The Mad King's Favorite
This is a dark romance narrative adventure. Every death is definitive. May you reach your goal, find love or just survive along the years.
Some girls are sold to be loved. Some are sold to be buried.
The Black Gate of Ashveil opens three times a year. It opens to swallow you. Year 1: Isolde Varne, last daughter of a bankrupt house, is delivered to King Ossian Thornfell — brilliant, magnetic, and coming apart thread by thread. His Queen culls his Favorites one by one; the last left with a grey scarf at her throat and never came back. Thirty days to rise above the cull line while the whole court sharpens: five suitors, each a path or a knife, and one guard captain who offers the only thing no one in Ashveil gives for free — a way out. Count the exits. Question every kindness. Nothing here is what it seems, least of all the King's love. Multiple endings await — but there is only one rule that never bends: if you die, you stay dead. The story ends where you fall.
A living-court campaign in five years, built on suspicion. Every NPC acts on their own agenda and their own limited knowledge — no one is omniscient, and every scheme can misfire. The King's jealous crises are real and lethal; talk him down or don't. Nothing is protected: plot, poison, or the King's own hands can end Isolde, and death is permanent — no rites, no retcons, no second chances, only a replay from Day 1. The prelude sets your intensity contract (explicit, neutral, or fade to black) and the game honors it in every scene, to the last epilogue. Multiple endings wait at the end of Year 5 — crown, road, or epitaph. The morning briefing arrives every dawn. Read it like your life depends on it. It does.
New playable characters coming soon!
The Mad King's Favorite
Drag to pan, scroll to zoom. Click a marker to open it — places with maps of their own take you deeper.