The Adventurer’s Guide
Know the mountain.
Earn the descent.
A party, a map you drew yourself, and the nerve to take one more flight of stairs. This is where your story begins.
Prepare for your first expedition01 / The essentials
What Realm Foundry Is
Three things every realm has in commonFights Are Decisions
No rotations, no cooldown spam. Combat is turn-based on a hex field: initiative, facing, reach, guard stances, hazard ground, and monsters that fight as a doctrine rather than a crowd. A bow cannot be drawn on someone at your elbow. Positioning is the game.
The Party Is the Unit
The mountain answers a party of four with more bodies and stronger heads, and holds back its best loot from anyone who goes down undermanned. Parties form at the Tavern, trade on the Exchange, and share the leaderboard.
Trials Over Tutorials
You do not pick a class from a menu. You enter unproven, learn the mountain with a dagger and a bow, and at level five you face the Awakening alone. Survive it and you choose your class — or let the gods decide.
02 / Your first expedition
The Path
From unproven hand to a name the server knowsCharacter creation asks one question: who are you? Race and face, nothing more. Every adventurer begins Classless — five levels of solo delving with whatever the mountain drops. At level five, the mountain has taught you all it will teach an unproven hand. What comes next is earned.
Enter Unproven
Choose a race. Take the dagger, the bow and a draught. Learn the first floors alone.
The Awakening
Level 5. A solo expedition through the Proving. Return with a name, or return and try again.
Take a Class
Twelve to choose from at the ceremony — or surrender the choice and let fate hand you something rarer.
The Deep Road
Party up. Forty floors, six regions, a boss guarding each descent. Techniques, oaths and gear tiers shape your build.
The Reckoning
Level 40. A second trial: specialize, or refuse it and deepen the path you already walk. In the forge.
03 / Power is earned
The Trials
You do not choose power — you earn itThe Awakening
You go in alone. No party, no invites, no one to carry you. The Proving is a real expedition on a real floor, and it ends when you reach the shrine or when you fall.
- Movement and the map — the floor is explored, not handed over
- Every fight is yours alone on the hex field
- Boons along the way ride with you into the ceremony
- Enemy strength inside the trial is a dial the host sets
Fall, and you may try again — unless the host has turned trial permadeath on, in which case the mountain keeps what the trial takes, and the whole server hears about it.
The Reckoning
Deep in the road, the second trial offers a fork: take it and specialize into a subclass, or refuse it and stay pure, unlocking rule-breaking depth in the class you already know.
- Designed, not yet built — the deep road it sits on is
- Specialize: a subclass kit that scales at your real level
- Refuse: deepen instead, with spells that bend the game's own laws
The level cap is 50. The Reckoning is where the last ten levels stop being about numbers.
Let the Gods Decide
At the Awakening ceremony, instead of choosing your class, you may declare:
Fate may hand you one of the twelve — or, one day, something the menu does not offer. When it happens, everyone online is told.
You may entrust your fate once per account, per server. This is not a reroll. It is a covenant.
04 / The battlefield
Combat
Gold Box rules, a 3D stage, and monsters with doctrineEvery Battle on a Hex Grid
An encounter lifts the party onto a hex arena cut from the room you were standing in — its walls, its furniture, its dead ends. Turns run on initiative. Each unit moves, acts, and can hold a guard stance that punishes whoever closes.
- Point-blank. Bows, crossbows and wands cannot fire at an adjacent target. Pin the archer, or be the archer who stepped back first.
- Shields first. A shield takes the raw blow; only what leaks through meets armor, wards and block. Armor caps at 70%, resistances at 75%.
- Hazard ground. Floors seed slag, spores, black water and old iron on the contested line. It bites both sides.
- Titans. Some creatures occupy many hexes, need real clearance to move, and strike from their hide. A corridor can save your life.
Doctrine, Not a Crowd
Encounters are compositions that grow with your party: solo meets the duelist, four meets the warden, the rooter, the howler and the brute. Monsters hurl you across the arena, drag you into reach, root you where you stand, choke the ground and bellow you into attacking the wrong target.
- Bosses change phases, call adds, erupt the floor, and take extra actions when cornered.
- Undermanned parties see the mountain hold back its best gear — four in the fight see everything.
- Techniques reshape your abilities with milestone points; oaths on rare gear awaken permanent bonuses when you do the deed they name.
- A turn that ends is over. Nothing you pressed too late spends the next one.
05 / Find your calling
Classes
Twelve to earn at the Awakening — click any for its full kit in the CodexClassless
Unproven and unbound. Learn the mountain, sample every weapon, and earn your name at the Awakening. A dagger, a bow, a draught, and Grit.
Warrior
Someone has to be where the hurt lands, and decide it lands on them. The Warrior is not the biggest blade in the party — the Warrior is the reason everyone else still has one.
Explore the classRogue
Everyone else fights the battle in front of them. The Rogue fights the one three seconds from now — the opened vein, the missed step, the moment the answer stops mattering.
Explore the classCleric
Death keeps a ledger and the Cleric keeps crossing out names. Not gently — faith here is a stubbornness, a refusal spoken loud enough that the light shows up to enforce it.
Explore the classWizard
The Wizard did the reading. Every fireball is a bibliography; every frozen enemy is a footnote. Magic is not a gift here — it is a discipline, and the dungeon is about to be graded.
Explore the classDeath Knight
The grave sent the Death Knight back with winter in the wound and an appetite the living do not have. Every blow taken is a meal; every blow given, a memory of how the cold felt the first time.
Explore the classDemon Hunter
The Demon Hunter stole fire from the thing that burned their life down, and pays the interest daily. Every glaive-stroke is repayment; every scar is the receipt. The debt ends when the demon does.
Explore the classDruid
The Druid knows the forest's oldest secret: everything grows back — the tree, the wound, the debt. Feed the ground and it feeds you. Cut the party down and watch it bloom out of spite.
Explore the classEngineer
The Engineer read the dungeon's rules and brought counterexamples. Every gadget is an argument that preparation beats destiny — and the satchel has at least two more arguments left.
Explore the classNecromancer
The Necromancer runs death like an office: souls filed, bones reassigned, decay itemized. It is not cruelty — it is thrift. The living waste so much, and the Necromancer wastes nothing at all.
Explore the classPaladin
Somewhere behind the Paladin is a promise made out loud — to a god, to a grave, to a village that burned. The armor is just the promise's outer layer. It has not been broken. It will not start today.
Explore the classShaman
The Shaman never fights alone — the storm owes a favor, the river keeps accounts, the ancestors lean in when called by name. Every chant is a debt collected on behalf of the living.
Explore the classWarlock
The Warlock read the contract, signed in blood, and — this is the important part — understood it. Power is a loan; health is currency; the dark charges interest. So does the Warlock.
Explore the class
06 / Into the deep
The Mountain
Forty-two floors, six regions below the galleries, a guardian at the bottomYou walk it in first person, corridor by corridor, and your character keeps their own cartography — explored cells and hand-placed markers that survive between expeditions. Floors remember which fixed encounters you have cleared. Return to the Tavern and the run ends; the map you drew does not.
The Upper Galleries & the Deep
The Flooded Works, the Bonepile Chapel, the Pale Court, the Roots of the World. Where the unproven learn, and where the Proving waits at floor five.
The Ashvein Delvings
Cinder galleries, slagfields and the bellows deep, ending at the Furnace Court. The ground glows between the stones.
The Sunless Shore
Black causeways over standing water, a drowned parish, the tidevaults, and the Brine Cathedral at the bottom.
The Howling Warrens
The gnawed maze, the broodhalls and the bonegardens. Something rules here from the Tyrant's Nest.
The Glasslands
Shardwalks and prism galleries where the fields sing. The Refracted Throne does not care for visitors.
Kingsgrave
The processional, the Hall of Crowns, the regalia vaults. Whoever sits the Hollow Throne has been dead a long time.
The World's Anvil
The hammerdeep and the star forges down to the last seam, and the Anvilborn's Crucible at forty.
The Guardian's Vault
Coiled around the way down: the Delvewarden, a dragon the size of the room. Fewer than four is a fool's errand. It has been tuned to make that clear.
07 / A place to return
The Tavern
Where every expedition begins and endsFind Your Four
The roster shows who is in and what they do — tank, damage, heal, support. Invite, accept, descend. Defeat drags the whole party back here, mended and poorer.
Trade, Re-cast, Gamble
An auction house with a ten percent cut and proceeds that find you even offline. Re-cast an item's affixes for gold. Or hand the gambler your coin and see what the mountain owed him.
Rumors & the Leaderboard
The board cycles what the mountain has been saying. The leaderboard scores every character on the server — depth, level, deeds — and the server publishes it, with the world's diary, to the Ledger every few minutes.
08 / A world of your own
Hosting
One server binary, one world file, five hundred to a thousand playersRealm Foundry is built to be community-hosted. A realm is a single dedicated server process and a single database file beside it. No container stack, no external database, no accounts to babysit. The flagship server we run is architecturally just another host — nothing about it is special-cased, so what works for us works for you.
A Complete World
Forty-two authored floors, seven bosses, twelve classes and the Classless start, four races, fifty-seven encounters, two hundred items, two hundred and seventy techniques, the Tavern economy and the Awakening. Launch and play.
Dials Beside the World
A plain text file next to the database holds the host's rules: whether the Awakening is permadeath, how hard its enemies hit, which store the world uses. Edit, restart, done.
- Trial permadeath — off by default; on for realms that want the mountain to keep what it takes
- Trial enemy damage — a percentage, or the authored value
- Backups are one file copied while the server runs
Everything Ships With Tooling
Every content type — classes, abilities, items, monsters, encounters, floors, techniques, trials — has a registry, a browser, an inspector and a validator. The map editor paints floors, doors, traps, fixed encounters and random zones.
Tune on Evidence
The server keeps a diary: sessions, fights and deaths by floor, how many fights each level took, what dropped, who passed the trial. One page tells a host where the curve is wrong before the players do.
Right now there is one realm: the flagship, run by us, while the game proves it is fun. When it has, hosting opens — the same binary, the same tools, your rules.
09 / Why we descend
Why Realm Foundry Exists
Most modern MMOs have optimized away wonder. Realm Foundry brings it back the way the old ones did: a mountain, a party, a map you drew yourself.
- The fear of taking the stairs down one floor too far.
- The relief of a Warrior who decided the hurt lands on them.
- The name the whole server heard when the gods chose.
- The dragon that was tuned to erase fewer than four.
You are not the hero of a scripted campaign.
You are a name in a ledger the mountain keeps.
And if you are bold enough… the mountain will remember you.
Play the Flagship
The flagship realm is live and taking testers. Windows only for now.
- 1 Download the launcher. It keeps the game patched and shows the notes for every build.
- 2 Run it, let it fetch the client, and sign in when the game asks.
- 3 Roll a race and a face. Take the dagger and the bow. Find the stairs.