In development · Level cap 60
Solace of Night is an MMORPG about two peoples who answered the endless dark in opposite ways — and the lantern every child on both sides is handed before they're handed a knife.
Twenty-three years ago the nights got longer and never gave the time back. Not a war, not a curse anybody can name — the dark simply took a larger share and kept it. Harvests come in thin. Roads that were safe at dusk are not. Every child born since has been handed a lantern before they were handed a knife, and the lantern is the one thing nobody sells.
Nobody in this world knows why it happened, and nobody you meet is going to find out. Two things came of it that matter: everyone is short-handed, and the seabed south of both continents cracked open. Whatever is under it — the Undervault — has been letting things up into eighteen dungeons ever since.
Neither faction is right. Neither is evil. A player should be able to run both to sixty and come away thinking the other lot had a point.
Surveys, tithes, the Lantern Levy, a garrison at every crossroads and a clerk behind every garrison. It is not cruel and it is not stupid — the roads are still walkable — but it is slow, under-funded, and spends more of itself administering the Long Night than fixing anything about it. Its people are tired.
Humans, dwarves, elves and gnomes muster at Dawnhold, in the fields of Brightmeadow.
Not a country — a compact between peoples who came through the Long Night by strength rather than order, and remember exactly which gates were shut against them while it happened. Held together by the Warchancellery, by a debt everyone agrees is owed and nobody agrees the size of. More honest than Solheim, and less kind.
Orcs, wraithkin, minotaurs and goblins muster at Skarhold, in the ash and hot springs of Emberwash.
The war between them is cold and occasional, fought by tired garrisons who mostly want to be told they can go home. Twenty zones across two continents carry the argument — from the flooded granaries of Brightmeadow to the drowned bone-fields of Gravemoor — and most of it never resolves, the same way it wouldn't in a real, tired world.
The two factions. Solheim answered the Long Night with paperwork: garrisons, ledgers and a tax on lantern oil. The Nightmarch is a compact of peoples who learned to survive the dark by strength rather than order.
When the Long Night began, the seabed south of both continents cracked open, and whatever is under it has been letting things up ever since.
Solace of Night will be available on Windows and Linux.