Home · Guides · Relics of the East
Relics of the East
Twenty relics, five grades, one table. The odds are published in full, the ladder that protects you from bad luck is published in full, and none of it is for sale.
Storm a seat across the Narrow Sea and its vaults may answer. That is the whole of how a relic enters the world: there is no relic shop, no relic chest, no relic pack, and no way to buy a draw. A relic is the reward for taking eastern ground and holding the fleet that got you there.
The rules, before the table
You bear one. A lord may own the entire shelf and still fights with exactly one relic. Bearing is a choice you change in the Forge, and it is the borne relic — never the shelf — that rides your marches and stands on your walls.
The server mints them, and the server applies them. The relic you bear lives in a ledger on the server. Your game shows you a copy of that ledger; it cannot write to it. When you strike a seat another player holds, your client sends its bonus stack without the relic and the server adds the relic from its own record — so an edited save shows a sword that does nothing at a real wall.
Health is the one stat only a relic grants. Nothing else in Iron Realms raises how much punishment a host absorbs. That is why the Sword of Eddard Stark is worth chasing, and why the number is on this page rather than in a patch note nobody read.
A capture is eligible, not guaranteed. The lord you beat must have held the seat at least twelve hours, they must not be you, and a given seat pays at most one roll a day realm-wide. Those three rules exist so two accounts cannot hand a seat back and forth for a draw each.
The odds, in full
Every eligible capture draws once on the table below. The five grades take 0.5%, 1.5%, 4%, 10% and 24% of eligible captures between them — the remaining 60% pays Valyrian steel and materials and no relic at all. So most captures pay you and do not arm you, which is deliberate: the first eastern seat you take should be worth taking even though it almost certainly will not hand you a legend.
A grade whose every item you already own does not draw nothing. It pays Valyrian steel instead — one, two, four or eight by grade — so a full shelf keeps paying rather than turning your captures into blanks.
Bad luck has a ceiling
The Sword of Eddard Stark is 0.5% of eligible captures. After 200 eligible captures without one, that number begins to climb; by 400 it is certain. The counter is yours alone, it is shown to you when a relic drops, and nothing you can buy moves it.
The table
Every figure below is the figure the game uses. The site test that ships with this page reads them out of the same constants the client does, so this table cannot drift from the game without failing a build.
| Relic | Origin | Grants | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| V · Legend — 0.5% of eligible captures, shared between 1 item | |||
| The Sword of Eddard Stark | House Stark | +30% attack · +30% defence · +30% health | Cold to the hand in any weather and heavier at dusk than at dawn; the smiths of Braavos say it is counting the promises it has been made to keep. |
| IV · Myth — 1.5% of eligible captures, shared between 3 items | |||
| Brightroar | House Lannister | +20% attack · +20% defence | Gold-hilted and lion-pommelled, found again where no ship should have gone — the one blade whose home is the east because that is where it was lost. |
| Dark Sister | House Targaryen | +22% attack · +12% march speed | Slender, black, and faster than the hand that holds it, made for a rider who meant to arrive before the news of her did. |
| Lightbringer | The red priests of Essos | +25% attack · +10% health | A blade that gives off a low heat in the scabbard, warm to the hand on the coldest night, whether or not the prophecy it is named for is true. |
| III · Storied — 4% of eligible captures, shared between 5 items | |||
| Oathkeeper | House Stark | +12% defence · +12% health | Half of a greater blade, and it fights like something that knows it owes a debt. |
| Widow's Wail | House Stark | +12% attack · +12% health | The other half, and the crueller one — it bites as though it resents being made small. |
| Lady Forlorn | House Corbray | +16% defence · +6% health | A heart-shaped ruby in the pommel and a habit of ending duels nobody expected to win. |
| Nightfall | House Harlaw | +14% attack · +10% march speed | Reaver's steel with a moonstone pommel, at home on a deck that is moving. |
| Red Rain | House Drumm | +14% attack · +8% gather yield | Taken off a knight who thought a longship could not catch him, and named for what it left on the sand. |
| II · Sung — 10% of eligible captures, shared between 5 items | |||
| Dragonbinder | Old Valyria | +10% attack · +10% health | Six feet of black horn, and a note so low that the ground hears it before the ear does. |
| Arakh of the Khal | The Dothraki sea | +12% cavalry attack | Half sword, half scythe, and useless to anyone who has ever fought standing still. |
| Unsullied Spear | Astapor | +12% infantry defence | A plain ash shaft that has stood in a line ten thousand long and never once stepped back. |
| Titan's Key | Braavos | +10% defence · +5% health | A key to a door in the Titan's heel, or so the harbourmaster swears — nobody has found the door. |
| Glass Candle | Asshai | +10% march speed · +5% gather yield | It will not light for you; but hold it and the road east seems shorter, and the veins richer. |
| I · Told — 24% of eligible captures, shared between 6 items | |||
| Lysene Bow | Lys | +8% archers attack | Goldenheart wood, strung by a city that sells everything and gives nothing away. |
| Qohorik Bracer | Qohor | +6% defence | Blackened steel from the smiths who keep a secret the whole world has tried to buy. |
| Volantene Tiger Cloak | Volantis | +6% attack | Striped silk over a mail collar, cut for a man who expects the debate to end in the street. |
| Myrish Lens | Myr | +6% march speed | A brass tube that turns a smudge on the horizon into a banner, an hour before it would have turned into a problem. |
| Pentoshi Ledger | Pentos | +8% gather yield | A magister's book of weights and tolls; whoever carries it somehow pays less at every gate. |
| Dothraki Bell | The Dothraki sea | +4% attack · +4% march speed | A single bell on a braid of horsehair, and every host you ride with rides a little faster to earn the next. |
What a relic is not
It is not for sale, and it never will be. The charter this game is built on says that nothing purchasable raises your ceiling, and a relic plainly would. There is no relic in the store, no relic in a pack, and no gem price on a draw.
It is not a random box. Nothing here is sold at all, so there is nothing to dress up: the table is published, the rates are published, the bad-luck ladder is published, and the consolation is published. You can read exactly what a capture is worth before you make it.
It is not a second power ladder. Twenty relics exist and one is borne, so the gap between a lord with a full shelf and a lord with one good relic is the difference between two single bonuses — not between two games.
How to win your first
- Raise a harbour (Keep 10) and build hulls — the arithmetic is in The Navy and the Crossing.
- Cross with a host large enough to storm a seat, not just to forage. The refusal names what is missing in the order you would build it: a harbour, then ships, then a smaller party.
- Take an eastern seat from a lord who has held it at least half a day. See Essos for what the east is and what it is not.
- Bear what you win, in the Forge, beside the Valyrian blades.