Explore With Your Ancestors · Free beta
Adventure with your ancestors.
Pick your clan. Pick a year. Land anywhere on earth — Edinburgh in 1450, London in 1940, any city in any century between. Make a small tweak to history, walk beside your ancestors, or simply explore — with a companion of your own name at your side. Any year from 500 to 1945, any ground with a name.
A taste of play
Skye, at Beltane, 1551.
Free Explore · A MacDonald · Trotternish, Skye
Beltane, 1551
The fires are lit on every ridge of Trotternish tonight, and the cattle are driven between them for luck before the summer shielings. You come down from the pass with the smoke at your back and your grandfather’s name in your mouth — a name that opens some doors on this peninsula and bars others, for the MacLeods of Dunvegan claim this ground too, and the quarrel is older than anyone at the fires.
A herdsman hails you by the second fire. He has a jug, a dog with one ear, and news: a galley from Sleat put in at Duntulm two days past, and men are asking after every stranger on the road. His eyes say he has decided nothing about you yet.
Take a path — or write your own move. The chronicler answers either way.
How it plays
- 1
Pick your clan
Walk in as one of nearly 500 documented families, with their allies and their grudges — or travel nameless and earn every welcome.
- 2
Pick a year
Anywhere from 500 to 1945. The year is absolute: prices, roads, rumours, wars and kings all answer to it.
- 3
Land anywhere on earth
A Hebridean shore, a Welsh mountain pass — or Tenochtitlan, Constantinople, Kyoto. Any place with a name is ground the story can open on.
- 4
Walk in
The chronicler sets the opening scene and offers three paths. Take one, or write your own move — the world answers either way.
Ways to play
Most adventures are simply this: you, the land, and the year.
Free Explore is the classic way, and it needs nothing more than a place and a date. The other ways stack a shape on top of it — a crown to win, a history to bend, a story to step inside.
Free Explore
The classic wayWalk the land. Meet its people. See what the year holds.
No quest but the road; no ledger but the journal. Wander anywhere, talk to anyone, and let the year reveal itself.
Tracks · the journal · your standing
World Conquest
Raise the clan. Take the isles. Take it all.
Muster men, win allies, and carve a kingdom season by season. Armies eat, winters bite, and every gain provokes a rival.
Tracks · territories · armies · treasury · allies
Butterfly Effect
Change one thing. Live in what follows.
Name a single divergence, then live inside its compounding aftermath — the ripples reach places you never expected.
Tracks · the change · its ripples
The Legend
Step inside a story the clan still tells.
Play the days around a documented event from the record — as it happened, or as you make it happen.
Tracks · the record · your thread
Step through somewhere real
Every door opens on true ground.
These are real places from the Clan Rising atlas, in years the record remembers. Pick one and the creator is already half filled.
Or land far beyond the atlas — any place on earth the year knew.
Questions
- Can I go anywhere?
- Yes — and you can begin anywhere too. Name any place on earth, Tenochtitlan to Kyoto, and the story opens there. Geography is never a wall; travel simply costs what it cost then: days on a drover's road, weeks on a sea passage. The year you chose holds absolute wherever you stand.
- Do I have to pick a clan?
- No. A name gives you kin, standing and old grudges the moment you arrive — but travelling unaffiliated is a fine way to play, and every welcome you win is your own.
- Is every playthrough different?
- Yes. The chronicler writes each turn fresh around your deeds. Two travellers can begin on the same shore in the same spring and live entirely different years.
- What does it cost?
- Your opening chapter and your first move are free in the beta. After that the chronicle pauses — full access is a small supporter price, or you can ask to be told when it opens.
- Is it suitable for younger readers?
- The world carries the weight of its history — raids, wars and hard winters — but it is written as family adventure: no gore, no romance, and the darkest chapters of the record are history to be walked through, never deeds to perform.