A thousand years ago the magical Ferric Empire collapsed in a single afternoon — every artifact and bound spell shattering at once in an event called the Ironfall. A thousand years later, you lead a Warband emerging into the shattered realm. That's the setup for my first game: Ironfall: Chronicles of the Shattered Realm.

What's play-by-mail?

PBM had a golden age from roughly 1983 to 1995 — games like Alamaze, VENOM, and Land of Karrus, played by submitting written orders each week and receiving a narrative report of what happened across the whole world. Slow, social, deeply strategic. Nothing digital has quite replaced it.

What Ironfall is

Twelve to twenty-four players, one of eight asymmetric factions each (the Iron Legion, the Stormcallers, the Duskborn, and more), thirty-plus weekly turns. Each turn you submit orders — where armies move, what your Heroes quest for, who you ally with, what daring special action you attempt — and the GM (human or AI-assisted) resolves everyone's orders simultaneously and writes you a story back. A living, procedurally-seeded map, fog of war, ancient vaults, and an Ironfall Clock ticking toward world-reshaping Cataclysms. Win by Conquest, Ascension, Accord, or Legacy.

A real design pedigree

It's distilled from a deep dive through Paper Mayhem archives — the leading PBM magazine of the genre's golden age — borrowing the best ideas from the classics and tuning them for modern email and, eventually, a web portal.

Want to play?

The design is complete and ready to playtest. A seat in a live Ironfall campaign is the top membership tier — see the Join page. Command a faction, send your orders, and find out what the patient, narrative style of PBM does that no app can.