Ultimate Rogue

The world keeps its own rules

Every thing in Eord is made of parts, and the parts answer to a table of rules about heat, cold, water, lightning and force. Dry grass catches, and fire spreads until it reaches the river. Oil floats on water and spreads further. Lightning runs through wet ground and hits iron twice as hard. Wolves are afraid of fire.

Nobody scripted the moment these things meet. You set them up and see what happens.

Fire burning in red and orange through dry grass at night, a few cells from the player. — A fire talisman lands in dry grass.

You see what the light reaches

There is one light in the world, and the screen shows exactly what it touches. Ground nobody has lit is black. A torch gives you a circle. A mirror shows you the room and yourself in it. A portal shows you somewhere else entirely. Look down a chasm and you see the caves beneath it, if something down there is lit.

A stoneborn sees a little way into the dark. A human needs the torch, and a torch tells everything out there where you are.

A lit room split by a mirror wall. The player stands on one side and their reflection on the other, with glowing fungus repeated in the glass. — A mirror wall, and you in it.

Things that live in the dark

Creatures are built from the same parts you are, and the same rules apply to them. A wolf bolts from fire. An iron guardian shrugs off a blade and takes lightning twice as hard. A pale ghost can't be cut at all, so you'll need something better than a sword.

Each of them hunts with its own senses, and you're hidden from one when none of its senses find you. Wolves follow your scent, and lose it where you cross the river. The guardian feels your footsteps, so in the dark it finds you when you move and not when you stand still. A ghost shows only in a mirror; everyone else just feels the cold. Your own senses can be fooled too: a wall that isn't there, or the things fear and poison make you see.

The same lit hall in the ruins seen four ways: by a human in full colour; by a wolf in blues and yellows, smelling someone behind the wall; by the iron guardian, with one cell of wall shimmering where it feels open ground; and by a ghost, which sees that cell for the illusion it is. — One hall, four bodies, four different worlds.

What you learn is the progression

No unlocks carry from one run to the next. Within a run, what grows is what your character knows. A beast you've never met is only a grey four-legged shape until you read about it, are told about it, ride inside one, or watch one die; then it has a name, and you know what it fears and how it hunts.

Watch fire, water and lightning do their work and you learn the rules: the first time, all you see is the guardian shudder. Read and your letters improve, and the notes you've kept say more. Wear a wolf's body and its nose knows every creature of its forest, for as long as you wear it.

The examine screen: a wolf two cells east, known by name now, with a line under What you know saying it fears fire, learned by reading of it, and a trapper's saying quoted beneath. — A wolf, once you know one.

Death is a door, at a price

What you are is separate from the body you're in. Bind your mind to a phylactery and grow a clone of yourself in a cradle, and when your body dies you wake in the clone, while your old gear lies where you fell. Lose the phylactery and the next death is the last.

Send a simulacrum out while your own body sleeps safely at home, or reach into the creature beside you and take it over. Every vessel costs rare materials and gold, carried by the most dangerous things in the world.

A dim, blue-grey view of grass at night beside a vessel cradle. The player, now a bodiless shade, stands in a violet flash, seeing the world without colour. — No body waits: a shade lingers by its phylactery.

You become what you do

Your calling is only where you start. Fight and you grow as a warrior. Bring down beasts and the hunter's path opens to you. Build, read, or let the fire do your killing, and other classes come calling. Each is offered when you sleep, and you can take it or turn it away.

You level up when you sleep, in your own bed or rough on the ground, and wake to the news: [Warrior Level 2!], [Skill — Power Strike obtained!]. Your classes and skills belong to your mind, and go with it into any body that can use them.

A box titled You wake over the dark ruins at night, announcing Warrior Level 2, Might +1, the skill Power Strike, Health +1, and the Hunter class offered, with Accept and Refuse buttons. — Morning, and what the day earned.

Every creature has a core

Cut it from what's left of them, and it's worth something to anyone: sell it, build it into a vessel, or, if you cultivate, draw its qi into you. Some creatures have cultivated all their lives, and they hit harder for it.

Cultivation is one path to power among many, walked by whole sects on some planes and by almost no one here. Sit still, gather qi, open your body's meridians, and break through realm after realm. Each realm changes what you see: cores glowing through the dark, the dead plain to your eyes, where fire would take before you strike the spark. Push too hard and the qi turns on you.

The Glass Shore under a violet sky, seen by a cultivator three realms in: wolves, a toad and a guardian tinted by the glow of their cores, a ghost standing plain beside a wolf, and a patch of spilled oil washed orange where fire would take. — Three realms in: cores, the dead, and what fire would do.

A world a day's walk at a time

Step out of the town gate and up onto the map of Eord, where every tile is a whole stretch of country and every step takes hours. Around the town the country is farmed: hedged fields that grow while you're away, farmsteads, flocks behind their fences, and farmers who keep their own hours and remember what you did. Farther out the farms stand behind palisades, and past that they're burned. Go down anywhere and walk it: forest, hills with caves beneath, marsh, a river that runs on from one stretch into the next. The land between the places you know is made fresh for every run, and it's full: shrines, graves, camps, dens, a mine fallen in, an old mirror standing alone in the woods. Every step on the map brings something, and nights are slower, darker and worse.

The world keeps going while you're away. Leave a fire burning and it burns out; leave a door open and something may be inside when you come home.

A stretch of river country by day: a broad blue river winding down through long grass and scattered oaks, with the player standing in the shallows. — One step on the map: a whole river valley.

A house of your own

Every run starts with you coming up the road to a walled town at dusk, and who you were before you came is your choice. Inside the walls it's safe, nearly always: lamplight, a trader, people going about their business. Once in a long while a host comes to the gates, and the town remembers that night.

Past the wall there's a plot of land. Claim it, buy timber and stone, and build: walls, a door, a bed, a hearth, a chest. It's all made of the same parts as everything else, so a timber wall burns, a shut door keeps the wolves out, and the hearth lights the room. Sleep in your own bed and wake healed.

At night, a one-room timber house lit orange from inside by its hearth. The player stands between the hearth and the bed, with a chest beside them and the door shut. — Night, and the hearth is lit.

Where it's going

Ultimate Rogue is early. This is the shape of what's being built.

A home to come back to: A town at the heart of the Prime Plane, and land on its outskirts where you build a house of your own.
Ways around death, at a price: Phylacteries, simulacra and clones. Grow a body and send it out to explore while your own waits safely at home. None of it comes cheap.
Lore written by hand: Every description, note and quote written by hand, in the spirit of Dungeon Crawl's quotes and ADOM's lore. The places for it are in: examine anything for its description and quote, and keep a journal of what you read. Some of it is in the world's own script, which your character has to learn to read.
Planes beyond this one: Eord is the Prime Plane. A gate in the proving ground opens onto a small test plane with its own sky and its own rules, and a cursed mirror in the caves opens onto the Glass, the whole world reflected behind the mirrors, where the High Roads run across the dark from one mirror to the next. Many more planes will follow.

Latest updates

19 October 2026 Water and lava that flow, down through the layers and over the edge
Liquid runs now. Pour a lake out of a storage ring at the top of a shaft and it goes down, layer by layer, and fills the room at the bottom. Dig beside a pool and it drains into your hole. Flood an ant nest and the ants drown. Lava creeps, burns what it touches, and turns to black glass where it meets water.
19 October 2026 Sunlight down a hole, and what you see through one
Light and sight cross between floors along straight lines now, through openings only. The sun through a hole lands at its angle and moves across the floor below through the day, and anything that can see you through an opening, you can see there too.
19 October 2026 Tunnels that run on under the next stretch of country
The edge of a map underground isn't the end of the world any more. Dig to it, and your tunnel runs on into the next stretch of country at the same depth, where you can walk on through.

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