TAVERN BREAK

How it's made

Who builds it

One person. Every screen, every rule, every line of the engine is hand-assembled by a solo developer — no studio, no funding, no growth team. If something's broken, the person who wrote it is the person reading your report.

The games

Six complete games run on one engine. THE LAST LANTERN is compatible with fifth-edition (5E) rules. The other five — RED CENTURY, THE BRIGHT AGE, THE GALLOWS TIDE, THE HUNDRED BANNERS, THE MIDNIGHT LEDGER — are original settings with original rules, each with its own hand-written rules corpus the Game Master is held to.

The dice

Every roll is made on the server, the moment you declare — not by the AI, not by the host, not by you. Each roll is printed in full in the table's ledger (the die, the bonus, the target, the verdict) and an automated audit recomputes every one. Nobody can fudge — not even the GM. If the narration ever disagrees with the dice, the dice win and the engine corrects the record.

Where the AI is — plainly

The Game Master's narration is written by an AI (Anthropic's Claude), working under each game's rules corpus, a codex of table laws, and the validators above. The AI narrates; code adjudicates. Rules, dice, health, inventory, and consequences live in a rules engine the AI cannot override. In co-op mode, a human runs the table and the AI is their copilot — prep, improv, and bookkeeping, with the human's word final.

The art and music — honestly

The art is a mix, credited plainly: licensed human-made pixel art — Time Fantasy tiles and sprites by Jason Perry (finalbossblues.com) and the Winlu sci-fi interior tilesets — alongside AI-assisted sprites generated in a pixel style we built and curated by hand, plus original music produced for Tavern Break with AI assistance. We don't claim the AI-assisted pieces are hand-drawn, and we license and credit the human work we build on.

What it costs

Sitting at a table is free — a player never pays to play. Hosts spend Tabs (story credits) to keep the fire lit, because every story beat costs real compute. No ads, no data selling; the credits are the business model, all of it.

"The AI runs the table so the humans can play."
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