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 Warrior, Rogue, Mage, and Ranger. 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), 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.

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.

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), Spellbook (Chapter Twelve), 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.

• 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.
• 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.

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.

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 armor sets, plus 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.

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 eleven 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.

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; carry it and a Read button appears (or just tell the GM you read it). Grasping the 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 and the book crumbles to dust, 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.
• 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.

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 Character › Spellbook 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.

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.

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 shields on your sheet).

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. 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.”

Your growing record of the world, in ten subtabs: People, Places, Items, Monsters, Flora, Fauna, Races, Magic, Lore, and Factions. Entries 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.

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.

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. (A fifth subtab, Professions, waits on a system still to come.)

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.

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.