The game — Rivermark Chronicles

One

Make somebody

Five steps: who they are, what they do, their abilities, a gift, and a look at the whole thing before you commit.

Roll or arrange. Abilities are rolled and assigned; the step tells you which ones your class actually leans on, so a wizard is not quietly advised to raise Strength.
A race and a subrace — 10 peoples, 15 rows — each with its bonuses applied and its traits printed, marked for whether the engine enforces them.
A class and a path — 12 of them, each with a subclass that arrives on its own schedule and brings features with it.
A face. A painted portrait for the party rail and the fight cards, and a 3D creator built into the first step if you want to choose the beard, the build and the coat.

The Calling step of character creation: a class dropdown showing Barbarian,
with hit die, primary ability, saving throws, features, starting gear and
subclass listed underneath, and a background and alignment picker. — The class step says what the choice costs and grants before you make it.

Two

Fight on a grid

Sixteen by twelve cells of five feet each, generated for the encounter, with terrain on it. This is where most of the engine is.

Distance is a real number. Movement is spent in feet, reach and weapon range are distances, and a thrown weapon has a long range that costs you something to use.
Obstacles give cover, and cover is worked out per shot rather than per square.
Leaving somebody's reach provokes. Threatened squares are hatched on the board before you move, not explained after.
Advantage, flanking, Help, Dodge, Ready, Hide, Grapple and Shove are all on the action list, and the ones you cannot take say why.
The screen does no geometry. Reachable squares and their costs, threatened squares, and the quality of each shot are worked out on the server and shipped to the board — so the picture cannot drift from the rules.

The combat screen with a worg selected: its portrait, hit points,
armour class and challenge rating on the right, and the action list
showing greyed-out actions each with the reason it is unavailable. — Select a target and the action list explains itself.

52Creatures

71Spells

99Items

1–20Levels

The ladder runs the whole way: proficiency to +6, spell slots to 9th level, and an ability increase or a feat at 4th, 8th, 12th, 16th and 19th. Named features keep arriving past 6th for some classes and not for others — a rogue's Evasion at 7th, a barbarian's Brutal Critical at 9th, a paladin's Improved Divine Smite at 11th, a monk's Diamond Soul at 14th — and the class pages are the honest list: every feature the engine actually runs, with the level it arrives at, and separately the ones that are only printed on the sheet.

Three

The Proving Yard

A ring of trodden earth for a party that has no campaign. Three difficulties, and you choose who walks out. A new party opens in the campaign it was made for, in that campaign's first room.

A warm-up

Something to break a sweat on.

A fair match

An honest fight, evenly made.

A hard match

The crowd will get its money back. Some of them do not.

The bout is sized against who is coming, not against the party on the books — so going in alone is a different fight rather than four times the fight.
A party with nobody standing is refused rather than dealt a fight it would lose on the first monster turn.
Camp is beside it. A long rest heals the party, gives the hit dice back, and costs nothing.

Four

The delve

The Undervault is generated when you walk into it, in the manner of the old random-dungeon tables — and dropped again behind you, so the way back is the stair you came down, and the floor behind you is gone. The yard has the same kind of stair.

Rooms from a size table on a plan, joined by a spanning tree and a few loops, stocked from a contents table and described from depth-banded fragments — so a room on level four does not sound like a room on level one.
Traps and secret doors. Search for them; a door you have not found is drawn as a blank wall rather than as a wall with a hint on it.
Doors you can force, pick, listen at or brace shut. Barricading every way out of a room is one of the ways to earn a long rest down there.
Wandering monsters stocked per floor and rolled as you travel.
An errand per floor, written when the floor is — a name, a hook, rooms to visit, and a twist. It pays no experience and no gold on purpose: the pay for a floor is the monsters standing on it.

A generated floor on graph paper with one room lit and the party's
tokens inside it, the room described on parchment above, and the ways
out and actions listed underneath. — The floor plan fills in as you find it.

And from the inside

Press V and the chart becomes a view down the corridor: flat-shaded walls darkening with distance, a step at a time, turn in place. It is the same dungeon and the same rules — a step across a threshold is a real move, so everything that would happen on the map happens here.

The first-person dungeon view: flat-shaded walls receding into darkness
with a FACING NORTH label, a small map in the corner, and step and turn
controls. — Turn in place, step forward, and look at what is there.

Five

Keeping them

A party of four, tabbed across the top of one sheet. Pressing a tab costs nothing — the other sheets are already loaded.
A bag you can reach anywhere, with equipping, using, and handing things to whoever else is carrying something.
A general store that stocks ordinary goods, consumables and enchantment of at most +1. Anything better is something the world has to hand you.
Experience, and the level claimed on the spot — the ceremony happens over the battlefield with the fight still behind it.
Retiring somebody is on their own sheet, takes two presses, and is refused while they are standing on a battlefield.
A sheet that prints, laid out for a binder — and a player's handbook that prints with it, every number in it read from the rules the game enforces.

The character screen: a fighter's full-length portrait between two
banners, hit points, experience and ability scores on a parchment
beside it, the party underneath, and the account's characters listed
down the right. — Everything the engine knows about somebody, on one page.

What you are actually playing