Getting started

Make a character

Pick a class (see the classes), a body, a height and a name. Height is a few inches either way, chosen once, and is looks alone: everyone reaches and is reached the same. The game saves your character as you play, and it comes back where you left it, with everything it carried, its level, money, trade skills, the abilities it has learned, whatever was still cooling down and its company of hirelings. Log out below ground and you come back at that dungeon's door; log out dead and you come back at the graves, as you would have woken.

You can play without an account: your characters then belong to your browser, which keeps up to 6, and each stops growing at level 6 and 5g in its purse. Sign in from the character select and they belong to your account instead, on any device, up to the same number; characters made before you signed in can be brought into your account from the account page, and grow on from where they stopped. Delete one from the character select to make room.

Your username is your handle. You may also give your account an email: once you follow the link mailed to it, you can sign in with it, and if you forget your password, "Forgot your password?" on the sign-in page mails a link to choose a new one.

You start in Spitehold, the only city. The town climbs a hill inside a castle, a gate in the middle of every wall, each kept by a sergeant. Two wide high streets run up from the gates and cross at the market square near the top, lanes cross between, and a ring road runs round the town below, just inside the walls; every building fronts onto one of them, each in a garden of its own. The auction house, the sellsword hall and the jeweller stand on the square, the inn, the pub and the provisioner on the high street south of it, the smithy and the apothecary on the west street, and at the head of the square, up a broad flight of steps, the cathedral crowns the hill: a great stone church, its door in a bell tower you can climb to the belfry, a nave and aisles under stained glass, and transepts with a door onto the lane down either side; behind its apse the hill falls away steeply to an orchard under the north wall. The town fills the rest of the bailey out to the ring road, houses on both sides of it, and a farm works the north-west quarter on the hill's lower flank. Every building can be walked into, and the shopkeepers keep shop inside, behind their counters. Nobody fights inside the castle's walls: no creature comes within 15 m of them, parties do not form and PvP cannot be switched on. The fields outside the walls belong to the same zone and hold the gentlest creatures in the game. Under the streets is the easiest dungeon, the Sewers, its door just outside the east gate, beside the wall, where a party can form before going in.

Go out

You can walk from the city to every other zone, through passes cut in the ridges between them. Cross a border and you are in the next zone. Ashmoor and Saltmire, next to the city, are levels 1 to 4. The Frostmark, in the north, runs from 12 to 15, and past it The Bloodmarch, from 14 to 17, is contested ground: walking onto it flags you for PvP. The last climb, from 17 to 20, is The Wakelands, past Mirrowmere and beside the Bloodmarch, reached across either. Each zone has an outpost, with three vendors and its people with work to give.

Keep to the roads: each runs from an outpost to the passes into the zones around it, and you move faster on them, and within the city's walls, than across open ground.

Talk to anyone with a yellow ! over their head. Most of what they ask is one step of a quest line, and each step leads on to the next: an errand to someone else, a dungeon to go into, a keeper to see fall, herbs to gather. Someone with more than one thing for you (several quests, one to hand in beside another, or a quest beside their shop) greets you with the choices; pick one, or press F for the first. A giver only offers work you are ready for: a new character in Spitehold has a few quests to choose from, and more of the city's people find work for you as you level. Every quest pays experience and coins, and the last of a line an item too. The zone map (M) marks where your quests are handed in (a green !), who has one on offer (a yellow !) and the dungeon doors they send you to, and shades in purple where the creatures and herbs they want are found; the boxes in its title bar hide any of them. A creature a quest under way still wants has a gold ! on its nameplate. The quests page lists them all. Abbot Aldine, in the cathedral, has been noticing things lately. She is a good place to start.

If you would rather not go alone, Dagna Steelhand, in the sellsword hall on the square, hires out sellswords — once you have earned a contract for the class through her quest line, and for a good deal of coin. See hirelings.

Fight

Click a creature to attack it, and you keep swinging until it dies or you press Escape. Your hotbar is on keys 1 to 0. You start knowing only your main attack and your defence; the rest of the bar is learned on your skill tree (N) with the points your levels earn, so see levelling. You spend pools rather than mana, so read pools and cooldowns before you wonder why your first hit landed hardest.

Die

You will. You lie where you fell for 3 seconds, then wake at the nearer of the zone's two graveyards. No graves stand inside a town, so dying in Spitehold's fields wakes you outside its walls. See death.

Make the world angry

Every wild zone is split into regions, and the minimap names the one you stand in. Kill enough in one region and it sends a warden. That is the game. See escalation and bosses.