What Crown & Ashes Is

I should admit at once that I did not set out to make a pleasant game. I set out to make an honest one, and I have since discovered, at some cost to my sleep, that the two are very rarely the same thing. A pleasant game forgives you. An honest one remembers what you did and lets the consequences arrive in their own time, which is usually at night.

Crown & Ashes is a medieval strategy game about a small settlement on the edge of a fallen kingdom. It begins with very little: a clearing, a handful of people who had nowhere better to go, and a forest that has been watching them for longer than they know. You raise houses. You send people out for wood and stone and bring them home again, or try to. You find bread for mouths that do not care how poor the harvest was. You make soldiers out of farmers, which is a sad and necessary business, and you deal with neighbours who smile at you across the border and lie to you with great warmth and real skill.

That is the day, and the day is hard enough. Then the light begins to thin. The shadows of the houses stretch across the frozen mud, the workers hurry back through the gate, and someone climbs the watchtower with a torch. Night in Morvenn belongs to the Hunger, which is the name the living have given to the dead who rise and come walking out of the trees. The Hunger does not want your gold. It has no interest in your land, your grain, your crown or your excuses. It wants you, and it is extraordinarily patient about it.

Morvenn is the name of the world, and the age in which the game takes place is called the Age of the Fallen Crown. Once there was a single throne. Now there is only the memory of one, and six great lands quarrel over whatever is left of it. Each of them is utterly convinced that it is the rightful heir. Each has its banners, its ancient documents, its priests ready to swear to anything at all. They march their armies back and forth along the old roads, burning one another's fields for a crown that nobody has worn in living memory. And not one of them, in all that marching, has thought to look behind. Behind them the graves are opening.

I find something almost unbearably human in that picture. People will argue over an inheritance while the house is on fire, and they will go on arguing as the roof comes down, because the argument is at least familiar and the fire is not. Your settlement is small, far too small to matter in the great quarrel of the six lands, and that is precisely its chance. While the kingdoms stare at one another, you can afford to stare at the tree line.

People ask about the name. I wish I could say it came out of long deliberation, but the truth is plainer. Every crown in this world is already half ash. The ambition that builds is the very same ambition that burns, and the hand that raises the first wall of a village will, in some later season, set fire to someone else's. I wanted a title that could hold both of these at once: the thing you reach for, and what is left of it in the morning, when the smoke has cleared and you walk out to count what survived.

The video on the front page of this site is black and white, and that was not an accident. Colour would have been a kind of lie. Colour promises warmth, banners, a market day, a festival with musicians. What I want you to feel first is the hour before dawn after a bad night: smoke still hanging over the roofs, frost on the timbers of the palisade, and that grey, exhausted light in which you go from house to house and count who is still alive. The colour is in the game, I promise you that. It lives in the fires and the fields and the painted shields. But you will have to earn it there, one night at a time.

I do not know yet whether this game will be loved. Nobody who makes things ever really knows that in advance. I only know that I could not have made it any other way. At the very beginning I tried to imagine a gentler version, with bright colours and kind neighbours and nights that were merely dark, and I could not finish a single sketch of it. It felt false in my hands. So this is the game I am making instead, and if you have read this far, I suspect it may be the one you were waiting for as well.