Every 15 to 30 turns the Weaver looks back over your journey and may give you a title for what you do most: Rat Killer, then Rat Slayer, then Bane of Rats. Each title carries one bonus, and it grows as the title does.
You write. The world answers.
There are no attack buttons. Every turn you write a sentence or a paragraph: what your character does, says or notices. A judge called the Weaver, WyrmRail's storyteller, reads it for three things: how well it's written, how much of this place is in it, and how much of your character is in it. She reads warmly: a real attempt counts, the details of the place you use count, and no way of writing is marked down for being that way.
That score decides how hard a hit lands, how far a conversation gets, and how much a place gives up. Then the Weaver writes what happens next. Every turn lands on one of these rungs. Here's the same sword swing at a zombie, at each one:
- LostYou swing and miss. The zombie doesn't even notice.
- ToldYour blade glances off its shoulder and rips its sleeve. It keeps coming.
- RepeatedYou catch it across the ribs. It stumbles back a step and you get room to breathe.
- RememberedA clean cut takes its arm off at the elbow. It lurches on, slower and off balance.
- Made into SongYou duck its grab and drive the sword through its chest, pinning it to the door behind it.
- Made into MythOne stroke takes its head clean off. The body stands a moment longer, then drops.
- Made into LegendYou swing, and the ground behind it splits open in a line. The zombie takes one more lazy step towards you. Then its middle slides away, and it falls in half.
- Made TrueIt shrugs off your blow and keeps coming, reaching for you. Then it stops. It parts from head to belt, and behind it the ground and the trees are torn open along the same line, as far as you can see.
What you write can become the world
Most of what you write is your own story. But every turn you write yourself rolls a chance to become canon: part of the world itself, the same for every player. The better the turn, the better the chance. When the fight, the conversation or the search ends, the world keeps the best turn that won.
Canon is how people, places and things stop being generic and become one of a kind. A blacksmith is just "a blacksmith" until someone writes her well. After that she's that blacksmith, and everyone who comes to her forge meets the same woman.
A person. You haggle with a nameless blacksmith and give her a burn scar and a short temper. If it goes canon, every player who walks into that forge meets her, scar and temper included.
A place. You describe the bridge outside town as rotten, with one plank missing in the middle. Once it's canon, the next player to cross it is warned about that plank, or finds out the hard way.
A thing. Your sword snaps in a fight and you drive what's left of it into the ground to mark the spot. Days later another player searching that hill finds a broken sword standing in the earth, and the Weaver turns the find into an encounter of its own: whose was it, and what happened here?
Something you did. You kill the wolf that's been taking a village's sheep. If it's canon, the village knows, and players arriving there later hear about the stranger who did it.
The chance each turn you write becomes canon:
Repeated1 in 10at that place for about a week
Remembered1 in 4at that place for about a week
Made into Song1 in 2in the country around it for about a month
Made into Myth2 in 3across the whole region, for good
Made into Legend3 in 4across the whole region, for good
Made Truealwaysacross the whole region, for good
A long fight written well is many chances. Writing more lifts your rung, and with it the chance. Choosing one of the offered options never becomes canon: only your own words do.
Every turn is a film
…and every turn is a film
What you write, and what the world writes back, directed into a short animated film.
- 1You write.
I plant my feet, sweep the blade low across all of them and shout for Hesper.
- 2The Weaver answers.
Your blade rakes across all three, and loose bone skitters over the platform. Then the line breaks: two of them fall in pieces, and the big one backs off along the rails as, behind you, the dead lamps of the waystation flicker on one by one.
Hesper VaneA white-hot lance of lamplight runs down the hook, through the two in front and into the biggest one; the tallow-flies scatter like sparks.Fifty-four damage across the line · sixty-four from Hesper · two fall · Made into Legend - 3The studio directs it. It reads the passages the way a director reads a script, a companion’s own words too: who is there and what they look like, where they stand, who moves first, what lands and how hard, where the camera goes, how long to hold. Then it animates the whole thing, with your sentence typed out over the top and the grade it earned. Nobody draws a frame.
Made from your words. Your character as you described them, in the gear you are wearing; the foe as the world wrote it; the place you are standing in. Drawn in hi-bit pixel art, lit by the place's hour and weather.
Free, on every turn. Your own browser makes it in a few seconds, and it costs no tokens. In a fight, each turn plays in the fight window at the top of the page; any turn can be watched again under its passage. Want it sharper? The Weaver’s Cut has her rewrite the film’s script, for about 1,200 to 2,800 tokens.
Yours to keep. Save any turn as a video with the music of the moment, with or without its words: tall for TikTok, Shorts and Reels, wide for YouTube, or both.
Your readers watch it too. Publish the chapter and its films come with it. Readers can watch each turn under its passage, the whole chapter as one film, or a whole arc of chapters end to end. Pick any of a chapter’s turns and make them into one video, each turn’s words on a card before its film.
A legend that outlives you
Everything your character does is counted as it happens. The Weaver reads those counts, remembers your story, and hands out names for what stands out. Some of it stays in the world after you're gone.
The blade that did the killing can earn a name of its own, and so can the dog that walked beside you. A named companion becomes canon. Let it go, or die, and it walks the Lull alone, where other players can meet it.
Now and then a rat is not just a rat: it's Old Mother Grey, the Rat-Queen. There's only one of her. She's stronger, she carries more, and she's likelier to drop something with a name. Kill her and she's gone for everyone.
When a character dies, the most storied thing they carried is taken from the body. Your next character can track it down and win it back, with its name and history intact.
A running memory of your story and the people in it, so the Weaver can bring things back: the debt you owe, the bandit you spared, the inn where you always sleep.
Pay for a month at an inn and the room becomes yours in the world for good, a door other players can knock at. Keep buying from one keeper and you become known there.
What the rail is singing
These are real deeds by real players, kept by the world and told along the rail. Players who play nameless are sung of as "a stranger".
The talk of the road
- Oliver Flask found a counting brass tally-token under the cairn
Four faces of the Lull
The Lull is a ring of country with one Train running round it. It takes a real week to go all the way round. What you find depends on which way you walk from the rail.
The Iron Crown
Cold mountains to the north. Snow, high passes that close without warning, and some of the hardest fights in the game.
The Old Face
Red rock and dry canyons, older than anywhere else in the Lull, with a cliff wall behind it that nobody has ever climbed.
The Long Shadow
Deep forest, bogs and black lakes, full of beasts. Wear one down and you might be able to tame it and bring it with you.
The Roving Shore
The coast and the Lull's only sea. Shipwrecks, fishing towns, and news of what other players have been up to arriving on every boat.
Fight for it, with words
You write your attack, then you write your defence. There are thirty-three skills, from BLADE and FIRE to SOUND and STEALTH, and each one leaves an effect on whatever you hit: a burn, a chill, a crack in their guard. Stack different effects and they react with each other.
Death is real. If your character dies, they stay dead. Whatever killed them gets a name and a bounty, your body stays where it fell, and another player can find it and bury you. You start again as someone new.
Talk your way in
Good writing builds Rapport; careless writing costs Standing. Build enough Rapport and you can ask for what you came for: a name, a way in, a job, a favour. People remember how you treated them, and each part of the Lull has its own opinion of you, which changes prices and how strangers greet you.
Find what's hidden, and who comes with you
Search a place and you'll turn up people, items, trouble, even whole places nobody has found yet. If you find something first, you found it for everyone. Notice boards post bounties, and trouble nobody deals with grows into something worse.
Travel with up to three companions. Summon one with CONJURATION, tame a beast you've worn down with TAMING, or hire someone who trusts you. They fight beside you, join your conversations and search with you, and they get stronger as you do.
It keeps moving when you're gone
One clock for everyone. A day in the Lull is six real hours, so an hour there is fifteen minutes here. Every player is in the same part of the day.
One sky for everyone. Weather moves across the country for all players at once. The rain on this page is falling on someone's fight right now.
One Train. It goes all the way round the country once a real week, stopping at every station. A queen sleeps in the middle of the ring, and some days she stirs.
The named walk on their own. Every three hours the world takes a step without anyone playing. Named figures and lone companions travel, meet, fight, trade, and pick up what was left lying in the road.
Catch up when you're back. Away for a day? The game leads with what happened to the things you made canon, to the people you know, and near where you stand. If nothing did, it says so.
Finds come back to you. When another player finds your grave, picks up the sword you dropped, or knocks at your room, you hear about it on the Synth bell, by their character's name or as a nameless Flaskborn.
Everything you play is a chapter
End a chapter on any turn you like, give it a name, and publish it on Synth.pub, where anyone can read it, with the game's numbers for every turn beside the story if they want them.
All WyrmRail stories →Free to play. Pay only for more turns.
Every plan gets the whole game. The only difference is how many turns you can take each week. A turn you write yourself uses more than one of the offered options, so the numbers below are a range.
Free$0
about 12–28 turns a week
100,000 AI tokens a week. Unused tokens roll over all month.
Synth Pro$4.99 / month
about 125–285 turns a week
1,000,000 AI tokens a week, plus a Pro badge.
Synth Max$9.99 / month
about 310–710 turns a week
2,500,000 AI tokens a week, plus a Max badge.
Counted at 3,500–8,000 tokens a turn, including the Weaver’s script for its film: picking one of the offered options is at the low end, writing a long turn yourself at the high end. The same tokens cover writing on Synth.pub. Billing and cancelling are in the FAQ.
Every turn is also a short film, made in your browser from a short script the Weaver writes with her paragraph (a small part of the turn's tokens), and saved as a 1080p or 720p video for free. The one optional extra is the Weaver’s Cut, her rewrite of a film’s script once she has seen what played: about 1,200–2,800 tokens a turn (most near 1,600, never more than about 4,700), and only on the turns you choose. The exact count is always shown. How the films work.
The Train is slowing.