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 design pedigree
It's distilled from a close read of the 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.
