Welcome to Hearth & Crown

Hearth & Crown is a grounded medieval living-world game. You create a person, give them a life, and live it inside a world that keeps moving whether you act or not.

There is no chosen one. No destiny waiting for you. No main quest you must follow. You might be a farmer, a craftsperson, a merchant, a healer, a servant, a traveler, a soldier, a guard, a retainer, an official, a landholder, a business owner, a noble, a spouse, a parent, a neighbor — or someone still deciding. Those are starting circumstances, not classes. What you become depends on work, relationships, choices, luck, and consequences.

What makes it different

Most games wait for you. This one does not.

People around you have their own goals, work, families, debts, and plans. Shops open and close. Households eat, save, and struggle. Rulers govern. News travels slowly and imperfectly. Opportunities appear and disappear. A harvest can fail while you are elsewhere. A friend can marry while you are on the road.

That is the heart of it:

The world continues even when you are not watching it.

Your job is not to save the world. It is to live in it — and what you do still matters, because consequences are real.

What kind of stories can happen?

Almost any life is valid material:

• Keep a farm through a hard winter.
• Learn a craft and earn a master's respect.
• Run a stall, then a shop, then a business.
• Serve a household, a guild, a lord, or a town.
• Marry, raise children, care for parents, keep a household together.
• Travel to another settlement for work — or to start over.
• Hold an office, carry responsibility, make enemies and friends.
• Get through a shortage, a dispute, an illness, a bad debt.
• Simply live quietly and well.

Ordinary life is content here. A quiet season of steady work, shared meals, and small routines is not a failure. It is the world working as it should.

Drama still happens — conflict, loss, love, ambition, danger — but it comes from people, causes, and circumstances, not because the game needs to fill silence. Nothing unusual happening is a valid result.

How this book works

You do not need to learn a backend. There is none visible to you.

• Chapters 1–4 teach you enough to begin: what the game is, who your character is, how skills work, and how actions work.
• Later chapters are reference: work, money, family, relationships, reputation, property, travel, health, rumors, goals, and growth.

Your world — its laws, customs, prices, religions, rulers, and geography — is defined by your specific Project. Individual worlds can differ substantially. When this book says "depending on your world" or "where established," it means: ask what is true here, not what is true in every medieval story.

One principle to carry in

You decide what your character attempts. The world decides what follows.

Say what you actually want to do. Pay attention to what your character would reasonably know. Make plans. Accept that other people have their own interests. Expect ordinary days as well as dramatic ones.

Live a life. See what becomes of it.