How to play, Chapter 1
Welcome to Greyford
In short
DRAKVOR is a role-playing game in the style of the old bulletin board games. Every day you fight a few rounds in the Ash Wood, grow stronger, and one day you climb the Ashen Horn, where the dragon Skarvold sleeps on his gold. Everyone plays in the same world.
A village at the foot of the Horn
Greyford has burned more times than anyone cares to count. Above it looms the Ashen Horn, and up there Skarvold lies on a hoard made of everything he has ever taken from these people. Every hero who falls in the forest adds a little to it, like it or not. So the hoard grows with every failure, and whoever slays the dragon carries some of it home.
You arrive with empty pockets and a weapon that barely deserves the name. The Ash Wood is full of rats, highwaymen and worse, and every victory brings gold and experience. Once you have enough experience, you challenge your master on the training grounds and go up a level. Level by level you climb, all the way to level 12, where the path to the Horn is waiting.
A few moves a day
DRAKVOR is not a game you finish in one night. You get 15 forest fights a day, and that is it until the next morning. That is on purpose: you drop by in the evening, fight, shop, put your gold in the bank and go to bed. Tomorrow you carry on, and nobody gets ahead just by playing through the night.
The others are real
The heroes in the hall are other players, in the browser and on bulletin boards. Sleep out in the fields instead of at the inn and you can be raided in the night, and a hero with a full purse is a tempting target. You can put a bounty on your favourite enemy, send messages, get married or simply climb the Hall of Heroes. Greyford also has villagers run by the game itself. They fight, level up and die like everyone else, but they never attack anyone.
The Greyford year
Every game day is a day in Greyford, and a year has 84 days in 4 moons. Together the heroes rebuild the village, one building at a time. At the end of the year Skarvold comes down and burns it all again. What survives and what goes up in smoke is explained in A day in Greyford.
Where to go next
Read First steps next. It explains how to create your hero and what to do in your first ten minutes. If you would rather jump straight in: the game explains a lot by itself, and the ? key helps on every screen.