Boxy

My goal for Boxy is the type of game that LitRPG and GameLit fans (such as myself) love to read about. No, not the immersive VR pods with feeding tubes, simulated pain that feels like pain and coffee that smells like coffee. The engineers will have to work on that one. Rather, Boxy aims to be the game that our esteemed main characters (such as yourself) come to play for the challenge, adventure, lore, player-directed economic and social systems, and unique, AI-directed quests and world events.

The worlds of the Boxy System have been plagued with a series of meteor strikes that the colonists call Starfall, where a star (of sorts) shatters high above the world, scattering its fragments across the lands. Each metallic fragment is both a valuable crafting material and an omen of the dark and powerful world bosses that can emerge with these events. These bosses are the manifestation of deeper wounds in the world, each made by a fallen fragment interfering with a place, its history and essence.

One fragment has never landed. Aurelith, the Star's Own Herald, remains curiously caught in the upper sky as the rest of the "star" falls without it.

Starfall is both catastrophe and season: meteors crash down, scattering stardust and starmetal and heralding the return of the world's long-banished bosses and their minions, horrors dormant for so long they had faded into myth. Scientists cannot fit their models to the material. Some suggest it may have originated in the planet's own core, although nobody has ever dug deep enough to test the theory.

Order and safety are greatest around the Spawn Sanctuaries: protected towns with markets, farms, apartments, guards, teachers, and roads leading outward. Beyond them, the population thins and the consequences of Starfall become harder to contain. Creatures grow stronger as deep crevasses reveal lost civilizations and more fragments of the Starfall mystery. Danger rises with one's distance from Spawn, as the Sanctuary is where heroes have successfully pushed the broken world back. The frontier is where danger still holds the advantage.

Your character is a new arrival at one of these sanctuaries. You arrive with empty hands, but the Sanctuary always welcomes newcomers: it provides public food, temporary shelter, work, instruction, and veteran sponsorship.

Your character might be a displaced survivor, a wandering colonist, a refugee, a pilgrim, a fortune-seeker, or simply somebody looking for ground on which to begin again. Your reason for being there is therefore more practical than cosmic: you have come to make a life in a world that still has room for one.