The Lost Realms is a text adventure whose storyteller is an artificial intelligence. You describe what you want to do in plain language — “pry open the rusted grate and peer down” — and the Game Master narrates what happens, then quietly updates the world behind the scenes: your health, your pack, the hour of the day, a stranger’s opinion of you, a passage newly revealed.

There is no rules sheet to memorize and no menu of buttons to click through. You speak in intentions, and the world answers. Everything in this handbook is here to help you understand what the world is doing with those intentions — never to make you study before you play.

Everything keeps secrets — especially the room

Because the world is authored rather than generated as you go, almost everything in it has more written about it than you are shown. An item has a history. A person has something they have not said. And a room — the place itself, the one thing always in front of you, with its own picture and its own paragraph — is very often hiding the most.

This is the habit worth forming early, because it is the one most players never form: a room is not scenery you pass through. It is a thing to be questioned. You can dive beneath a platform, sit still long enough to hear what a place does when you stop moving, look up at what everyone else walks under, or come back a third time and notice what has not changed. None of that is a command the game lists for you. It is what a curious person would do standing there.

Read the description you are given as evidence, not decoration. A cracked bell named in a room's first sentence is an invitation. Water described as lapping at a shelf is telling you the level moves. A hall that is called unchanging is daring you to check. The prose is where the author left the thread; pulling it is your half of the bargain.

A caution worth having in advance: it is entirely possible to finish a world's whole story — every quest, every room entered, the ending earned — and still leave most of its lore unfound. Completing the tale and exhausting the world are different achievements. The Guide tab will show you the second one, and it is full of spoilers by design; it is there for when you would rather know than keep hunting.

The three roles

There are three ways to relate to the Realms. As a reader of this handbook you are the first, and it is nearly all you will ever need.

• The Player — you. You explore, converse, fight, and solve, issuing intentions and living with their consequences.
• The Dungeon Master — a human author who builds and edits worlds. Optional, and covered in its own guide (see Appendix B).
• The Game Master — the AI that narrates every turn and turns your fiction into game state. Not a person; the engine of the story.

The title screen shows the world’s sigil, its name, and a tagline over a softly looping scene. A Prologue link reads the world’s opening; a small speaker icon unmutes the background (browsers keep it silent until you ask).

What you enter

• Your name — your character’s name (up to 24 letters). Left blank, you become Traveler. The small disk button beside it lists your saved games so you can jump between adventures.
• Class — the built-in world offers seven: Warrior, Rogue, Mage, Ranger, Cleric, Druid, and Alchemist. An imported world brings its own.
• Claude API key — what consults the AI that narrates. It is stored only in this browser, on this device, and sent only to Anthropic. Get one at console.anthropic.com. On some realms this field is simply absent — the key is held for you, and there is nothing to paste.
• Model — a dropdown beneath the key choosing which Claude narrates: Claude Sonnet 5 (fast and economical, the default), Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Opus 5, or Claude Opus 4.8 (deeper, more deliberate storytelling). Where a realm holds the key for you, you still choose — from whatever models its keeper allows.

Begin, and never lose your place

Leave Dungeon Master and New Game unchecked for a normal first playthrough, then press Begin Your Journey. When the opening scene appears, type what you want to do and press Enter. That is the whole game; the rest is exploration.

Your entire session — location, inventory, world changes, discovered lore, story history, and the clock — is saved continuously to your browser. Refreshing the page drops you straight back in. Logging out keeps your save so you can Continue later.

The interface is a simple grid: a slim header on top, the story and a sidebar in the middle, a command bar beneath, and a status bar along the bottom.

Header & tabs

The header shows the world’s title (left), your current location (center), and an in-world clock, a time-of-day icon, and the logout button (right). Below it, players see five tabs: Story, Character, Maps, Journal, and Compendium. Three small controls sit at the right end — ☰ to choose which sidebar blocks show, ⚙ for settings, and ▶ to hide or show the whole sidebar.

The story & command bar

The Story tab is a scrolling log of the tale so far; older passages load as you scroll up. Beneath it, the command bar carries a ⟩ prompt reading “What do you do?” — type there and press Enter to take your turn.

Story-panel tools

A small row of icon buttons sits at the story panel’s corner. None of them ever spends a turn:

The sidebar

Seven collapsible blocks give an at-a-glance read of your situation: Character (portrait, name, and HP · MP · XP · WT bars), Wealth, Inventory, Magic, Items (on the floor here), People (present in the room), and Exits. The status bar along the very bottom shows the engine’s state, the moon phase, and the in-world date.

On a credits server — one where turns are metered against an account — the status bar also shows a balance badge: what you have left, marked low under about five turns and out of credits at zero. Hover it for the last turn’s cost; click it to choose a narrator, each priced in credits per turn. A turn that is refused (no credits, signed out, service down) costs you nothing: the reason appears in the story and your command returns to the box so you can retry.

Every turn has the same rhythm: you describe an intention, the Game Master narrates the outcome and applies its consequences, and the world moves on.

Issuing intentions

Write naturally. Attacking, examining, taking, dropping, using, sneaking, persuading, bartering — there are no special command words. The GM reads your sentence, resolves it against the world’s rules and your abilities, and answers in a few vivid sentences.

Clickable links

• Exits appear as clickable links in the scene and the sidebar. Clicking one is exactly like typing go <direction>.
• Names of items and people — in the story, sidebar, Compendium, and on the map — open a detail popup rather than taking a turn, so you can inspect without acting.

Doors & barriers

Not every exit is open air. Some carry a door — or a barrier, a boulder or portcullis wearing the same mechanism under a different name — with a real state: open, closed, or locked. Examine one by name (or just “the door”, if there’s only one in the room) to see its picture, description, and state without spending a turn; a known door also shows as a small icon beside its exit, and clicking it opens the same detail in a popup. A shut or locked door genuinely stops you — whatever the narration implies, the game itself refuses the move and says why — so open it first, or open it and step through in the same breath (“I turn the key and step into the vault” resolves as one turn).

A lock may want a specific key, a magic item, or a spell, or be sealed shut by nothing ordinary at all; some can also be picked, with the Lockpicking skill (Chapter Fourteen). A hidden door is not merely closed — it is not there as far as you can tell, until an NPC tells you, a document says so, or the Game Master decides your searching turned it up.

Creatures you haven’t seen, and creatures you can’t name

Not every living thing in a room announces itself. A creature may be hidden — present, alive, watching you, and mentioned nowhere: not your sidebar, not the room’s text, not the map. A bird gone still in the tall grass, a figure on a rooftop, something in the reeds. You find one the same way you find a hidden door: by doing the specific thing that would find it — search the grass, look up at the rooftops — often behind a skill check, most often Perception. A failed search costs nothing but the try; the creature is still there next time. Meanwhile it is not idle — a hidden creature can watch, follow, flee, or strike, and one that attacks gives itself away by doing it.

A second, independent question is whether you know what a creature is. A wild animal you cannot identify reads as a plain description — a small brown bird — everywhere the game would otherwise name it, exactly as an unidentified magic item reads as a plain brass lantern; learn what it is and the real name takes its place. Two skills answer both questions without a search or a roll at all: Wildlore spots hidden animals and names any animal on sight, and Vigilance (built on Perception) spots anything hiding, animal or not. Caring about wildlife is enough to find the bird in the grass; finding the watcher on the roof takes somebody who has made a study of watching.

Two kinds of slash

Almost anything you type is a story intention — unless it begins with a slash. A slash marks the line out-of-character: handled instantly, with no narration and no time passing.

The Character tab opens on your Profile sheet, with further subtabs for Equipment (Chapter Seven), Spells (Chapter Twelve), Inventory (Chapter Seven), Crafting (Chapter Nine), Skills (Chapter Nine), Progression (Chapter Thirteen), and Statistics — a lifetime tally of your deeds, kept as you play and saved with your journey. The profile gathers who you are, and grows an Ailments section of its own (Chapter Six) the moment you're carrying one, and a Marks section the moment you carry a lasting scar.

• Portrait — upload your own, have the GM paint a fresh one (♻), or enlarge it. You can also just ask in the request bar: “paint my portrait as a disgraced knight.” A Gallery beneath the sheet keeps every portrait you generate; open one full-size and press Use to make it your portrait, or drag a thumbnail straight onto the frame.
• Identity — name, a growing title, level and class, your Fame label, your Alignment, and Gender and Race selectors (fed to the GM so it portrays you correctly). Race defaults to Human and lists whatever peoples the world defines. The Character Creator carries an Age box and a Born date picker, the same pair the sheet shows later, so you can set how old you begin (25 by default) or pick the exact day — type an age and the calendar jumps to the year it implies, keeping whatever month and day were already chosen. From there it reads off that Born date in this world’s own calendar rather than a plain number, so it is never stale — wind the world’s clock forward and you age with it. Only your Dungeon Master can change it from there.
• Abilities — the traits your character has rather than has learned, listed together; any granted by your race carry a Racial badge. Chapter Ten explains what separates them from skills.
• Background — click-to-edit prose, with a ✨ Generate button that asks the GM to write one for you.
• Factions, Magic, Skills, Treasure — compact glances that mirror the fuller views elsewhere in this book.

Marks

Carry a lasting scar and a Marks section appears on this sheet: one row per mark, each with a checkbox. Ticked marks are painted into your portrait and full-body render; unticked ones are left out of the picture, but the Game Master still knows about them, because the scar still happened. Marks are cosmetic only — they never touch your stats. Worn gear can be damaged the same way, and Chapter Seven covers it; a Damaged gear section beside Marks lists each damaged piece with what the damage looks like and whether you are wearing it.

The sheet at a glance, and on paper

Click your portrait in the sidebar and the whole character sheet opens as a dialog over the story, so you can check it without leaving the scene. It has seven tabs: Profile (your full-body render, identity, wealth, vitals, attributes, statuses, ailments, marks and damaged gear), Abilities, Skills, Factions, Inventory, Magic and Treasure.

The Print button at the foot of the dialog lays everything out as one page in a new window and opens your browser’s print dialog, so you can print your character or save it as a PDF. The printed sheet lists every mark, including the ones you have unticked (labelled not painted), because paper is the full record. If nothing opens, allow pop-ups for the site and press Print again.

Four bars track your condition: HP (health), MP (mana), XP (toward the next level), and WT (carry weight). Your six attributes are STR, DEX, INT, WIS, CHA, and CON.

Recovering — rest, sleep & camp

Health and mana don’t come back on their own; you recover them by taking time to rest, sleep, or camp. Just say what you do (“I rest a while,” “I sleep until dawn,” “I make camp”) and time passes. Each restores some of both pools — never a full heal — and the longer you rest, the more you get back, up to each tier’s ceiling.

A short rest is a quick pick-me-up: it knocks fatigue down two stages (an exhausted adventurer comes back to merely tired) and keeps your prepared spells — but it never fully clears fatigue the way sleep does, and you can rest only twice before you must properly sleep or camp to recover further. Sleeping or camping is a full night’s commitment — a solid 8 hours — and you only get the recovery once you see it through; a proper camp restores the most, yet even that never fully heals you (that’s what potions and healers are for). When you bed down, a pleasing notice shows the hours passing on a little clock. Camping needs open sky: indoors, a “camp” becomes an ordinary sleep. And one catch for spellcasters — sleeping or camping empties your prepared spell loadout (your mind clears overnight), so you’ll re-memorize your spells afterward, which itself takes time. A light rest leaves the loadout untouched. (A sound sleep can be disturbed by a random encounter — coming soon.)

Fatigue — the cost of skipping sleep

Downtime isn’t optional forever. The longer you go without real sleep, the more fatigue drags you down. It appears in your Statuses and dulls your attributes in three stages:

Because these are real attribute penalties, fatigue quietly weakens everything — your attacks, your defenses, your skill checks, even how much you can carry. Recovery clears it too: a rest knocks fatigue down two stages (but never fully, and only twice before you must sleep), while a full sleep or camp resets you completely and refreshes your rests. Bed down before a long trek or a hard fight — an exhausted adventurer is a worse one at everything.

Ailments & diagnosis

Fatigue isn’t the only thing that can drag you down — a world may carry real sicknesses of its own, contracted from a bite, a bad meal, a foul bog. A borne ailment gets its own card in an Ailments section that appears on your Character › Profile sheet the moment you're carrying one: its name, a plain description, and how many days you’ve carried it. What it isn’t is diagnosed by default — a card starts out telling you only what you can feel. A Field Medicine check — once per sickness per day, and against a difficulty that falls the worse the sickness shows — can diagnose it, and once it is, the card fills in “what a healer knows” — the real name of the threat and what it takes to treat it. Lack the skill yourself? Being examined by someone who would plainly know — a physician, a herbalist, a plague-ward’s ledger — is a real scene that places it just as surely.

Spending stat points

You begin with three unspent points to place across your attributes at character creation, and earn one more at every level-up. A stat-allocation dialog opens to spend them — raise whichever attributes you like, and confirm once every point is placed.

Three derived values

• Armor Class (AC) — shown at the foot of the attributes, the number an attacker must beat to hit you: base 10 + your DEX modifier, or the base your equipped body armor sets, plus the bonus of any other worn piece (a coif, helm or shield adds to it and never replaces it) and any AC bonuses.
• Persuasion — a bonus from CHA that increases the reputation you earn with NPCs.
• Fortitude — a bonus from CON that helps you resist poison, disease, exhaustion, and the hazards of the world.

Attributes drift

Acting in character quietly trains your attributes; at a level-up that hidden progress can surface as a permanent trained ±N bonus. Temporary buffs and afflictions show as a status ±N tag and expire against the game clock. Because every check reads your live attribute, a blessing or a curse bends your odds automatically.

The Character › Inventory subtab is your pack laid out: a card for every thing you carry, its picture above its name, and clicking the name opens that item’s details in the corner of the tab. The cards gather under headings by what the thing IS — Spellbooks first, then Weapons, Armor, Consumables, Keys, Treasure and the rest, each with its count. Trophies are never in your pack — the game keeps them in a trove of their own — and this is the one screen that shows the pack and the trove together. Only headings with something beneath them are drawn, and the headings are the world’s own kinds of thing, so a realm that has invented a kind gets a shelf for it. Something of no recognised kind is never dropped: it takes a shelf named after itself, or stands under Other.

Across the top of it runs a Filter box — which matches an item’s name or its kind, so consumables gathers every potion and ration in one go — three readings between them — ITEMS, how many things you hold, pack and trove together and counting stacks, which is not the number beside a section heading (that one counts cards); WT, what the pack weighs against what you can carry, reddening when you go over, and counting the pack alone, since trophies sit in a trove and weigh nothing — a VAL readout beside it giving what the whole lot is worth, pack and trove together, which is why the two disagree about treasure; and an XP reading, present only while something you hold still has hidden lore to give, counting each item once however many you carry, since a story is learned once, and, on the right, a pair of buttons: By Type for the shelved view, By Item to lift the headings off and see everything in one run. The order is the same either way; only the headings come and go, and whichever you choose is remembered for next time. Treasure alone is shelved by worth, the finest piece first, each trophy carrying its price beneath its name so the ranking shows its working, and the heading carrying what the whole hoard comes to — a card prices one of a thing, the heading prices what you have.

Carrying a sword is not the same as holding it. The Equipment subtab of the Character tab is where the gear in your pack becomes gear on your body — and where a good deal of your survival is quietly decided.

The thirteen slots

Your body offers thirteen places to put something: Head, Amulet, Armor, Clothing, Weapon, Sidearm, Shield, Gloves, Belt, Leggings, Bracers, Ring, and Boots. A world’s classes may add their own on top of these — a Mage’s Spellbook slot is the one every realm ships with, and a field spellbook always settles there rather than competing for a hand. A Cleric’s psalter, a Druid’s greenwood token, and a Ranger’s hunter’s knot are the same slot under a different name — each still a spellbook-typed focus, just not a tome.

An item fits exactly the slots it names, and nothing is bent to make it fit. That is what lets a two-handed sword be a weapon and only a weapon, while a dagger declares itself both Weapon and Sidearm — so you may run it as your main arm, or tuck it in the off-hand beside a heavier blade.

There is no separate battle screen. Combat is narrated by the Game Master and resolved through the changes it returns — your HP shifting, a foe falling, a status like bleeding taking hold, experience awarded. Your class and level inform how hard you hit and how much you can take.

A weapon carries a Damage stat of its own — the dice it rolls and the kind of harm it deals — shown on the item much as armour shows its AC, and it is the equipped weapon’s dice that are thrown when your blow lands (Chapter Seven). Where a weapon has that stat the number is no longer a judgement call: the dice are thrown, your strength (or your dexterity, for a light or ranged weapon) is added, any enchantment on top, and a natural 20 to hit doubles the dice. You are shown the whole sum, not just the result. Whether you throw the dice yourself is a setting: Auto Roll Damage is on by default and throws them for you, and turning it off opens the dice bag and asks for your weapon’s damage on every landed hit. The arithmetic is the same either way. A weapon with no damage stat is settled by the Game Master as it always was.

When a fight begins the living world slows around it, so a single exchange isn’t swallowed by the marching clock. A foe’s own abilities, resistances, and temperament shape what it does; a creature may flee, call for aid, or press a wounded advantage.

When a die is asked of you

Some moments hand you the dice. If an action calls for a roll you can make — a saving throw against a trap, a feat of daring — the game surfaces the die and folds your result into the outcome. Saves in particular are always yours to throw, and Chapter Eleven covers them in full. You can also settle anything yourself with the story panel’s Dice bag (D4 through D20); each roll prints as a note in the tale.

A skill is a proficiency — Lockpicking, Herbalism, Swordsmanship — that sharpens through use. The Character › Skills subtab shows a card for each: its icon and name, the governing attribute with your current modifier, its level and tier (Novice → Master), and an experience bar.

Four ways to gain a skill

• Born to it. Every class begins knowing one to three signature skills — a Warrior is born to Swordsmanship, a Rogue to Lockpicking, Sneak, and Surprise Attack, a Mage to Spellcasting. A skill-reliant, lightly-armored class carries more of them; a class that tanks through weapons and armor carries just its one. Which skills a class begins with is part of world design, so your Dungeon Master has the final say and may adjust them for their world.
• Reached by a milestone. Your class may promise you further skills at particular levels, laid out along the path described in Chapter Thirteen. A skill earned this way costs you nothing but the climb: no book to find, no check to pass, and no spent attempt. Reach the level and it is simply yours.
• Read from a book. A book-type item teaches a skill — sometimes several at once — carry it and a Read button appears (or just tell the GM you read it). Grasping a lesson is not guaranteed — it takes an Intellect check: roll d20 + your INT modifier against the skill’s difficulty (a Skill Study card shows the roll). Succeed and the skill unlocks, its knowledge now living on the card. Fail and the book stays in your pack — but you may attempt each skill only once per character level, so a missed skill is closed to you until you level up, when you can try the book again. A thicker primer teaching more than one skill is worked through this way one lesson at a time, the Read button always studying whichever you don’t yet know; it crumbles to dust only once it has nothing left to teach you.
• The hard way. You can learn a skill outside your discipline, but you wield it at a lesser effect — a reduced proficiency, marked off-class on the card. Some skills are closed to your class outright — a rare few root skills such as Spellcasting among them. There the read is refused with “These techniques are closed to your discipline,” and, mercifully, the book is not consumed; keep it for a character who can use it.

How a check is rolled

When you attempt something a learned skill covers, the GM rolls for you: it sets a difficulty and rolls d20 + your ability modifier + skill proficiency against it. One action can trigger several checks at once — picking a lock and staying hidden. The reply prints a compact manifest of every roll, so the dice are honest and legible, and a success earns that skill experience.

Crafting

You can make things now, and take them apart. Crafting (INT) is the only gate — learn it alone and you may attempt to make anything, combining materials you are already carrying (a craft never conjures a material or a finished item from nothing). Behind Crafting sit five more skills that decide how good your work turns out, not whether you may try: Metalwork (STR; metal, glass), Leatherworking (DEX; hide, fur, sinew), Woodworking (DEX; wood, bone, horn, stone), Tailoring (DEX; cloth, thread, cord), and Engraving (DEX; a decorative pass on a finished piece, not a material of its own). Taking something apart works under the same Crafting skill, one attempt per item per day, and only the ordinary materials come back — anything magical about the piece doesn’t survive the breaking down.

A craft is a sitting at a time — about eight hours per turn. Say what you want to make and, if you like, how long you mean to give it: aim higher and the work gets harder and takes longer, and how far up you got is what you end up with, from rough to pristine. If a project isn’t finished when the sitting ends, the half-made thing sits in your pack as an ordinary item — it can’t be equipped or used yet, and its popup shows an Unfinished field. Sleep and pick it back up later, or push straight into another sitting.

Character › Crafting is where all of it lives. Unfinished lists every project still on the bench, with a stage bar and a button to work on it; Methods is your notebook — a thing you make once, you can make again, without the Game Master inventing it fresh, though it still takes a sitting to build. Ask a smith or crafter to repair a worn item and, given the materials and the hours it wants, they can move its condition a rung up the ladder — two on a critical — though nothing gets it past pristine. That is a different fix from mending a torn one, which is cosmetic damage from a fight rather than wear (Chapter Seven).

Every item sits somewhere on a five-rung condition ladder — ruined, worn, average, good, pristine — and good is where anything that says nothing about itself sits, at no penalty. Taking a thing apart yields materials one rung below its own condition, so a good sword gives back only average iron, and a chest has to be emptied before it will come apart at all. Where nobody has worked out what a thing yields, your first successful attempt settles it for good — every later one of its kind comes apart the same way.

Clear no stages of a project and the half-made thing is lost, but the materials are not: they come back to you, one rung worse than they went in. And what you build can be no better than the worst of what went into it — a week’s fine work on scrap iron is a well-made piece of scrap — though a critical roll on the final stage lifts the result one rung above its materials. A thing you crafted yourself is yours to name, in a field on its popup, and that name follows it everywhere from then on; a piece bought off a shelf can’t be renamed, since that would rename every one of its kind.

A skill is something you learned. An ability is something you have. Sharp ears you were born with, a climber’s grip that runs in your blood, the steadiness a warded amulet lends you while you wear it — none of these were studied, and none of them can be studied. They come with your race, or they are granted by a thing: an equipped item, a spell, a potion, a rare plant.

Because inherent gifts express themselves in particular moments, abilities are almost always situational. They read like promises about a circumstance rather than a number on your sheet:

• “+2 to hearing checks” — a whisper through a door, and nothing else.
• “+3 climbing on walls” — the cliff face, not the swordplay at the top of it.
• “advantage persuading merchants” — the haggle, not the zealot.

This is deliberate, and it is the whole point. A blanket “+2 WIS” would sharpen your ears and also every other judgement you ever make, forever. An ability attaches to the check the moment actually calls for and vanishes everywhere else.

Three lanes, kept separate

Your sheet carries three different kinds of thing, and telling them apart makes the rest of this book legible.

So an ability cannot be learned, unlearned, or levelled. Take off the ring and its gift goes with it; a racial trait, by contrast, is yours for the whole of a life.

Where you see them

The Profile sheet gathers your abilities in their own section, with anything inherited from your race marked by a Racial badge. You never have to invoke one, quote one, or remember it at the right moment — the game applies every bonus you are owed, and says so in the roll it shows you.

A skill check measures something you attempt. A saving throw measures whether you withstand what is done to you. A basilisk’s gaze, a gout of dragonfire, a lungful of poison gas, a spell reaching for your mind — each of these calls for a save, and none of them waited for you to try anything.

Unlike a skill check, a save is always yours to roll. A Saving Throw Called For card names what you are resisting and the attribute that governs it, the dice bag opens, and you throw the d20 yourself. From there the arithmetic is the game’s, not the Game Master’s:

That total is graded on the same ladder skill checks use — Critical, Success, Partial, Failure — and printed as a manifest with the whole formula laid bare, so nothing is hidden and nothing is fudged:

d20 12 · WIS 14 (+2) · Warded Mind +2 = 16 vs DC 15

Because the modifier reads your live attribute, a blessing or an affliction bends a save exactly as it bends a check. Fatigue makes you easier to poison without anyone having to remember that it should.

The tomes themselves are objects, and they stand with the rest of your belongings on the Character › Inventory subtab (Chapter Seven), under a Spellbooks heading of their own.

The Character › Spells subtab is your grimoire — spells as cards tagged with their school, level, and MP cost. A scope toggle switches between Known (what you’ve learned) and All (the whole world grimoire, so you can see every spell and where to learn it).

Open a known spell’s card for its action buttons:

• Cast · N MP — spends the mana and applies the effect. Healing, restoration, and self-buffs resolve mechanically; damage and utility magic are narrated by the GM. Disabled when you’re short on mana.
• Forget — lets a spell slip from memory.

Your MP pool is the fuel, regenerating as the world allows. Magical items are a distinct kind, filed under the Compendium’s Magic tab rather than plain Inventory.

Earth Magic — Reagents & Concoctions

Not every working is a spell. The Concoction skill (CON, built on Herbalism, open to any class) compounds ordinary ingredients into a magical draught, salve, dust, or oil through ritual rather than a loadout, and it runs two steps. First, prepare an ingredient you’re carrying into a reagent — a Prepare button on its card, or telling the GM to prepare it. That step is labour rather than a roll: it costs hours and the ingredients themselves. Second, brew a concoction from the reagents you’ve prepared — a Brew button, or asking for several at once — a CON check against the recipe’s difficulty. Failure still costs what you spent: the reagents and the hours are gone either way. Skill pays twice: the hours a working takes shrink as your Concoction skill rises (a first-day worker pays the recipe’s full time, and each level above that takes about a tenth off), and missing the difficulty by only one or two yields a thin batch — half the doses, at the plain grade — rather than nothing. A natural 1 always spoils the working, and a natural 20 always lands it at the best grade.

Two things can stop you before you ever reach for a mortar. Every reagent is worked under a craft skill — Concoction, for everything discovered so far — and without it you cannot prepare that reagent at all, however many ingredients you’re holding. And a rare reagent’s formula may be a secret nobody hands you for free: common ones are simply known, but a secret one wants a teacher — typically a receipt book, which sets the formula down in your compendium the moment you read it, no check and the book never spent. The two refusals name themselves differently on purpose, so you know which one you’re facing: missing the craft sends you to the Skills tab, missing the formula sends you looking for whoever keeps it.

What you get depends on how well you rolled — a Workable, Sound, or Potent result, named right in the item itself. Nothing yet stops a working by place or circumstance, so for now a working can be brewed wherever you have the reagents and the time.

Skills you go out and earn. Abilities you were born with or were handed by a thing you wear. Progression is the third kind of growth, and it is the one your class itself promises you: a path of milestones charted level by level, each one paying out when you reach it. A Warrior’s path is not a Rogue’s, and neither is a Mage’s. The Character › Progression subtab is where you read yours.

It reads as a timeline, top to bottom, earliest level first. Each stop on it is a milestone: a level, sometimes a name, and the rewards waiting there. The left rail tells you where you stand — Achieved for a milestone already behind you, Next for the one you are climbing toward, Later for everything beyond it.

Milestones are sparse on purpose. Most levels have none; a class charted across twenty levels might carry only four to eight in total. They tend to cluster early, while a character is still finding their feet, and spread out afterward, so that each later one is worth the wait. A level with no milestone is not a level wasted — it still brings its hit points, its stat point, and everything you have been earning for yourself along the way.

What a milestone gives you

Every one of them is mechanical. A milestone never pays out in rumor or scenery; that is what the story is for.

Titles — the honorific you wear

The meatier milestones are named — Skirmisher, Vanguard, Scholar, Nightblade — and reaching one earns you that name as a title. A gilt Title Earned banner announces it in the story, and from then on it sits beneath your name in the sidebar and on your Profile sheet, in place of the Adventurer you started as. The most recently earned title is the one you wear.

It is not decoration. The Game Master is told who you are with your title — “a level 4 Warrior (Skirmisher)” — so the world can address you by what you have become. Lighter, unnamed milestones grant no title; they are pure mechanics, and they pass without ceremony.

What you can and cannot see ahead

A milestone you have reached is always shown in full. One still ahead of you is shown only if your Dungeon Master has chosen to reveal it — otherwise the timeline marks its level and says “A milestone yet to be revealed.” You know something is coming; you do not know what. Reaching the level reveals it for good.

If your class has no path charted yet, the tab says so plainly. Progression is world design — your Dungeon Master charts each class’s milestones, and may retune, hide, or reveal them — so a young world may simply not have gotten there yet. As they chart it, the beats you will grow into appear.

Chests, barrels, coffers, a corpse’s satchel — the world is full of containers that hold other things. Their contents stay hidden until the container is opened, whether you ask in the story (“open the chest”) or use the Open button on its detail popup.

Locks & taking things

A container may be locked — by a key you must find, a lock you can pick (with the Lockpicking skill), a hidden button, or a seal that yields only to a puzzle. Once it’s open, take what’s inside by asking (“retrieve the ring from the chest”) or with the Loot buttons on its popup — and put things back the same way. Treasure you take is filed in your admired Treasure trove; everything else lands in your pack.

Every NPC holds a numeric opinion of you, shown as a tier. How much they’ll tell you — small talk, history, motives, secrets — is gated by how far you’ve earned their trust.

Fame — what the realm has heard

Reputation is one person’s opinion and you can see its number. Fame is the other half of being known, and it works the opposite way: it is what the realm at large has heard of you, and you never see the number at all — only a word for it on your Profile.

A new character is Unknown — not a blank in the sheet, but the truth: nobody has heard of you yet. You are told, once, each time the word changes: “Your fame grows — you are now Notable.”

It rises by itself, and you never have to ask. Finishing quest beats raises it, with more for the beat that ends a thread. Treasure raises it — the jewelled, admire-rather-than-use kind that goes to your Treasure trove, and the richer the piece the more it is worth. And simply being wealthy raises it, counted at the highest your purse has ever stood, so spending the money afterwards costs you none of the renown it bought. Your Dungeon Master’s Game Master may also grant it outright for something notable you did.

Factions

The world is threaded with factions — guilds, orders, watches, cults. A person may serve one or several, and so, in time, might you (your memberships show as cards on Character › Factions).

Joining an order & its rank ladder

An order takes you in through conversation, never a menu — you can ask to be taken in, or one of its people can offer you a place, and either way it is earned: expect to have done it real service and to stand well with it before anyone raises the subject. The induction plays as a scene, not an announcement — an oath, a token, a name written into a book. The moment you are sworn in, every rung your standing has already bought is conferred at once, so joining an order that already thinks well of you starts you partway up its ladder rather than at the foot of it. You can also be sworn to an order you cannot yet name — what you swore to was a person — and nothing on screen tells you what you joined until you discover it.

Each order you belong to carries a rank ladder, read the same way as your class’s Progression timeline (Chapter Thirteen): the rungs are levels, and your standing with the order — its regard for you, on the same scale a person’s reputation uses — is the experience that buys them. Climbing a rung grants a skill, an attribute, stat points, or a named boon exactly as a class beat does; what differs is the flavour, which tends to be things an organization holds — its stores opened to you, a writ that carries weight, people bound to answer. What it teaches lands on your sheet for good; what it lends stops the moment your standing falls below the rank — you keep the skill, the attribute, the points, but the privileges stop until you climb back. Some rungs are marked Awaiting (held back until a particular story beat) or Trial (the order asks something of you beyond the number, found out from its own people rather than written on the card) — either way, that rung and everything above it wait until the condition is met.

The realm runs on its own accelerated clock: roughly one real-world hour equals one in-world day. It keeps ticking while you read and type — unless you stop it (below). A new game begins at 09:00 on the 1st of Frostmark, Year 437.

When the period changes, NPCs move to wherever their routine puts them, and if a room truly reads differently at the new hour the scene is reprinted — its title tagged like “Market Row : Afternoon,” with fresh banner art where the world provides it. Otherwise you simply see a quiet note: “◈ It is now afternoon.”

Holding the realm still

A clock that never stops is the point of a living world, and occasionally it is the problem: you want to read back over a long passage, plan a route across the map, study the Compendium, or leave the desk for ten minutes — and none of that is a reason for the world to move on without you.

The ⏸ Pause Story button in the story panel’s corner holds everything. Not the narration alone: the clock itself stops, and with it everything the clock drives — the hour does not turn, nobody walks their routine, no ambience fires, nothing wanders in, nothing ages, restocks, heals or comes back from the dead. The realm is exactly as you left it when you return to it.

Your next action starts it again, by itself. Move, rest, speak to someone, take something — anything you actually do — and the world picks up at the precise instant it was held. There is no jump and nothing happens in the gap. You can also just press the button again. What does not restart it is asking the app a question: a / question to the Field Guide leaves the pause exactly where it is, because that is you talking to the app rather than acting in the world.

Your growing record of the world, in eleven subtabs: People, Places, Items, Monsters, Flora, Fauna, Races, Magic, Lore, Factions, and History. Ten of them fill in through play — entering a room records the place, everyone present, and the notable items underfoot, each filed by its kind; a Race card is added the first time you encounter one of the world’s peoples.

A creature’s entry states its size whenever the world has decided one — tiny through gargantuan, with medium being your own scale. It is worth reading before you plan around a thing: it settles what you could carry off in a pack (Chapter Fourteen), what could follow you through a gap, and how badly a shove would go. A creature with no size stated is not average — it is one nobody has measured, and the Game Master judges it from what it is.

The Journal keeps your timelines. Quests is a chronological record of the story beats you’ve unlocked, each stamped with its in-world date. Factions is a matching timeline of the orders you’ve come to know. Tasks tracks the jobs you take on as cards — each showing its giver, what is asked, and its milestones, with a state badge (Accepted → Started → Completed) and the XP it pays out once complete. A toolbar filters, collapses, and imports or exports them. This is also where an order’s duties land (Chapter Fifteen) — each arrives as a task like any other, its milestones written fresh for that occasion, paying the order’s standing alongside the XP. Say yes when someone in a scene asks you for something and it lands on this tab by the end of that same turn — with whatever the world needs for it (the beast to hunt, the letter to carry) authored in the same breath. You may carry five such errands at once; tasks are entirely optional, and a character who cares only for the grand story can finish the game having taken none. The boxes beside a task’s milestones are not yours to tick — they are an indicator, not a control, and fill only when the Game Master judges the step is genuinely done in the fiction. There is no override: a step that stays open owes you the reason in the scene, not a click.

Legends is where a thread goes once it ends. Each resolved arc is chronicled as one dated entry, told in the world’s own voice — as a bard or a chronicler would tell it, not as a tally — carrying the outcome you reached, the renown it earned you, and chips for the spoils it won. Click a spoil and the item or place it names opens. It is the one place your Fame, otherwise a quiet label, is finally written down.

Languages is a card per tongue you know so much as a letter or a word of — not only the ones you set out to study. Each shows the alphabet you’ve learned, drawn letter by letter, and a count of the words you know under it; open a letter for the filtered list of words behind it. It is the one screen that answers what do I actually know of a tongue — a script or a word list is learned from a book or scroll written for the purpose, no roll involved, and a card for a tongue can appear before you ever set out to study it. A rare few carry a whole grammar instead, and teach the tongue outright: such a card shows a gold Fluent chip rather than a tally. Some worlds write a second card for what looks like the same tongue — a neighbouring valley’s dialect of a capital’s language, sharing its alphabet and most of its words. Knowing one is a running start on the other: a page in it reads clean wherever the two agree and trips you only on the handful of words the dialect says its own way. Gallery keeps your victory banners and sleep pictures in one running record, newest first, each capped on its own so a quiet week can’t crowd out a hard-won fight.

The Maps tab draws a node-graph of the places you’ve visited — a World overview, a Region view showing the map of the area you’re currently in, plus a subtab for each interior you’ve entered. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, and use + / − / ⟳ to zoom or reset. Every connection is drawn as a line between rooms, labelled with the direction that joins them.

Click a room name to open the same room popup you see elsewhere; the item and being icons along a node’s edge open their own detail popups. Only places you’ve been are drawn — the graph grows with you.

The ⚙ button opens Settings, where you tune the app to taste.

• Appearance — a Dark / Light theme for the whole app (the classic parchment-on-black, or ink-on-parchment).
• Logout after inactivity — optional, with a minutes stepper; a timeout returns you to the title screen but keeps your save.
• Show dice-roll video — when on, rolling from the Dice bag plays a short clip of that die tumbling.
• Auto-roll skill checks — on by default, letting the Game Master throw your skill checks. Turn it off and it asks you to roll them instead (Chapter Nine).
• Include Art Style in Portraits — on by default. Your world’s Art Style is painted into your portrait the way it is into every other image. Turn it off when that style describes a medium written for scenery — an etching, ink washes, heavy impasto — and the portrait comes back a portrait rather than a picture of a painting.
• Include Scenery in Portraits — off by default. Turn it on and a redrawn portrait sets you against the place you are standing in, under the sky overhead — a snowbound square behind your shoulders. Off, the backdrop stays plain, so the same character comes back looking the same however often you redraw them.
• Auto Roll Damage — on by default, throwing your weapon’s damage dice for you. Turn it off and they are handed to you on every hit that lands (Chapter Eight).
• Voice input silence window — how long dictation waits after you stop speaking before it sends.
• Art providers — pickers for the services that generate images and sound: an Image AI for portraits and banners, an Icon AI for the small inventory glyphs, and a Gallery AI for portrait variations, each with its own model choice.

Two more controls sit on the tab bar: ☰ chooses which sidebar blocks show, and ▶ collapses the sidebar entirely. Every block can be folded on its own, and all of it persists.

When your tale is worth keeping, the story panel’s 📖 Make a Book button binds it into an illustrated PDF through your browser’s Save as PDF. Two bindings are offered:

• Transcript — the narration reproduced verbatim, a chapter per scene.
• Story — the Game Master retells your adventure as chapter-based prose that reads like a novel.

Both close with an illustrated appendix of the people, beasts, and relics you met along the way — a keepsake of one journey through the Realms.

The rest of the Realms waits only for you to speak your intent.

Reputation tiers

Skill-check difficulty

total = d20 + ability modifier + skill proficiency. Critical at DC + 10 or a natural 20; a natural 1 always fails; no learned skill keeps a flat 5% chance.

Saving throws

total = d20 + governing-stat modifier + any saving-throw ability bonuses that apply. Graded on the same ladder as skill checks. Always yours to roll; the Game Master decides if and how hard, the engine decides how it lands.

Class progression

Milestones are sparse — roughly four to eight across twenty levels, clustered early. Each grants a class skill, an open skill, an attribute bump, extra stat points, or a mechanical boon; a named milestone also grants the honorific you wear. Paid out once, at the level charted. Unreached milestones are hidden unless the DM reveals them.

Equipment slots

Head · Amulet · Armor · Clothing · Weapon · Sidearm · Shield · Gloves · Belt · Leggings · Bracers · Ring · Boots — plus any a class adds (a Mage’s Spellbook). Equipped armor sets your AC base; the equipped weapon supplies your damage dice.

The day’s six periods

Coin

1 gold = 10 silver = 100 copper. Some worlds mint currency of their own on top of that — gems, chits, favors, whatever the DM has defined — and a being only takes what it’s set up to accept. Offer the wrong kind and you’re refused and told why; sell to a being that deals in its own currency and it pays you back in kind, not necessarily coin.

The two kinds of slash

Two “masters” stand behind every game, and this handbook keeps them strictly apart.

• The Game Master (GM) is the AI — Claude — that narrates each turn and turns your fiction into game state. It is not a person; it is the engine of the story, and it is what your intentions speak to.
• The Dungeon Master (DM) is a human author who builds and edits worlds — their rooms, beings, items, quests, and lore — and can forge whole new realms. Becoming one is as simple as checking a box on the title screen; there is no password.

Authoring is a craft of its own, with its own tools and its own guide. If you want to shape worlds rather than wander them, the in-app Field Guide (/guide) carries the full Dungeon Master and Game Master reference. This handbook is for the road, not the workshop.

The Lost Realms · Player’s Handbook · First Edition. An accompaniment to the in-game Field Guide; screenshots and cover art are placeholders where marked.

Copyright © 2026 Brave You Worlds, LLC. All rights reserved. This book is Game Content, not software: it is licensed under LICENSE-CONTENT, and unlike the engine it has no Change Date and does not become open source on any future date. Reading it, printing a copy for yourself, and using it in personal or non-commercial community play are free under that licence, permanently. Selling it, redistributing it, or using it in anything you take revenue from needs a separate licence — licensing@braveyouworlds.com.