Mørkyn

The model narrates. The game decides what is true.

A local-first AI role-playing game. You type what you do. A language model writes the scene.
Behind it, a real game keeps the world: who is here, what you carry, where you stand, what time it is.

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WHY IT IS DIFFERENT

In most AI adventures the narrator owns history. A sword appears because the paragraph said so. A shopkeeper changes name between replies. The story decides you nodded, agreed, and walked off before you typed a word.

In Mørkyn the prose is not the save file. Every turn, the model proposes what changed. The game checks it against its own records and keeps only what holds up.

• >> An item is yours when someone hands it over, you buy it, or you take it. Not when the narration mentions it.
• >> The game decides who you are talking to and who answers. Your words stay yours.
• >> The narrator does not play your character. Your actions, thoughts and choices are typed by you.
• >> Dice, danger and rewards resolve on the server. Shops keep hours against a world clock. People keep their names, jobs and feelings toward you as numbers.
• >> The world is a seeded map you walk, and its towns have streets and shops that exist before the story mentions them.

More than sixty issues from live playtesting went into making those lines true, each one logged in public with the turn that caused it.

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WHAT YOU DO

• >> Make a world and a character. Pick a preset, write one line of idea, or fill every field yourself. Genre, magic, technology, peoples, backstory, starting gear and powers are all rolled to fit each other.
• >> Play in turns. Talk, fight, trade, sneak, investigate. Tag a person, place or item with @ to point at it exactly.
• >> Travel. Walk the wilderness tile by tile, then zoom into a town and walk its roads to a shop by clicking the map or typing where you want to go.
• >> Grow. Skills, ranks, abilities with real costs, quests offered by the people you meet, companions who follow you, relationships that remember.
• >> Keep it. Save slots, undo the last turn, a turn history, and a save editor in the browser if you want to change anything by hand.

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WHAT YOU NEED

• >> Windows, Linux or macOS, with Git and Python 3.11+.
• >> A local model in GGUF format, run inside the game or through llama.cpp. Tested on Qwen3 8B (Q4) with a 12 GB graphics card: most turns take 5 to 35 seconds.
• >> Or any OpenAI-compatible cloud API, if you would rather not run a model yourself.
• >> Optional: character portraits, if you run Forge or a similar local image server.

With a local model, nothing about your campaign leaves your machine.

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RUN IT

Download the launcher for your system, put it in an empty folder, and run it.

Windows — start.bat --full
Linux / macOS — bash start.sh --full

--full installs the local model runtime. Leave it off if you will only use a cloud API.

The first run downloads the game from GitHub, builds a private Python environment, and opens the game in your browser. Later runs ask before updating; answer no and it starts the copy you already have.

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STATUS

Playable, pre-1.0. The launcher installs the current development build, 0.10.0-dev. Each dev build has its own changelog section and tag on GitHub, so you can see exactly what changed. The last tagged stable is 0.9.12.

Expect rough edges: the prose can still drift from the world now and then, and the town view is new. Bugs and their fixes are tracked in the open. Next: a stable 0.10, then 1.0 as a standalone download with starter saves.

Found something wrong? Post it in the community tab. A turn number or a screenshot helps.

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License: PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0. Play it, fork it, change it. Do not sell it.

Source: github.com/Stelliro/Morkyn
Changelog: CHANGELOG.md
Issue log: docs/PLAYTEST_ISSUES.md
Notes: stelliro.com/morkyn