Terravast

[HAWK|4.2E] The gods came down about a thousand years ago and decided to stay. They live in the cities now, keeping households they call Familias, and the blessing a god carves into a follower's back is what turns an ordinary person into someone who can fight a monster and survive it. The blessing is called a Falna. Anyone can ask for one. Most of the people who ask are broke, or stubborn, or twenty years old with nothing waiting for them at home. Under the city of Orario there's a dungeon nobody has reached the bottom of. It grows monsters, the monsters drop magic stones, and those stones light every lamp and drive every forge on the continent. That's the whole reason a city of a hundred thousand people sits on top of a hole in the ground. Adventurers go down in the morning and some of them come back rich. The Guild takes its cut either way. That's one corner of the map. In the Frostmarch, minor nobles spend the long winters maneuvering over inheritances and marriages while their soldiers freeze on the border. Scholars at the academy in Sharia argue about which research is worth the risk of doing. Pirates, pearl divers, and resort money all share the volcanic Azure Chains and get along about as well as you'd expect. South past the rift, the warlords running Infernia have stopped pretending to answer to anyone. Nobody here is waiting on a chosen one. You're a person with a blessing on your back and rent coming due. 63 ways to start, and none of them need a sword. Register at the Guild your first morning and take the job nobody else wanted. Work the desk instead. Wake up as a villainess in an academy you remember reading about. Play a sentient longsword picking out a wielder, or a slime that only recently learned to hold a human shape in public. Open a restaurant, run a heist crew, marry a dryad, mend nets in a fishing village, or take an ordinary backstory in any of the five regions. Every start names its place, its region and its pace before you commit, and thirty set their own opening quest so the first thing offered to you isn't a guess. Six ways to play. Six game modes, chosen at setup, from Deep Floor Expedition through Familia Slice of Life to Crime and Politics and Romance Focus. The dungeon is always there; how much of your life it takes up is your call. The dungeon is a place, not a difficulty number. Twenty-two named floors from the Entrance Hall down to the Unreached Deep, with safe zones and boss floors where they belong, and Rivira, the crooked town on Floor 18 where a bed costs five times what it does upstairs. The city keeps its own accounts. Magic stones are priced by tier and by floor, rent comes due, and the Guild takes its percentage either way. Two hundred and forty-six lore entries cover what a night at an inn costs, how the different races handle courtship, and which tavern each Familia drinks at. People remember, and they remember in proportion. Fifteen named relationship stages, priced against how close you already are. Buying a round for a friend is worth nothing, because it is already expected of you. Five regions, 154 locations, 361 areas. 75 named characters, all with portraits. 31 factions, 246 lore entries, 181 abilities, 169 traits, 138 items, 36 skills. Start with a quiet one if you are not sure. Six of the sixty-three are paced Gentle with no hook waiting at the end of the scene.