glowing fungus.
Cinder Drake
A wingless fire-breathing drake that stalks the volcanic deeps.
Gallery Serpent
A great patterned serpent that treats the sunken ruins as holy ground.
Throat Wyrm
A great limbless wyrm that hunts the walls of the descending chasm.
Coil Stalker
A deep-dark ambusher that strikes from the black and crushes in its coils.
The final entry · The sealed page
The Elder Wyrm
Family Drake · Level 14 · Boss
The titanic sleeping dragon whose stirring once sundered the world.
The texts of Graven Bastion warn it may be a thing that can only be wounded, never truly slain. The illustrator did not stay to verify.
“It is still breathing.”
The Arena Law
Turn-based, server-judged, and honest. Every round is a decision; every decision is yours; and the sand does not lie.
The Fighter's Codex
Every fight is an interactive, turn-based duel resolved on the server — you choose one action per round while an enemy AI answers, and the client only animates the blow-by-blow log with live health bars. Stances, a one-time opening tactic, class skills on mana and cooldowns, and mid-fight potions give real agency, and your wounds and spent mana persist after the bell. Defeat in the deep is never free: you crawl back to your lamp at a quarter of your health.
| Aggressive | Hit harder — but take more. Your blows land 35% heavier with +5% accuracy, but everything that finds you bites 25% deeper. |
|---|---|
| Defensive | Weather blows; strike softer. You take only 60% of incoming damage and dodge 6% more, but your own strikes fall to 70% strength. |
| Balanced | No edge, no weakness. Stances can be switched mid-fight as your action for the round. |
The Three Opening Tactics
Press the Attack
Seize the initiative — you strike first, no matter how quick the thing in the dark is.
Study the Foe
Read your enemy before the first blow and see the skill it is hiding — at the price of letting it strike first.
Steady Footing
Enter the fight braced, with +6 armor for the first two rounds.
Each round you choose: strike with your weapon, unleash a class skill (mana cost, rounds of cooldown), brace behind your guard to shrug off over half the incoming damage, shift stance, quaff a healing draught from your bag, or break away and flee — though fleeing a ranked duel costs you rating.
Leveling & Training
Every level won in blood grants 3 free training points, spent at a city's Training Grounds to raise strength, agility or stamina — and once the free points run dry, gold buys more, at a price that climbs with every point. Even defeat teaches: losses pay roughly a quarter of the kill's XP in consolation, and first blood against a new creature pays double.
Equipment
Eight weapons and eight armors, from Bare Fists and Tattered Rags to the Champion's Trident and Gilded Plate. Each tier is gated by level and bought with arena gold at a city Armoury — a level-13 champion swings for up to 40 where a novice scrapes out 5.
Loot & Economy
An 18-item catalog of trophies, relics, gems, reagents and healing consumables across four rarities — Common, Uncommon, Rare and Epic. Drops stay family-true (a salamander will not shed a basilisk eye; matching trophies are weighted 4×), bosses always yield their unique trophies, and city vendors pay 55% of an item's worth in cold coin.
Auction House
A single global auction house, reached from any city, where players list their spoils at a price of their choosing and other gladiators bid gold to claim them. Listings are capped and settled only within city walls — the deep has no market stalls.
Investments
Stake gold in five ventures — Market Stall Shares, an Ember Forge Contract, the Arena Purse Syndicate, a Deep Mining Claim, or the Relic Appraisal Fund — each maturing over real time, from a quick 10 minutes to a nerve-testing 4 hours, with returns and ruin scaling together. Or outfit a caravan on a trade route between two cities you have visited: the longer the road, the richer the return and the likelier the ambush. Stakes are capped at 120 gold per level, so fortunes grow with the fighter.
Clans
Found a clan for 500 gold, raise a banner and a tag, and gather up to 20 fighters. Every member can feed the shared chest with gold and loot, but only the Clan Master withdraws — and the chest itself goes to work, staking pooled clan ventures at double the normal cap with up to 8 running at once, their payouts flowing back to the clan.
World & Travel
Twelve locations — four cities, six caves and two wilds — spread across a connected map with 38 districts and chambers to walk between. Cities are the only safe ground, where the Armoury, Training Grounds and Arena are open; everywhere else you delve, and encounters are level-weighted so the early caves forgive while the deep ones do not.
Bestiary & Lore Book
Fourteen reptilian horrors fill a Monster Book as you meet and slay them, each with its own stats, lore and painted portrait, culminating in the level-14 Elder Wyrm; slay them all and the Beastmaster's purse pays a one-time 1,000 gold. A 10-entry Lore Book of the world's history and factions unlocks alongside it — some pages by setting foot somewhere, others only when a certain thing lies dead.
Arena PvP
Challenge real players in any city arena with Elo rating on the line, and climb a public ranking ladder of every gladiator's rating, wins and losses. Fleeing a ranked duel forfeits half a loss of rating — the crowd remembers — and farming the same victim is refused after three bouts an hour. Unranked sparring against circuit fighters matched to your level pays gold and XP without touching your rating.
Vitality: Health, Mana & Stamina
Health, mana and stamina are persistent — wounds and spent mana follow you out of the pit, and defeat drags you back to your lamp at a quarter of your health. All three regenerate on the minute, roughly 10% health, 12% mana and 20% stamina per tick, while stamina meters the adventuring itself: 8 to travel, 5 to fight, 4 to explore. Push too hard and the deep makes you rest.
Arrival Encounters
The road is not safe. Arriving in a cave or the wilds carries a one-in-five chance that something bursts from the dark and strikes first — an ambush you fight from the back foot. Even quiet roads hold chance happenings: a dead courier's gold, hard lessons from a scarred wayfarer, or a scree slide that scatters your pouch.
The Living Game
No two descents are painted alike. The deep watches you — and it keeps a record.
156Hand-painted artworks — one unbroken style
Sixteen kin-and-calling likenesses — and beyond them, a one-of-a-kind portrait for every champion forged.
Per-champion AI portraits
Describe your champion in a sentence and the game paints them. Every gladiator gets a one-of-a-kind portrait, conjured the moment they are created.
At character creation the player's short portrait concept is composed with their race and class art notes and the shared style prompt, then painted by gpt-image-1 at high quality in the background — the champion is playable immediately. Up to 5 portrait re-rolls per account let you repaint until it feels right.
An illustrated chronicle
Your deeds don't just get logged — they get painted. Rise a level, fell a boss, or triumph in the arena, and a new scene appears in your champion's visual saga.
On milestone deeds the server has gpt-4o-mini distill the champion's recent chronicle into a short caption and one dramatic scene, then gpt-image-1 paints it as a wide 1536x1024 canvas. Each champion's gallery grows up to 40 scenes, and a manual 'illustrate' action lets players paint the current moment on demand.
Sagas written as you play
A saga-scribe of the deep turns your battles, finds and obsessions into mythic prose — chapter by chapter, unique to your champion.
On request, gpt-4o-mini is fed the champion's recent logged deeds, the previous chapter and their declared focus, and returns a titled in-world paragraph of 4-6 sentences. Up to 20 chapters accumulate into a personal legend.
Focus-steered happenings
Declare what drives your champion — and the world answers. Searching any place generates a unique written event bent toward your obsession.
Exploring costs stamina and prompts gpt-4o-mini, cast as a grim second-person narrator, with the champion's declared focus and the authored lore of that exact location; it returns a unique 2-4 sentence happening with small gold and XP rewards, and the search can also turn up a real loot item. Every happening is recorded as a deed that feeds the saga and the painted chronicle.
A hand-painted world
Every monster, cave, city district, relic and loot drop has its own painting — 156 images in one unbroken painterly style.
All art is generated by gpt-image-1 through one shared 'Ashfell Embervein' style prompt — grim dark-fantasy oil painting, ember and torchlight, black basalt and charred bronze: 14 monsters, 12 locations, 38 sub-locations, 10 lore entries, 16 equipment items and 18 loot drops, plus 16 race-and-class portrait previews for character creation, per-player avatars, timeline scenes and web assets. Every image is cached to disk with its prompt recorded in a manifest, so each is painted exactly once.
Even the interface is painted
Coins, stats, scrolls and satchels are AI-painted emblems in the same ember-lit style — no emoji, no stock icons.
A dedicated script paints a cohesive 12-icon UI set (gold, strength, agility, stamina, XP, HP, bag, map, weapon, armor, arena, lore scroll) with gpt-image-1 as carved bronze-and-gold relief emblems, and 5 website art assets come off the same pipeline.
Champions of the Deep
The ten names the crowds are shouting right now. Carved here in gold, held only for as long as they can defend them.
Live from the pit
— champions branded
— clans raised
— monsters slain
The ledger is being rewritten — the heralds are still calling the names. Step onto the sand while they argue.
Reigning champion of the deep
Rank 1 · The Headliner
—
—
Level
—
Rating
—
W / L
Consulting the heralds… Think your name belongs here? Take one of theirs.
The Road Ahead
The dig continues. What is under the hammer, what is being cut, and what still sleeps below the last survey line.
Now
The Season of EmbersUnder the hammer as we speak.
- Live balance tuningEvery change to player power runs through the combat simulator before it ships — same-level delves hold near a 63% win rate, and the Elder Wyrm stays a boss worth fearing.
- Vitality & the roadHealth, mana and stamina now persist and regenerate by the minute, and travel can turn into a road ambush or a chance meeting. Both just shipped — expect tuning.
- Sharper onboardingA cleaner path from the character forge to your first delve, with First Steps guidance that doesn't hold your hand longer than it must.
- Polish, everywhereFaster combat playback, cleaner panels, mobile refinements — a standing war on friction across every view.
Next
The Deep RoadsThe descent continues.
- Seasons of the PitLadder resets with seasonal rewards, and a Hall of Past Champions so no legend is ever fully forgotten.
- Clan warsContested claims over the caves themselves — stake a chamber, defend it, and tax what crawls out of the deep.
- World eventsWhen something old stirs below, everyone feels it: server-wide incursions, bounties, and brief windows of unusual loot.
- TournamentsScheduled brackets in the Pit of Reaching, with unique trophies for those who survive the card.
Later
What Sleeps BelowDeeper than any lamp has reached.
- Below the UndermawA new region for champions of level 15 and beyond — and something at the bottom of it that makes the Elder Wyrm look young.
- Companion beastsHatch, raise and fight beside creatures of the deep. Loyalty is earned in scars.
- The Grand BazaarPlayer stalls, commissioned gear and a deeper crafting economy built on what you drag up from the dark.
- Voice & soundAn ambient soundscape for the underworld — and your saga, narrated.
The road is drawn in charcoal, not carved in stone — shape and order will shift as the game grows.
The bottom has not been found. That is the point.