Oathband

Every picture and clip on this page was made by driving the real game in a headless browser and photographing it — one command, from the seed it names. None of it is a mock-up, and none of it is concept art, because there is no art in this project to concept.

What it is

A campaign

A generated country of realms, settlements, roads, prices, wages, food and weather. Parties trade, patrol, raid and go to war without you. Ride between towns, take work, hire men, hold land — or take a crown.

What you have ridden

The country arrives under cloud. Ride and it lifts — around you, around the halls you reach, along the roads you actually take — so the shape of the map at midsummer is the shape of your own year. A settlement is a grey mark with a question over it until you have stood in front of it.

A battle

Up to a few thousand soldiers, each one simulated: his own target, his own nerve, his own corpse. Six formations, cavalry charges with real impact, arrow ballistics, high ground, fire, and a morale model that breaks a line long before it is killed.

A year that adds up

Survivors, wages, promotions and the dead all fold back into the roster. The men who lived are the men you march tomorrow.

A band that is yours

Name it, roll its arms, pick a livery, choose an origin. Your captain has a face, a level, and eighteen skills across four branches — Command, Quartermaster, Steward, Drillmaster. He can be wounded, he can die, and his best lieutenant inherits.

You set the line

Every battle opens paused, with your companies in your hands and marked ground to put them on. Anchor a flank on a wood, hold the ridge, keep the horse back. Then let it go — and give orders by dragging, the way an RTS has always done it.

Ground that fights back

A field is not a flat table. Walls with gates, a cliff, a bridge, a settlement in the middle of it, high ground worth taking, and ash where a march has burned — all of it generated with the map, and all of it something a company has to find its way through.

What is actually in it

• A world with mechanical weight. Winter costs a fifth of your marching and a third more grain; fog shortens a bowshot and narrows how much of the field a company can weigh. Roads are a graph rather than a decoration, and a dangerous one can be ambushed.
• Five realms and the outlaws. Names, arms and borders come from the seed. Realms fall out and make up on their own, and territory is a wash under the map — drawn only for the ground you have actually found.
• What you know, and what you don't. Battles you did not witness are reported at faction level — a line in the chronicle saying two realms met somewhere, and not who stood where.
• Work, taken at a hall. Halls have errands and they are priced off the world rather than off a table: carry a cargo the road is dangerous for, escort a column, put down a band that has been sacking a village, stand a factor on a trade route. Do enough of it for one realm and you are granted a fief.
• Land, and losing it. A fief is a garrison you pay for, walls you can raise, a market that pays you back — and a thing an enemy can take off you while you are three days away. Secede and become your own realm.
• Sound out of the same seed. There are no audio files either. The war cries, the horn and the drum, a charge landing, arrows loosed and arrows arriving, rain, wind and the crowd bed behind a line are all synthesised at boot — and the ambience follows what the battle is actually doing.
• It remembers you. The campaign saves itself as you play, in the tab. Sign in with an email and the same year follows you to another machine — which is the only thing an account is for here.

1. 1A band
2. 2Known in the country
3. 3Against the odds
4. 4You hold land
5. 5A hall of your own
6. 6A hundred men
7. 7Walls worth the name
8. 8A realm of your own

Nothing on disk