Aethyr Chronicles
The System is awake. It knows your name, your debts, and exactly what you carried into that dungeon.
Aethyr Chronicles is a multiplayer text adventure narrated by a living storyteller — an AI Game Master called the System — running on top of a real, honest rules engine. Speak naturally and your legend is written turn by turn. Under every scene: true dice, true economies, true consequences. The narrator tells the story; it never fudges the math.
TWO WAYS TO PLAY, ONE WORLD
Dormant — fast, free commands forever: fight, hunt, craft, trade, travel, build.
Awake — speak as your character ("I ask the innkeeper about the bells under the hill") and the System narrates back. Every awake scene still runs on the engine's numbers.
A WORLD WITH TEETH
Turn-based combat with stances, shields, dual-wielding, cleaving two-handers, aggro, and elemental combos — soak a foe, then let the lightning conduct. Invent your own arts: skills and spells you dream up become real mechanics — a made-up "Forked Lightning" genuinely jumps between foes; a meditation practice genuinely deepens your mana. And monsters below your level teach you nothing — mastery is earned at eye level.
AN ECONOMY THAT CAN LIE TO YOU
Loot comes up sealed — wear it blind for half its virtue, or pay the appraiser. Some seals hide curses, and a worn curse does not come off. Enchanting is a school: graded veilstones burn whether the working takes or fails; failures can shatter the piece; a second working can crown a blade — or strip it bare. Masters can hide a curse behind a true name and fence it — if the appraiser doesn't catch them first. Player-fed markets, escrowed trades, camps that grow into settlements, and free cities any player can charter.
PLAY A MONSTER, EARN THE WALLS
Human-kin walk into towns as citizens. Dragons, gryphons, hydras, and minotaurs start outside them — working the Watch's gate-lists, cull by cull, until the city knows their name. Citizens can fall the same ladder they climbed.
A WORLD THAT MOVES WITHOUT YOU
Day turns to night on a real clock. Caravans arrive at dawn and leave at dusk. Rumors circulate. Guilds post writs. Other players' deeds echo in your story — and the Adventurers' Guild's smoked-glass Orb will read exactly what you are.
No download. First turns free.
Play now: https://aethyr.dungeoncrawlers.online
Part of the Dungeon Crawlers collection: https://dungeoncrawlers.online
Comments
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Concept sounds kind of neat.
But if you want to create a text-based adventure with an llm writing all the text, you really need to pick an llm that doesn't write like a moron.
"Your stride needs a beat more. (1s — a stabled mount eats the road: a mule halves the beat, a horse erases it)"
Like... what? This is gibberish.
It looks like... there's some kind of movement cooldown system. It seems like a few seconds cooldown (which makes me wonder if there's even a point to it). I take it, then, that the above gibberish is meant to suggest that riding e.g. a horse reduces the cooldown.
So just say that. Add a cooldown bar. Say "A horse reduces the movement cooldown."
A new player does not know what systems, features, and options are in your game. And when the game attempts to describe Every Single One of them in some kind of egregiously moronic poetry, it does not work.
I can tell that the entire game is going to be like this, and I'm simply not going to waste the effort. This isn't some kind of high literary writing where there's some potential aesthetic benefit to someone putting in the effort to figure out what the words actually mean. It's just appalling bad writing with no purpose.
Thanks for the honest feedback. Fair hit, though I'll own it fully: the word soup was me, not the LLM. Those system messages are hand-written, and I was trying to keep them in-world. You're right that it made them a hindrance instead of flavor.
Your example is already fixed, as of today: that message now reads plainly, there's a visible cooldown bar like you suggested and honestly, after sitting with it, I removed the movement cooldown entirely. It was there to slow people down and it wasn't earning its keep. I also went through every system message in the game against a new rule: flavor can set the scene, but the mechanics get said in plain words, with real numbers and real commands.
On what the game's actually going for: it's not meant to be a quick hack-and-slash. It plays like an old-school MUD, all of that free, forever, but when you want to invent an art, skill, or spell that only you know, that's where the LLM comes in as a DM: for when a human GM isn't around, or you just want to roleplay solo. Everything gets written into a persistent world ledger, so any GM, human or AI, can reference it and call back to it later.
If you're ever willing to give it another fifteen minutes, I'd genuinely value a second pass.