Darkwind: War on Wheels News

[p]Ready for Santa Claws' Slay Ride 2025? It's a deathrace with rockets and flamethrowers, open to everyone. [/p][p][/p][p]December 29th at 9pm GMT. Big prizes, obvs. Santa Claws is a generous bear-mutant, after all. [/p][p][/p][p]Join us in our Discord server for more details. https://discord.gg/HxFWPYj[/p][p][/p]

[p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][p]Our next game, The Necromancer's Tale, is a story-rich RPG in which you experience the origin story of a necromancer, and leverage all of your cunning, underhandedness and sneakiness to advance your black magic ambitions and take revenge on your enemies.[/p][p]The Necromancer's Tale has been in development for over 5 years, and features 400,000 words of narrative from 8 writers, as well as 180+ unique NPC with their own portraits and narrative plots. 25-50 hours for a playthrough.[/p][p]We have just released a new demo which features an in-depth dungeon crawl (with turn-based combat) in addition to ~3 hours of content from the start of the game.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][p]The full game releases in July. Wishlist it to get notified! :-)[/p]

Dexter's was settling into its usual lazy routine during the winter. A few old timers sat around, swigging their beers.

Everyone heard the roar of the v8 engine pulling in outside, and the stomp of feet coming to the door. Wait, was that one set of feet, or two?

The door burst open, and a huge bear-clawed mutant stood on the threshold, the year's first dusting of radioactive snow caught in his fur.

"Santa Claws, my friend!" shouted Dexter.

"Grooooowoar! Who's been naughty, and who's been nice this year!?" roared Santa.

"Listen up, I'm putting on two events this year- an arena combat followed by a deathrace. Top prize in each is a fire engine, magically chromed-up by my elves in my workshop in Morgan."

"December 29th, 20:00 and 21:30. With qualifiers earlier that day for the deathrace. Everyone's welcome!"

It’s 75 years after the solar apocalypse, and 65 years after the game itself started with our first racing/deathracing leagues. Welcome to the year 2100!

In Darkwind, one week of real-world time is one month in-game. So every 12 weeks, a new year starts.. a new season in the deathracing and combat leagues, a new season in the squad combat leagues, another year in which road warriors in heavily armed 1970s musclecars continue to dominate the world.

We still have active players who have been there from the start, but the in-game heroes of that time are long gone: characters in Darkwind age and die – if they are lucky enough to survive to old age despite the harsh post-apocalyptic world. Darkwind was described by Rock Paper Shotgun as a ’boutique’ MMO: a small online game with a fiercely loyal player-base who stick around for years. If you’re looking for some uncompromising turn-based vehicular combat with a persistent world and perma-death, there really isn’t anything else.

Here's some of our favorite fan fiction from over the years!

http://www.dark-wind.com/BrookesTale.pdf -- Brooke's tale is a 100 page short story which fleshes out the game world around the year 2050, in a really solid way

https://www.dark-wind.com/fp15.html -- The Birth of Deathracing captures the events of the Solar Apocalypse from a personal perspective

https://www.dark-wind.com/fp16.html -- In The Beginning explains what actually happened, and why the world burned in 2025/2026

The Necromancer's tale is an RPG we've been working on for a while. It's a dark, narrative-first RPG of revenge and raising the dead.

[Steam page just open for wishlists!]