Understand Kilmoryn, and the rules of war within it.

Kilmoryn is a single seamless world, roughly 250 km across, of coast, upland and island, ringed by the outer ocean — the Mourn. There are no loading screens. The land is split into areas and load-balanced across many physical servers, all running server-authoritative physics at 60 Hz, and even a dungeon is entered by walking through its portal: the world simply changes around you.

Nearly seven hundred settlements keep shops, trainers and people who will talk to you — every one with its own story, its townsfolk speaking in their own voices. Around them the land is divided into more than three hundred and fifty provinces, each with exactly one holder. Kilmoryn is open PvP, and almost all of it is held by somebody — save one island, the Haven, where players can barely hurt each other.

A guild city begins as a Heartwood Seed, bought from a Steward and planted by the Guild Leader in a province nobody holds. The Heartwood is the city's heart: its treasury, its bind point, its Runemaster's post, and the one thing an enemy must fell to take it. Every rank you raise it houses more citizens, claims another province and opens more buildings.

Build mode lifts the camera over the city's grid. Place a building and it becomes a construction site that rises piece by piece where everyone can see, as your builder crews haul in lumber, stone and gold — and work never outruns delivery: a site short of stone waits for stone. A destroyed building falls into rubble you can rebuild at half the price.

Then the city runs itself, once a minute, whether anyone is online or not. Citizens need homes and food; fed and housed, they pay tax and work your farms, mills, mines and workshops. Mood ties it together — rations, variety, ale from your own brewery, a church — and a happy city builds faster, grows and pays more, while a miserable one slows down and empties.

Every province has one holder: the city whose Heartwood stands in it, or whose outpost claims it. Push your border out with outposts — up to nine provinces beyond your own — but a province only pays while it stays connected home. Lose an outpost and everything beyond it is cut off with it.

Each province has one mine, and every mine has a name and a story. Mines open to capture for half an hour a day; take one in its window and its output — up to a full day's pile — is yours.

Nothing teleports. Goods travel home by caravan along the roads: real carts and ox wagons with escorts, which anyone can attack. Kill the draught animal and the cargo lies in a wreck for an hour, free to whoever gets there first. Cities trade with one another the same way — by road, or with a dock, by sea.

A city with a Barracks or a Stable raises soldiers. Armies belong to the city, not to any one player: they march, hold ground and fight on their own, around the clock. Order one across the map and it gets there whether you are online or not — and when players are near, the battle is fought by real soldiers in front of them, and every one who falls counts.

Come within 300 m and you can take command yourself. Select your units, drag out a line to set its width and facing, change formation, charge, hold or fall back, tell the archers when to loose — or lift into an overhead view and fight the whole battle from above.

Armies live on supply. In your own provinces they are fed; march them beyond and supply drains, and unsupplied men desert. Every army costs gold and food by the hour. And they never damage buildings: walls come down to siege engines.

A city's safety is a contract, not luck. Its Heartwood cannot be harmed outside a siege, and its council buys protection for everything else; whatever is left unprotected can be attacked at any time. To take the city itself, you have to declare it.

A declared siege is a bane. Buy a Warstone Claim — ranked I to VIII, and at least the rank of the target's Heartwood — and plant it on the ring just outside the city. The Warstone rises, both guilds are told, and the defenders choose when the fighting starts, up to two days ahead. Nobody can call it off.

When the bane goes live, protection counts for nothing inside the city. The defenders win by breaking the Warstone. The attackers win by felling the Heartwood — and a city whose Heartwood falls is wiped: every building in it destroyed.

Build a Wooden Pier, a Shipyard or a Stone Quay, make ship deeds from your city's planks and iron, and launch at the berth. Take the helm and set the sail to the wind — it shifts through the day, and every ship feels the same one. There is no tacking to learn: you always make way, just slower upwind. Mind the shallows, and strike your mast to pass under a low bridge.

At sea, a ship is a fortress that moves. A ram's blow grows with the square of the closing speed. Grapple a ship within fifteen metres, haul the hulls together and board her — or mount a ballista or catapult on deck and break her from range. A broken hull goes down with everyone aboard left swimming, and what she carried floats up as wreckage for anyone to salvage.

A city with a dock can trade by sea: a Cog or a Carrack sails itself along the sea lanes to another city's harbour. Near players it is a real ship, and it can be rammed or shot to pieces like any other.

Eight ancient Farportals stand in the wilds, one for each element — Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Spirit, Law, Chaos and Death — each a great frame of its own. A Traveler opens one toward another for a minute, and while it stands open anyone may walk through, horse and all. The way runs one way: to come back, someone must open the far gate. Travelers can also recall themselves, another player or their whole group to the nearest Farportal.

It moves people, not war: no siege engine or ship passes through a Farportal, so roads, bridges and harbours keep their price — and none reaches into the Deep.

And the roads are worth taking: every road and trail is half again as fast, on foot or mounted, and every one that meets a river crosses it on a bridge. A Horse Figurine becomes a horse and back again; a Pegasus Figurine, a winged horse that takes off, climbs and lands under its rider. Fight from the saddle with sword, hammer or polearm — or draw a lance and gallop, and it lowers itself: the faster you close, the harder it hits.

Melee is directional and physical. Flick the mouse to choose your swing, hold to wind it up, release to strike — and where it lands matters. A blow to the head does triple damage and stuns; one from behind doubles again; a charge hits harder still. Feint to drop an attack and raise your guard. Block a blow and the attacker is left open while you counter. There is no cleave: every swing finds one target.

What you hold decides how you fight. A lone one-handed blade fences: tap to strike fast, hold for a heavier blow, press again to flow into a second cut, and parry toward the mouse. Spears and halberds strike at once with moves of their own, from either foot forward, and chain into combos. An empty weapon set raises your fists for jabs, hooks, kicks and combinations. Double-tap a direction to dodge. Most hits only jolt you: only a heavy blow staggers, and your armour decides how heavy that has to be.

Bows and crossbows shoot where the crosshair points — no lock-on, no guarantee. Aimed spells go where you look; healing and support can follow your chosen target, so support keeps pace with the chaos. The heaviest creatures knock you flat or throw you. All physics is server-authoritative at 60 Hz: what you see is what the world enforces. And no one can be held down by turns: every stun, from a spell or a blow to the head, leaves its target immune to stuns for three times as long.

Magic in Kilmoryn is concordance: the craft of preparing an exact relation between two things so that one answers the other. One prepared relation is a concord, and it stands on four parts — the Four Holds. A source supplies what moves. A reference identifies the subject. A path limits where the change can go. A bearer holds the working together until it completes. Lose one and the working fails in a specific, diagnosable way rather than a mysterious one.

Nothing is created. The heat came from somewhere, the healed tissue was spent from somebody, and the frost rimming a caster's vessel is the receipt — which is why a working can be read after the fact, and why an illegal one has a name of its own: a false concord.

And the ground argues back. Most of Kilmoryn is high ground, where magic works fully. Around a few places it thins: on low ground spell damage, healing and mana all fall by half. At the heart of those it is dead — no casting at all, magical effects stripped away, spell-fliers falling out of the sky, and nobody raised from death. The weaker ground decides: a mage on high ground cannot blast someone standing on dead ground. Lure a caster onto it and you have nothing to fear from spells.

QFT has levels, but power is deliberately flat. The cap is 75, and a level-75 character in the best gear is only about a fifth stronger than a level-1 character in the best gear. What a veteran has is choice — more powers, more skills, more ways to answer a fight. A newcomer who picks the right fight can win it.

Levels raise your training budget. Trainers across the realm teach skills for gold and training points, and let you choose your Class when you qualify; your Class and your Disciplines grant your powers. Group up and every member nearby shares the experience, with a bonus for every companion.

When you fall you are in the guttering: thirty-five seconds in which anyone with a resurrection power can bring you back where you lie, standing, with everything you had. If nobody comes, you wake at the Heartwood you are bound to, or your guild’s city, or your hometown. Die in a dungeon and you wake on the surface — unless it is the Deep.

Death costs what you carry, not what you are. Your backpack stays on your corpse for anyone to loot — you included, if you get back to it — but what you wear and wield stays with you, and there is no experience penalty. Put what you cannot afford to lose on your body or in the bank before you ride into a fight.

Bandit camps and dungeons dot Kilmoryn, and every creature drops loot by its kind and how dangerous it is. About one dangerous beast or brute in 150 is a champion, its title in gold over its head and legendary treasure on its body; a dungeon's final boss carries legendary treasure too, and hunted deer, moose and rabbits give up their hides. There is no player crafting: what you carry is looted, bought from shops or from other players, or made by a city's workshops — arms and armour at the Smithy, bows at the Sawmill, siege kits and ship deeds from planks and iron.

Because radar is trivial to hack client-side, the game ships an honest one: a minimap that shows every nearby player and creature as a dot, so nobody gains an unfair edge. The world map layers your territory, your armies, the roads, the sieges under way, the ground where magic thins or dies, the Farportals and the Haven.

A journal keeps every thread you have taken up. A friends list shows who is online, and the mail reaches anyone: letters arrive at once, and parcels of goods and gold travel from bank to bank. And you can record any session — or save the minute that just happened — and watch it back later from any angle.