Grim Guild

Grim Guild puts you in charge of an adventurers’ guild and alehouse in Eldenmarch, inherited from your grandfather Karl. You do not go on adventures yourself: you run the hall, decide which groups take each job and set the terms. The groups choose whether to accept, and their outcomes come back to you in reports.

Run the hall

Each morning, petitioners bring requests to the counter. By day, you post jobs on the board; in the evening, returning groups come through the door, if they return. At night, you serve drinks at the bar. You also spend three errands each week: inspect a job before posting it, ask around about a group, or take the cart’s haul to town while it still has value. Upstairs, you can review the book and the week’s accounts.

Every job goes out on a sheet you write yourself. You set the pay, decide how clearly to describe the danger and choose whether the group may turn back. Groups read the sheet before deciding whether to go. Clear warnings and permission to turn back can build their trust in the hall; leaving out a warning can have consequences when you read the report.

The cost of a job

The fights are never shown. Reports describe what happened, while the names of those who do not return are cut into the wood by the door. Those sent without the danger written down are marked in red. When someone dies, the room can fall quiet for a week, and groups do not sign up in a quiet room.

Petitioners may play down a job’s dangers or keep details back. You can send someone to look first and learn what the job involves and what it will take. The threats include thunderboars, dire wolves, cave bears, wyverns, giant spiders, great worms beneath the fields, goblins, orcs and trolls, as well as a named creature that appears once a year. Precautions have their own costs: cautious groups may turn back early from work they could have completed, while bandits kept away from the hall may go out onto the road.

Keep the books

Karl’s note, held by the brewery, comes due at the end of each season, with the amount increasing each time. If the box cannot cover it, the debt goes on the brewery’s slate and the bar’s takings go to Karl until it is paid. When the box has less than two weeks of upkeep, a silver panel shows what is owed, what the yard could fetch, what can be cut and who might lend money.

The money-changer charges interest. If you miss the payment date, his man comes to the door the next evening; what remains is taken from the bar’s silver each night, and the debt grows every week. Another hall can lend without interest, then ask a favour two or three weeks later. Each hall explains its terms before you borrow, and you can repay the favour in silver instead. Refusing twice damages your hall’s standing, leaving no hall willing to lend to you that year.

You can delegate work when your hands are full. The clerk chooses which papers to post, the watch captain assigns groups to the gate, watch or rounds, the hiring hand recruits newcomers at the bar, and the accounts staff sell goods from the yard. You set the clerk’s rules for failures, including how much must remain in the box and whether unchecked papers or dangerous work can be taken on. Staff are paid weekly. Those who doubt the hall can turn crooked if they receive neither a raise nor a bonus; another hall may hire them, or they may leave after some years.

A year in Eldenmarch

A year runs from spring to winter and ends at the old quarry. It has one of several possible endings, and what lies beneath the quarry differs between towns. The year is then bound into a book bearing your name. Silver in the box is spent at the end of each year, but the hall’s reputation carries forward: a high name brings better applicants and larger jobs, while a low one attracts people with nowhere else to go.

Some weeks bring risks you can choose to take, such as brewing winter ale for a festival that may not happen, storing food against a famine that may not come, or sending someone after a named creature. War, plague and flood arrive in their own time, and you decide what to do afterward. In a long-running town, the keeper grows old; after the twelfth year, the hall passes to someone who once came through its door.

Build a lasting town

A town can contain up to a hundred halls, each starting in its first week and progressing at its own pace. Halls ahead of yours leave traces in the weeks you have not reached: their dead become stones in your churchyard, their troubles become talk at your bar, and goods lost in the fens can reach you with a note identifying their owner. Visiting another hall’s stone lets that hall know you were there. A town can last one year or fifty, and a town at least three years old can be opened as calm, ordinary or harsh.

The town’s survival is the hall’s responsibility. A hall that fails can reopen, but an empty town is finished. In a town that has lasted many years, you can invest in a district’s wall, ditch and keep, as well as guards, stores, outside help and a share in the merchants’ house. Older towns gain stone works and a great town work; from the thirtieth year, a stone work can be raised again to its finest form. Sending a group on the rounds takes it through the most troubled district the hall still serves and slightly eases trouble there that week. Troubles increase as the years pass.

Share a town

You can open a town to Steam friends, to people with its six-character password, or to anyone looking for a town. No address or port is needed. Your game keeps the town, and other players can continue playing while you are away. Each player keeps their own hall in the shared town.

Choices and guidance

There are four difficulty settings. Until you end the day, Undo lets you take back a posted sheet. During the first week, Alfrance the apothecary explains what each screen is for. The first time a scene appears, a note describes what is happening, what may happen if nothing changes and what you can do. The dark button indicates the next step, while ordinary choices appear as paper slips. On the board, text above the post button explains what stands against a job; a greyed-out button’s “Why?” gives the same information. A board button points to the most rewarding job among those a free, capable group would accept, but it does not say the job is safe. The title screen can start a single spring of 12 weeks.

Viewer-submitted work

You can paste chat lines in the format “name: what they ask.” At most one viewer-submitted request appears on the board each week, with the viewer credited as the person who brought it and their words on the paper. The job itself comes from the game, and its report begins by naming who asked. The “Viewer names” setting can also give viewers’ names to new adventurers. Viewers can join a town using its number and play alone, or use its password to keep their own halls there.