ABOUT FERALITY

A post-apocalyptic exploration RPG. You roll a party, move through a nested world, fight range-banded turn-based encounters, negotiate with factions, take quests, search rooms, and accumulate a record of what you found. Characters who die stay dead.

The investigation running under all of it is not a matter of finding the villain. You are reconstructing a history out of fragments, and the fragments do not cooperate. Evidence may be incomplete, contradictory, politically motivated, emotionally distorted, deliberately misleading — or completely accurate and completely misunderstood.

Three different things, and learning to tell them apart is the actual skill the game asks for:

Ferality will not stop you to announce the significance of what you have found. A room can contain something important without any label saying so. A person can say something that only means anything twenty hours later. A document can answer a question you have not thought to ask yet. A small favour for a stranger can carry a clue to something enormous.

You are expected to remember. Exploration is not only about finding loot. It is about finding context.

The Dossier is your party's growing record of what they have found. Evidence there is knowledge, not currency — it is never spent, traded, or consumed. Finding something simply means the party can no longer honestly pretend they do not know it.

As it fills, discoveries that seemed unrelated start sitting uncomfortably close to one another. The Dossier will show you the pattern forming. It will not tell you what the pattern means. That part is yours.

The story has tiers, but they are not difficulty bands. They describe depth of understanding, not gating by strength. Nothing stops you from standing in front of a late piece of the mystery early.

• You might find the evidence before you find the explanation.
• You might meet someone before you understand who they answer to.
• You might defeat an enemy before discovering why they were there at all.
• You might discover an answer before you know its question.

This is not a mistake. It is the design.

There is no single correct sequence through the world. Wander. Revisit. Open the optional door. Walk into something dangerous a little too early and learn what it costs. Come back to an old room once you know what you were looking at.

Geography matters more than progression. Different places hold different pieces of the same history, and the two halves of one story may sit in regions you visit months apart. This is a place, not a corridor of levels.

You will sometimes fight someone before you know their story. An encounter can present itself as a dangerous person causing a local problem, and only later resolve into something with a chain of command behind it.

The game does not require the mystery to be solved before the fight. Sometimes the fight comes first and the explanation arrives later, from somewhere else entirely. So take note of names, documents, locations, organisations, symbols, and details that seemed incidental at the time.

A victory is not necessarily the end of a story. Sometimes it is the beginning of understanding it.

None of them is the good faction, and none is the evil one. Each carries its own history, worldview, fears, and interests. You will find real virtue and real failure inside all five, and your reading of any of them may not survive the next thing you find.

Two people can stand in the same room, read the same page, and arrive somewhere completely different. Ferality is interested in that gap. The question is not always which faction is correct. Sometimes it is why this faction needs to believe this — and the answer is often uncomfortable.

Faction dialogue is not narration. It is testimony. A group can condemn a thing while quietly living off it. A person can claim indifference while plainly still carrying what they saw. Someone can tell you the truth and still leave out the part that matters. Someone can lie for reasons you would accept.

So read behaviour alongside the words:

• Consequences, records, and patterns over statements.
• Who benefits, and who ends up carrying the blame.
• Who wants the evidence destroyed — and who wants it kept.
• Who insists something is impossible, and how quickly.

Preserving evidence can protect future victims and preserve something that should not exist. Destroying a thing can prevent its abuse and erase the only record of it. Exposing a truth can free people and collapse the arrangement keeping them fed. Holding a broken system together can stop suffering today and guarantee it tomorrow.

You are rarely choosing between good and evil. Usually you are choosing between one consequence and another.

Official histories, personal accounts, military records, research notes, faction archives, standing orders nobody has rescinded, abandoned infrastructure, institutions that outlived their purpose — and things that are still running when nothing should be.

Some of these records disagree with each other. The game will not tell you which one is right.

The Kindred are not a monster species and not a footnote. They are part of the present reality of this world and part of its history, and both of those facts raise questions that the world is not eager to answer.

You will play as them. You will also, eventually, start wondering where they came from and why. Hold onto that question.

The Foreman is the system through which your party receives objectives and operational guidance. It issues assignments. It routes resources. It answers questions.

Sometimes its answers are strangely precise. Sometimes they are evasive in a way that feels deliberate. Pay attention to how it answers, not only to what it says.

Not every quest is main-story material in disguise. A small local problem is often exactly that, and helping people survive is a complete reason to do something. But some of these jobs carry a name, a document, a location, a witness, or a pattern. You get to work out which is which.

The world also moves. Clear an area, finish a job, help residents, defeat something, shift a faction relationship, and places change. New people arrive. Empty rooms become inhabited. Somewhere you wrote off becomes useful. Going back is not wasted time.

You will miss breadcrumbs. You will leave locations unexplored, misread evidence, carry unanswered questions to the end, and make decisions on incomplete information.

That is fine. There is no answer sheet waiting at the end to grade you. You are building your own understanding of this world, and an incomplete one still belongs to you.

Play however you like: survive, explore, chase factions, dig into the mystery, fight everything, avoid what you can. Players who pay attention will find more layers — not a better score.

Ferality is interested in what happens when people inherit systems they did not build, histories they did not witness, and conflicts they did not start.

It asks what happens when nobody remembers why something exists, and everyone follows it anyway. It asks whether truth is worth anything if no one agrees what to do with it. And it asks whether understanding the past actually makes the future easier to choose.