What breaks first — your isen, or your troth?
A grim solo RPG in a cold Norse frontier. A saga no one else will tell.
A Machine Game Master narrates your saga and responds to the choices you make — no branching menus, no script to uncover. The Isenmarch answers in cold, spare prose, and the story bends around what you do. It plays to find out what happens. So do you.
A full dice ruleset runs beneath the story — you see the saga, not the machinery. Forge a character across five ways of being: Fleet, Mettle, Isen, Sleight, Wits. Swear vows and mark their progress toward triumph or ruin. Resolve the hard moments on the dice: your action die against the two dark dice of fate.
The Wrackshore gives up its dead slowly. The Frithlands hold their weather like a grudge. Iron is sacred here, oaths bind, and the ruins are just ruins — old and worn and strange. Bog iron. Black water. A raven that calls once and does not call again.
Paths, companions, rituals and combat talents shape a character no one else will play. The Machine Game Master seeds people, places and troubles you won't see coming. Begin again and the Isenmarch is the same — and nothing is.
Iron is sacred here and oaths are currency. The old roads go somewhere they no longer go. What lives in the black water was not put there by anyone. You will not be told what any of it means — you will find out, or you won't, and the Isenmarch will be the same either way.
The ruleset adaptation. The world and its systems — regions, oracles, the way a vow accrues and breaks. Every location's description, written before any image of it existed. The interface. The voice the Machine Game Master is held to. All of the code.
No scene art here was drawn by hand. The scene art, music and ambient audio were generated during development — the images from prompts built out of the world text that already existed — and then put through a fixed pipeline: cropped, downscaled to a native pixel grid, quantized to a palette chosen per scene with dithering off, and upscaled only at whole-number multiples, so no pixel is ever half a pixel. The smallest icons are the exception: the 16, 24 and 32 pixel rungs and the on-screen keyboard's glyph were drawn by hand at their native size, because nothing survives being shrunk that far.
That last part isn't a detail. Dithering on, against one shared palette, gave us speckled skies tinted pink. So dithering is off and every scene carries its own palette.
Forty-four plates ship: nine regions and thirty-five zones. The village of Pale Hollow was reframed, rotated, rebuilt around its longhouse, and passed over once more before it was allowed in.
The Machine Game Master's responses are generated live as you play.
We'd rather tell you exactly where the line is than let you find it yourself.
Isentroth's Machine Game Master is exactly that — a machine. What you type is sent from the game to our server and on to Anthropic's Claude, which generates the narration you read back. Anthropic does not train on it.
Your text is kept for 12 months and then erased. Logs are also scored in batches to improve the Machine Game Master. If you opt in to helping with that, your exchanges are kept past 12 months; if you opt out — or are never asked — they're erased at 12 months. Ask us to delete them sooner and we will, either way.
The scene art, music and ambient audio in the game were generated during development and art-directed by the team. Isentroth is rated 18+.
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