How to survive the Golden Age.
Fortune & Gallows is an open-ended historical pirate role-playing game. You write what your character attempts; the game resolves the world, remembers the consequences, and saves the voyage as it develops.
Every voyage belongs to a character.
Create a character from the Player Portal. Each character has an independent campaign, inventory, money, relationships, history, world state, and progression.
Character creation lets you choose a portrait and identity, then review the fixed starting attributes and trained skills granted by the selected occupation. Your play style also affects how much guidance the experience provides.
Guided vs. Strict
- Guided may provide more contextual help, reminders, crew expertise, or insight when appropriate.
- Strict provides less unsolicited coaching and fewer hints.
Write what you actually want to do.
There is no required command vocabulary and no fixed list of numbered choices. Type a natural action such as “Ask the dockhand who owns the red-hulled sloop,” “Search the room without touching anything,” or “Offer to repair the pistol for 2 shillings.”
More specific actions can matter. Describing how you investigate, negotiate, hide, fight, travel, or use an item gives the world more information to resolve the attempt. You may also choose to refuse, retreat, wait, investigate further, negotiate, surrender, abandon an opportunity, or try an approach the game never explicitly suggested.
Room-description modes
You can control how much location detail is shown automatically when you enter a place. The setting is saved separately for each character, and changing it does not advance game time or consume a turn.
- BRIEF — the default. The first visit to a location gives the full current description; later visits show the location and materially changed details.
- VERBOSE — shows the full current location description every time you enter.
- SUPERBRIEF — ordinary entry text is reduced to the location name, while immediate warnings, active encounters, and other critical danger are still shown.
- VERBOSITY — reports the current description mode.
- LOOK or LOOK AROUND — always gives a complete current-scene description regardless of the selected mode, including visible people, objects, weather, and grounded exits. Looking does not move the character or advance world time.
The world may be harsh. The referee should not cheat.
Fortune & Gallows is designed around an impartial-referee contract. The narrator portrays and adjudicates the world; it is not trying to defeat you, protect you, or force you through a prepared story.
- The world does not level-scale around your character. A frigate, reef, hurricane, law, debt, or skilled opponent remains what the world says it is.
- Resolved outcomes are not secretly fudged for drama. The game should not make an enemy stronger because you are winning or rescue you because a loss would be inconvenient.
- Obvious character-known risks are surfaced before commitment. You are not expected to personally know period sailing, medicine, gunnery, navigation, law, trade, or ship repair when your character or qualified crew would understand the issue.
- Secrets belong to the world. NPC motives, hidden actors, unseen hazards, distant events, and other legitimately unknown facts can remain hidden. The underlying rules should not secretly change.
- Similar circumstances use similar rulings. If a result changes, there should be a real difference in state, method, tools, conditions, opposition, or information.
- Your choices are allowed to change the campaign. The game should not move a prepared encounter, clue, NPC, or consequence merely to force you back onto an intended path.
- Severe and permanent outcomes are possible. Ships can be lost, careers can fail, people can die, and a player character can die when the world and mechanics legitimately produce that result.
- Real system errors may be corrected. A duplicated damage event, stale state, impossible NPC knowledge, or other implementation mistake is not treated as “bad luck.”
Your sheet changes with the voyage.
Attributes and trained skills describe what your character is good at. Occupation determines the fixed starting package. Money, health, inventory, renown, action-point progression, relationships, and other state can change through play.
Your judgment chooses goals and approaches; character and crew expertise handle the technical knowledge and execution they actually possess. A clever plan can change the real odds and may make a previously difficult problem routine.
If a save becomes incorrect because of an alpha bug, Black Keel Games staff may be able to correct supported character fields while preserving save revision history. Players should not attempt to edit game state through browser tools.
What does “12d” mean?
The game currently uses period-style British money notation. Internally, money is commonly stored in pence so purchases and rewards can be calculated exactly.
The letter d is the historical abbreviation for pence, from the Roman denarius. The letter s means shillings.
Location, date, time, and health matter.
The header shows the character’s current location, island or region, world date, time of day, health, and money. Travel, work, sleep, injury, gambling, combat, and other actions may advance time or change these values.
The game world continues from the saved result of the previous turn rather than resetting the scene for each response. Described objects, damage, relationships, evidence, debts, injuries, and other established facts should persist until something actually changes them.
Committed turns are autosaved.
When a turn is successfully committed, the campaign advances to a new save revision. The world state, result, and history are stored with that character. If a turn fails before it is committed, the game should not silently advance the authoritative save.
Each character has a separate save. Selecting a different character from the Portal changes which voyage is active.
Your voyage becomes a journal.
Story History records completed player actions and narration in order. Use it to revisit earlier decisions, conversations, discoveries, and consequences.
Major illustrated moments are attached to the event that created them, so the history can gradually become an illustrated adventure journal. Campaign endings can also draw on this history to remember the character through people and records that actually knew of their life.
Important moments may become artwork.
The large scene panel can display a cinematic, usually first-person illustration of the current major story beat. New artwork is reserved for meaningful moments such as major arrivals, discoveries, combat, boarding actions, storms, capture, important work milestones, and other significant scene changes.
Routine dialogue or minor actions normally keep the existing scene image. Image generation runs separately from the turn, so you may see “Illustrating this moment…” while continuing to play.
Deletion is permanent.
The Portal allows you to delete one of your characters. The confirmation screen requires the exact character name because this is not an archive or reset.
This is unfinished software.
Features, rules, balance, historical content, UI, AI behavior, saves, and illustrations may change during development. Alpha saves may sometimes require migration, correction, reset, or deletion as systems evolve.
Useful reports include contradictions, inconsistent rulings, impossible NPC knowledge, wrong inventory or money, incorrect time passage, save problems, characters returning from the dead, illustration spoilers or mismatches, unexpected player actions written by the narrator, historical errors, hidden difficulty changes, and confusing UI.
If something looks wrong.
- First, refresh the page once.
- If the account appears signed out, return to Login and sign in again.
- If the wrong character is active, return to the Portal and select the intended character.
- If an illustration is still processing, continue playing or check again shortly; it does not block the save.
- Do not repeatedly resubmit the same action if the page says the world is still responding.
- For a persistent bug, note what you attempted, what happened, the character name, and approximately when it occurred.
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