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The living world that thinks for itself

A single-player medieval RPG where nobody writes the quests.

Pixel art, in a grey and unheroic register.

For PC. Windows, and built for the Steam Deck.

Wishlist on Steam · soon
From a run · the first autumn

"A granary clerk asked me for help. Forty sacks of good grain, condemned as spoiled and sold off in the night, her handwriting on every entry. I had twelve days before the count. I was busy elsewhere. Nobody ever heard my answer, because I never gave one.

They arrested her on the twelfth day. Her mother stood outside the cellar at every mealtime. The stable boy who'd seen the night wagon three times stopped telling anyone anything, ever.

I could still free her. It would take weeks now instead of days, and she would never quite believe I hadn't been busy on purpose."

Nobody wrote this quest. It happened because nobody answered in time.

The land

The Old Seat, a stone castle keep
The Old Seat

You wake in a room that belongs to someone else, with no memory you can trust, in a tired rain-grey land of small towns, muddy roads and old stone walls. People here trade bread and iron, whisper by the fire, and worry about a thing they only half understand: the Mark.

Nobody can prove what the Mark really is. A sickness, a curse, or fear doing what fear does. That question is yours to poke at, and the game will not settle it for you.

Bonemark paints in greys. A realm with three cliff edges: war inside its walls, hungry and armed crowds at its gates, and the quieter war inside your own head. Nobody appointed you to hold it back from any of them. Step by step the realm decides who you are, and what people believe you did may not be what you did. It remembers both.

No chosen one. No prophecy. No shining king to save, and no duty to save anything. A real, breathing place, and the choices you make in it.

What you do

Explore, trade, fight, gather fighters, hold a town. It is real-time action with one character: a duel in a muddy street, a dungeon cleared with the Companions who chose to come, a battle line where formations hold or break and a frightened flank runs. That part you have played before. This is the part you have not:

Talk to people who think
Ask a baker for help and she weighs it against her own day, her own debts, her own opinion of you. She can say yes, no, "later," or "let's make a deal."
Companions who can leave
The people who follow you keep their own account of what you have done. They argue. They ask for their share. Some of them walk south with it.
Gatherings
Hunger and war push people together at fords and crossroads. Some are raiders, some are refugees, most are simply hungry. What a Gathering becomes depends on what the region does about it, including you.
Prices move with the world
Trade runs on real routes and real hands, so damage travels. What you break in one region is paid for in another, by people who have never heard of you. There is a run below where that bill came due.
Your name and your deeds, kept apart
No reputation score. What you actually did, what people say you did, and who privately owes you are three separate records, and they are free to disagree.
Doing nothing is doing something
Nobody waits at a marker for you to come back. Ignore a request and the world keeps moving without your answer, and it will still be moving when you finally have one.
Awareness, and losing it
A person who can still see straight builds things, because building needs other people and they can tell. A person who has stopped seeing straight starts needing the world to be at fault, and finds a good reason for every door they kick in, and the doors that open to them are the ones you would expect. You will not be told which one you are becoming, and nothing grades you on it. The people around you notice long before you do.

A run is one, two or three years, or endless. Each length is paced as a whole story, not the same story cut short.

Nobody decides what you are for

Hold the realm together. Put one house on top and be the reason it got there. Break every coalition and take your cut of the pieces. Protect nine people and let the rest of it burn. Take the side half the realm is afraid of, and still be mourned as a hero when you are gone.

All of those are playable. None of them is the intended one. There is no win screen because there is no single thing to win. There is an ending, built out of what you actually did, and some of them are much better than others.

Everyone is awake

In most games the townsfolk are wind-up toys. At eight o'clock the baker walks to the bakery because a script pulls a string. Turn the game off and she was never really there.

In Bonemark every villager is a small thinking person. They see only what is near them, remember what happened to them, want things for their own reasons, and decide for themselves even when nobody is watching. They can be brave, frightened, kind, greedy, or just having a bad day.

The baker has a sister she worries about, and a promise of bread to the inn she means to keep, and if you knock at her door at night she is asleep, and will not thank you for it.

That is a large claim, so here is what holds it down.

  • The game works with the brains off. Every clever helper can be switched off and Bonemark is still a complete, fair game.
  • No peeking. A person can only know what they truly saw or heard. No secret spying just because the computer knows.
  • The storyteller only finds the words. Deals and promises are real, and it is the world that makes them real, never the chat.
  • Save and load is safe. Stop and start any time. Nothing breaks and nothing happens twice.
The Golden Joke

The storyteller can tell you a wonderful story about a dragon. It cannot put a real dragon in your game.

Read how this is kept honest →

Chronicles

What a run should read like. Three situations the world is built to produce.

Companions keep their own account of you. Hers had run out.

From a run · Old Seat, the second winter

Hessa carried my banner for eleven months. She was at the ford, and at the burning of the tannery, and on the night I paid the toll-men rather than fight them.

I never asked what she thought about the toll-men. She told me anyway, twice. The third time she did not tell me. She asked for her share, counted it in front of me, and walked south with it.

She guards a caravan now, two valleys over. She was civil when I passed through. She did not ask where I was going.

Nothing pointed at me. The price did.

From a run · Fenwater, the summer after the raids

I burned a village in the spring. Not for cruelty, for the granary the raiders were eating out of. It seemed clean at the time.

By midsummer, iron in Fenwater cost a third more than it had. The smith there bought his ore through a middleman, who bought it through a man in a village that no longer existed. Nobody in Fenwater had heard of me, or of the granary.

In autumn the militia I had promised to arm could be given eleven spears instead of thirty. The clerk who told me this was apologetic. He thought it was the weather.

How the world actually works

Every claim on this page rests on machinery: four kinds of helper and only one allowed to act, a ten step loop each person runs, a council that can propose and never force, a judge and a single executor between a good idea and a real consequence.

It is written out in full, in plain language, on one long page.

Read the handbook →

Reference
The manual
A three-part guide to Bonemark and a catalogue of every person, monster, troop, weapon, item and place, each with its own picture.
Modding
Add your own goods, items, merchants, people and building services by writing small text files. No Godot, no programming. Every kind of content carries the status it really has, measured from the build.
Glossary
Every word the game uses in a particular way, defined once, and linked to the chapter or the thing it names.
TALLOW
GAMES
Games that remember.

We make games that read like books and bend like a dungeon master’s table, where every run is a different story, told by a storyteller that has been waiting for you to make a choice. Bonemark is the first.

A Writer’s Desk

Tallow is the fat you boil down when there is no wax left. It burns slow, it makes a small light, and it does not pretend to be the sun. That is the studio’s pace.

Join the Road

None of these doors are open yet. When there is a place to follow the making of Bonemark and to post your run stories to, it will be behind these, and this line will say so.

Not open yet

Wishlist Bonemark

Bonemark is in development for PC. The Steam page is on its way; when it opens, this is where you press.

Wishlist · soon

English at launch. Italian, French, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified Chinese are planned.

Developed and published by Tallow Games.