Iron Gall

Where magic is written in ink

In the free port of Velmarre, whatever is written in True-Line comes true. A contract binds for real, a ship written safe in harbour arrives, a debt written settled is settled.

True-Line is not written in letters but in emblems, drawn square by square on a ruled page, and an emblem cannot be copied: it has to be worked out from the numbers in the margin. In other words, every page is a nonogram.

A workshop, a letter, and a debt

Master Jacquemart ran his writing workshop for decades. One morning he shut it all at once and left, leaving you his workshop, his notebooks, his two cats, a letter that explains everything except why he left, and a debt of 250 million florins to Tobie Lenz, the moneylender.

You start at his dusty desk with one small inkwell of market ink. You solve pages for the customers at the counter, sell them for florins, and slowly bring the workshop back to life:

Ink. Every filled square costs ink, and a weak ink cannot hold a heavy truth: its marks fade before the page is done. Buy better inks from five suppliers, from soot ink at the market to dragon’s blood from the alchemist, then brew your own in the ink works.
The workshop’s rooms. The ink works, the copyists’ room, the quay, the library and the cabinet of relics are locked when you arrive. Each one opens when you have a use for it.
Staff. Hire apprentices who solve beside you or sell pages at their own desks, harvesters and boilers for the ink works, refillers for your inkwells.
Expeditions. Draw a route map (another grid: the truer it is, the safer the road), and send explorers from the quay to the edge of the map: the nearby forest, the northern mines, the coast and its giant cuttlefish, the mountains, the faraway islands. They come back with a haul, and a story they swear is true.
Chests, relics and spells. Wax-sealed chests, relics from the master’s collection of odd trinkets, sealed scrolls to decipher into spells for your grimoire, and the master’s notebooks, a tree of crafts to learn.

The Jacquemart file

As you play, the file on Master Jacquemart opens, chapter by chapter: a witness to hear or a note in his hand to read, a question to settle by cross-checking the clues, and an emblem to write. Seven chapters tell why he left, and how.

Pay it back, or else

Pay the debt back at the counter, whenever you like and as much as you like. In normal mode, the moneylender charges interest every month, and after 25 hours of play an unpaid debt sends you to debtors’ prison. Easy and very easy modes soften this, and a sandbox mode has no debt at all.

Features

Nonograms that are generated, always with a single solution, from small 5 × 5 pages to large formats.
An illustrated workshop: every screen is a room, and you play on a sheet lying on the table.
Pages written with a quill, crosses in leadpoint, squares in the colour of the ink that wrote them.
Domino and Gribouille, the workshop’s cats, wander from room to room. Pet them, and they purr.
A story told through witnesses, notes and pictures.
Incremental progression with no offline progress: when the game is closed, nothing moves. The workshop waits for you.
Music, recorded sound effects, an ambience for each room.
In English, French, German and Spanish.

Early version