Serpent in the Staglands

Serpent in the Staglands is a role-playing adventure set in Vol, a world inspired by the late Bronze Age and a Transylvanian landscape, with its own politics, races and gods. You play Necholai, a minor god of a celestial body who descends to the Staglands for a moonlit festival. With the way home blocked and immortality slipping away, Necholai takes a mortal body and the guise of a traveling Spicer to seek answers and help. The story centers on intrigue and survival in a harsh land, rather than good and evil, saving the world or becoming a hero.

Explore the Staglands

You travel with a chosen party of five through a non-linear adventure shaped by your wits and choices. The game rolls the dice for you, but does not provide auto-populating map markers, checklist quest grinding or rigid story exposition. The unmarked map includes wilderness, cities, towers, temples, dungeons and caverns; there is no level scaling or story-blocked map barriers to impede your exploration.

You can examine hand-drawn maps in your inventory to find secret locations, study diagrams of foreign languages, record encounters and leads in your journal, and work out how to smuggle Spices. You investigate quests and puzzles by making your own journal notes, without the game telling you what to do.

Build your party

The classless role-playing system lets you create or find up to five unique characters, using any combination of more than 100 magic, combat and aptitude skills. Dynamic items include an incantation book, hand-drawn maps and a herbology kit for brewing potions.

Tactical combat

Combat is party-based, real-time and pausable, with an emphasis on broad tactical decisions and creative combinations of party skills. It is designed around pre-buffing, positioning and skills that trigger automatically, rather than cooldowns or frequent pausing. Enemies and challenges include monsters, rogue mages and mutilated outlaws, which can use the same spells and skills as your party.