Lord of Bebbanburg

How a reign works

You rule by judgement. Each season — spring, summer, harvest, winter — the hall brings you one matter, and you decide it. A thief taken a second time with four children the hall can name. Two families and a hedge they have argued over for three generations. A bishop's warm letter that asks, four sentences from the end, for a manor. Three Danish traders wanting a berth, with no weapons in sight, which is itself a kind of statement. Every ruling moves several of your eight numbers at once, and almost never all in the same direction.

Three of those numbers are what you spend: silver, grain and warriors. Four are who you answer to: the people of the valley, the Church, the Danes and Wessex. The eighth is honour, which is the only one you cannot buy back. Take any of them to nothing and the reign ends, each in its own way and for its own stated reason — the hall does not simply announce that you have lost.

Consequences arrive late, on purpose

Some rulings set something running that no later moot mentions for two winters. The blood-feud you settled cheaply comes back wearing different clothes. The hostage boy you took as surety for a peace grows up, and is good with the men, and his father stops writing. The priest you humoured writes south about the customs kept in this valley, and the reply arrives before you know the letter went. A consequence that lands in the same season is a puzzle; one that lands two years later is a reign, and that is the difference this game is built around.

Today's omen is the same for everybody

One omen a day, drawn from the date itself, identical for every player anywhere in the world — a raven on the gatepost facing inland, the wind in the east for nine days, kittens in the mail chest that nobody will move. It shifts what today's rulings are worth by a single point on one of the eight numbers, and only when that number was already moving. It cannot decide anything on its own. It exists so that two strangers can find out they had the same morning.

Your reign is yours, and it travels

A reign runs for weeks of real time across as many visits as you like. It is kept in your own browser's storage, and it is also a saga code — one string holding the season, the ledger and every ruling you have given. Copy it to carry a reign to another device, or hand it to somebody else to continue from where you left it. The code and the save are the same thing, so the two can never disagree with each other.

There is no account, no sign-in and no network. Nothing about your reign leaves your machine, and there is no code on this page that could send it anywhere — pages in this corner are forbidden to make requests at all, and that is enforced by a test rather than by anybody remembering.

How it ends

Many ways down, one way through. Starvation, an empty hall, a valley that quietly stops bringing you its quarrels, a king whose patience you spent carefully over years, ships that stop standing off, or a season in which two men in open hall decline to take your oath on a small matter. Endure twelve winters instead and the seat holds — not won, held, which is the only verb this seat has ever taken. Either way the page writes your reign's chronicle from the rulings you actually gave, names an epithet you earned rather than chose, and hands you a link that opens on it.

Argue about it in the forum

The board's forum has a room for this. Post your chronicle, defend the winter you closed the gate, and be told by a stranger — at length — exactly which ruling cost you the seat four years before you noticed.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

This is an unofficial fan game inspired by The Last Kingdom — the television series and the novels of Bernard Cornwell it is based on — naming the work, its setting and its premise under nominative fair use. It is a free, unofficial fan tribute, made for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Carnival Film & Television, Netflix, or Bernard Cornwell and his publishers.

Every moot, ruling and line of the chronicle on this page was written fresh for it. No dialogue, novel text, script text, scene, still, logo or artwork from any television series or book is reproduced anywhere in it. Iron Realms — the strategy game the rest of this site is about — is an original fantasy world with its own map, its own houses and its own art, and has no connection to the world of The Last Kingdom. This corner is kept separate on purpose, and nothing in it should be read as suggesting otherwise.

The rest of the corner

The Last Kingdom wing has the trivia rounds and the character pages, and more games on its roadmap. The fan tributes hub has the Westeros, Supernatural, King of the Hill and Fringe wings alongside this one, and the free tools that are not about anybody's fiction. If you would rather play something with a map in it, Iron Realms is free and runs in a browser tab.