Underlight

Underlight is a player-driven dream city where you create a character and shape stories through interactions with other players. There are no predetermined paths or specified endgame: your choices and experiences affect an evolving story of characters, histories, beliefs and factions. Every other Dreamer you meet is played by a real person, and there are no bots handing out the same quests to everyone.

Life in Underlight

You can build a character backstory and develop it with fellow Dreamers. You might teach other players, become a Ruler or Guardian of one of the Houses, or train as a warrior. Your character’s actions can create conflict and resolution, and the direction of their story is up to you.

Combat and advancement

Combat uses a live-action, first-person-style system. You swing weapons or cast fireballs, then move to dodge incoming attacks. You can fight nightmares or duel other players.

You learn magical arts from other player characters rather than automatically gaining them on level-up or buying them from NPC trainers. Potential teachers wear colored halos. When your character is ready to learn a new art or improve one, you can approach a teacher, who may require a small task or quest in return. Players write these quests for other characters and can tailor them, with tasks ranging from finding a way to harm a Darkmare to gathering supplies for an experiment or infiltrating an enemy house. The possibilities are limited by imagination and a few basic rules. Advancement for new and lower-level characters has been sped up so they can get into the action more quickly.

Character focuses

At character creation, you choose a focus that determines your specialization, the magical arts you can learn and how much you can improve them. The four focuses are Gatekeeper, Soulmaster, Fatesender and Dreamseer.

• Gatekeeper: Gatekeepers deal more damage with blades, chakrams and their flame art than any other focus. They protect the city and can cast arts that guard themselves or others against paralysis, curses and fear. Reflect is their strongest protective art, but can only be used on themselves. Their signature art, Ward, lets them lock city portals to defend a stronghold or set a trap.
• Dreamseer: Weapons and items have limited uses before they are destroyed; the commonly used chakram lasts for up to 50 charges. Dreamseers can recharge items with few charges remaining, restoring them to their maximum, but the process can destroy the item instead. Their signature art, Blast, rapidly damages a single target within sight.
• Fatesender: Fatesenders can terrify other Dreamers, making them run uncontrollably, blinding them or paralyzing them. Protective arts can block these effects, but a Fatesender can catch a target off guard or work with a Soulmaster to remove those protections. Fatesenders are powerful dreamsmiths who can imbue weapons they craft for themselves or others with these effects. Their signature art, Firestorm, heavily damages everyone in the same room who is not in their party.
• Soulmaster: Soulmasters are the strongest healers, but can also poison enemies to drain their health over time or curse them to make their arts harder to cast successfully. They can gather significantly more energy from defeated Nightmares, strengthening their House’s reserves. Their signature art, Abjure, randomly removes active effects from its target. Working with a Fatesender to Abjure and paralyze a target is a feared battlefield combination.

The dream world

Underlight has a retro late-1990s look, with 3D sprites and pixels.