ASHAVETH

What Ashaveth is

Ashaveth is an original single-player grimdark RPG that runs entirely in a web browser. Made by Design Delight Studio and currently at version 1.2.0, it is free, requires no download and no account, and is rated for adults 18 and over. A campaign spans 50 levels across five distinct biomes.

You start in the last town, Sallowmere, and climb from level 1 to the level 50 cap. Progress is saved in your browser, and the title screen offers Export Save and Import Save so a run can move between devices. The game is turn-based and text-forward — one player character against one enemy at a time — carried by 192 pre-generated art assets rather than a 3D engine, which is why it keeps working after the connection drops.

Everything in Ashaveth is original to Design Delight Studio: the setting, the 72 monsters, the five bosses, the three named residents of Sallowmere, and the forge-only sword called Godsbane. It is not based on or affiliated with any other franchise. Its lineage is the 1990s BBS door game — a daily budget of fights, a real-calendar reset, a death penalty measured in net worth — rebuilt with a story that takes those conventions seriously.

The trailer

Twenty-four seconds, with sound. It will not start until you ask it to, and it does not download until then either — the file is 6 MB and preload is set to none, so arriving on this page costs you nothing. The same film ships inside the game's own manual.

What it looks like

These nine captures are from the live v1.2.0 build at ashaveth.ddsboston.com, taken on 25 July 2026 — not mock-ups. They show the town hub, a boss fight in progress, the four-stage forge, an NPC arc panel, a biome, two pages of the in-game Almanac, and the epilogues gallery.

Scroll or swipe the strip. Nine captures, live build, 1.2.0.

The world and the Red

The world of Ashaveth is a palimpsest — a page that was written on before. Something is scraping it clean, and it has reached the last town, Sallowmere. The Red is the first fire, the force unwriting everything. You are Sallowmere's final line against it.

The premise drives every system in the game. As the Red advances it does not merely destroy — it erases, removing things as though they were never written. Sallowmere is where the last people, and the last record of them, still hold. The tavern-keeper Wren is building that record even as the Red unwrites it, which is why her arc matters mechanically and not just narratively: finishing it puts your name in the one ledger the erasure was built to miss.

The Red's own bestiary entry states the tension plainly: it is the first fire, but the holy was made to end gods. That single design note explains its stat block — 300 defense, resistant to FIRE, weak to HOLY — and it is the reason a 750 gold flask of Blessed Oil is a serious tactical decision at level 50.

The world is a page that has been written on before. Something is scraping it clean, and it has reached the last town. The job: get strong enough to reach the Red before it reaches Sallowmere. The Sallowmere Almanac, v1.2.0

The five biomes

Ashaveth has five biomes tied to fixed level bands: The Whispering Woods (levels 1–9), The Drowned Host (10–19), The Obsidian Peaks (20–29), The Void Edge (30–39), and The Dragon's Domain (40–50). Each band raises enemy difficulty as you climb toward the cap at 50, and each ends in a gated boss.

The Whispering Woods

Bandits work the roads — and here and there the trees repeat themselves, like a page copied one time too many.

Levels 1–9

The Drowned Host

A black mire that swallowed an army whole. The mud remembers the shape of the men in it. Osric will not speak of it sober.

Levels 10–19

The Obsidian Peaks

Black volcanic rock with the heat coming up through it. People climb here to burn something — or to kneel to the thing that burns.

Levels 20–29

The Void Edge

The margin of the world, where the ink runs out. What is left up here does not keep its shape, and neither will you if you linger.

Levels 30–39

The Dragon's Domain

Ash to the horizon and bone beneath it. This close to the Red, the air itself has started to forget how to be cold.

Levels 40–50

The biomes are documented in the Sallowmere Almanac, the in-game manual whose atlas maps every zone you can reach and prints the closing boss's stat block next to it. Each level band is fixed, so the route from the woods to the Dragon's Domain is the same 50-level arc for every player. Across those bands the bestiary holds 72 monsters: 67 ordinary enemies and the 5 bosses.

The five bosses

Five bosses gate the campaign, one every ten levels: Arachne, The Broodmother (level 10, 970 HP), Golgoth, The Rot Giant (level 20, 3,900 HP), High Cultist Malakor (level 30, 7,200 HP), Xel'Nath, The Void Walker (level 40, 10,000 HP), and Ashaveth, the Red (level 50, 13,000 HP). Each has explicit damage-type weaknesses and resistances.

Boss HP is not the interesting number — the weakness table is. Four of the five bosses are weak to HOLY, and every one of them resists something you are likely to be carrying. Arriving with the wrong damage type halves your output at 0.5×; arriving with the right one multiplies it by 1.5×.

Arachne, The Broodmother

Burn the silk. Arrows glance off the chitin, so PIERCING is the one thing that will not serve you here. The only boss in the game that is not weak to HOLY.

Level 10 · 970 HP

Golgoth, The Rot Giant

Undead rot: burn it or bless it. Consume Offspring heals him 20% of his maximum — 780 HP at a time — so he is a pure damage check. Out-hit the regeneration or come back heavier.

Level 20 · 3,900 HP

High Cultist Malakor

A blasphemer bares his throat to the holy. The void he serves feeds on magic, so MAGIC is wasted on him. He is also the man carrying the ember Vosk needs.

Level 30 · 7,200 HP

Xel'Nath, The Void Walker

Order unwrites the unwritten. Steel finds nothing to cut: both SLASHING and PIERCING are resisted behind 165 defense. Reality Tear lands at 3.5× — and telegraphs first.

Level 40 · 10,000 HP

Ashaveth, the Red

It is the first fire, so fire is worthless against it — but it is a god, and the holy was made to end gods. Apocalypse Breath hits for 4.5× and is announced a round early, every time.

Level 50 · 13,000 HP · 300 DEF

The final fight is deliberately plain in structure. Ashaveth, the Red has one stat block that does not change mid-fight — there is no surprise second form to survive, and no hidden HP bar behind the first.

Ashaveth, the Red — Level 50, 13,000 HP, 470 STR, 300 DEF. Weak to HOLY, resists FIRE. One unbroken stat block, no phase two. Final boss stat block, data/bestiary.ts

The forge: Godsbane

Godsbane is the only blade that bites the Red, and it cannot be bought at any price — it is flagged quest-only and filtered out of every shop tab, the sell tab and the gift list. Vosk forges it in four stages: The Shard, The Heat, The Edge, and The Quench. Finished, it deals 2.5× damage to the Red. The Quench permanently costs 10% of your maximum HP.

The forge is the central progression goal of the game. No shop sells a weapon that harms the Red; the only path is to earn each component from a fallen boss and bring it to Vosk, whose regard must clear a rising bar at every stage — 40, then 55, then 70, then 80. A player who never talks to him can still fight the Red, with a lesser blade, and the ending says so.

1. The Shard

   Marsh-iron, pulled from the thing that ate the Drowned Host. "That iron has been dead a long time. Dead iron is the only kind that takes this work."

   Golgoth — slainLevel 20Regard 40

2. The Heat

   An ember of the first fire, off the cultist who kept it lit. God-metal only softens in the fire it came out of, and Malakor is the last man carrying a piece of that fire.

   Malakor — slainLevel 30Regard 55

3. The Edge

   Unwritten ore, from the place where the ink runs out. The Red unmakes edges, so an edge cannot cut it — unless the edge is made of the unmaking.

   Xel'Nath — slainLevel 40Regard 70

4. The Quench

   A blade like this is quenched in the death of a world, and there is only the one on offer. It permanently costs 10% of your maximum HP — floored, so it can never leave you unable to function. Carrying it unquenched means carrying a weaker weapon into the last fight.

   No bossLevel 40Regard 80−10% max HP, permanent

The three of Sallowmere

Three named NPCs hold the last town: Osric, an old soldier who commanded the host that drowned in the marsh; Wren, the tavern-keeper building the Record of everything the Red unwrites; and Vosk, a one-eyed dwarf smith. Each tracks six relationship axes across six stages, and Osric and Wren each carry a four-stage arc.

Osric

He commanded the host that drowned in the marsh and carries every man of it. He drinks so the water stays quiet. His arc, THE DROWNED HOST, is one half of the key to the other way through.

Arc: 4 stages · +12 STR · +25 STR companion

Wren

She remembers everything — not a figure of speech — and is building the Record of what the Red is unwriting. Her arc, THE RECORD, is gated on trust, not affection.

Arc: 4 stages · reveals enemy weaknesses

Vosk

One eye gone milk-blind at the forge, forty years on the god-killer. He alone forges Godsbane, and only for a hand he trusts to 80.

Gates all 4 forge stages

Relationships are tracked on six independent axes — affection, trust, respect, fear, attraction, and manipulation — and resolve into six named stages: Stranger, Acquaintance, Friend, Close, Lover, and Soulbound. Fear and manipulation are real axes with real consequences; you can move a relationship without being liked. Turning in a quest is worth +10 affection, the largest single push available, and each person will give you one quest per day.

The arcs pay in mechanics, not cutscenes

Both arcs are gated, staged, and load-bearing. Osric's second stage is a permanent stat gain and his fourth puts him beside you for the rest of the run. Wren's third grants an intel flag the combat screen already reads, and her fourth writes your name into the ledger the ending quotes back at you.

Wren's gates are the design argument in miniature. Hers is the only arc that reads trust rather than affection, because a player can be adored and still not be someone you hand the only surviving archive to. That distinction is the whole character.

Each NPC also keeps a journal. After a meaningful conversation an NPC writes an entry, in their own voice, about who you are becoming. Those entries persist for the whole campaign, and up to three of them are read back to you at the ending.

The other way through

Ashaveth can be finished without fighting the dragon — but the route is earned, not offered. Complete both Osric's four-stage arc and Wren's four-stage arc, then travel to the Red's lair. An entry scene opens in which you walk in with the blade lowered, and the encounter resolves to MERCY or WRITER without combat. AMBER, the kill ending, is withheld on this route by design.

This is not a difficulty setting or a mercy rule. It is a gate with a precise condition, and the code that opens it is one line: both arcs complete, all eight stages. Miss either one and the lair behaves normally — you fight, or you leave.

The design argument is stated by the withheld ending. AMBER is the ending you reach by killing the Red, and it is deliberately unreachable on the non-combat route: you cannot have the kill ending without drawing a blade. The route does not make the game easier — it makes the last decision honest.

Both arcs complete, or the lair is just a lair. The non-combat gate

Combat and progression

Combat is turn-based, one enemy at a time. Weakness deals 1.5× and resistance 0.5×, with a 15% chance to critically hit for double damage. Both directions of damage curve hyperbolically, so neither armour nor penetration ever reaches immunity. Two safety rules — a one-round telegraph above 2.0× and a 48% single-hit cap — mean no boss can delete you without warning.

The telegraph rule

Any boss ability at 2.0× damage or above announces itself a full round early, and on that winding-up round the boss only makes a basic attack. Apocalypse Breath, the Red's 4.5× finisher, is always telegraphed. The round you see the warning is the round you heal, guard, or accept the hit.

The numbers, as shipped

The three classes answer armour differently

Class choice is not a stat preference; it is a decision about how you intend to solve 300 defense at level 50. Every character also earns two shared passives late: Void Hunger at level 30 returns 15% of damage dealt as health, and Fracture at level 45 gives a 20% chance to strike twice.

Blessed Oil is the parity tool

A Mage gets HOLY for free through Divine Smite. Four of the five bosses are weak to HOLY — every one except Arachne — including the Red. Blessed Oil, at 750 gold, coats your weapon so every strike carries the HOLY tag for the rest of one fight. That flask is how a Warrior or Rogue buys the same 1.5× the Mage was born with. At level 50, against 300 defense and 13,000 HP, it is one of the most consequential purchases in the game.

The daily loop and its stakes

Each real day grants 15 fights, resetting at 12:01 AM local time along with 3 tavern ales; each ale costs 10 gold and buys 5 more fights, to a ceiling of 25. You gain 3 stat points per level, and the level curve starts at 500 XP and scales by 1.12 per level. Gold left in the bank earns 5% interest per day, compounding. The Inn heals at 1 gold per missing HP.

Death is where the economy bites. You lose 15% of your total net worth — carried and banked gold combined — taken from carried gold first, then from the bank. Banking mitigates the loss but does not prevent it: there is no fully safe vault. You revive at 10% of maximum HP, the loss is recoverable, and there is no permadeath.

The armour bench

Ashaveth, the Red carries 300 defense, and your damage against armour follows one curve: 340 / (defense + 340). This bench applies that curve to the shipped class constants so you can see, before you commit 50 levels, exactly how much of your damage each class keeps against the last boss.

The headline the bench keeps producing: a Warrior's basic swing keeps 53.1% of its damage against the Red, a Rogue's keeps 67.3% because it sees every point of armour at 0.55×, Mighty Blow keeps 79.1%, and Divine Smite keeps 100% because it does not see armour at all. Layer HOLY on top and the whole figure moves by half again; layer Godsbane on top of that and it multiplies by 2.5.

The armoury

Ashaveth ships 68 item images: 44 named items plus a 24-cell fallback matrix covering every rarity and type combination, so procedurally generated loot always has art. Rarity runs COMMON, UNCOMMON, RARE, EPIC, LEGENDARY, MYTHIC. Godsbane and the four Mythic relics are quest-only or drop-only and appear in no shop.

Quest blades and the relics of the erased draft

Six items exist outside the economy entirely. The two Godsbane states are flagged quest-only and filtered out of every shop tab. The four Mythic relics are objects the Red failed to unwrite, surfacing from worlds the Palimpsest was written over — and they drop at a rate of 0.05%, one in two thousand, from a single constant shared by every code path so no player can grind for an item the game would never give them.

Weapons

Armor

Accessories

Consumables and materials

The fallback matrix

Loot can be generated at runtime, which means an item can exist that no artist ever drew. Rather than ship a missing image, the game carries one plate for every rarity and type pair — 4 types × 6 rarities = 24 cells. Any generated item resolves to its cell, so the inventory is never broken. The bestiary got the same treatment in v1.2.0: 12 monster family plates now sit between the manifest and a broken image.

The 24-cell fallback matrix: every type and rarity pair has committed art.

Type	COMMON	UNCOMMON	RARE	EPIC	LEGENDARY	MYTHIC
WEAPON
ARMOR
ACCESSORY
CONSUMABLE

The endings

Ashaveth has three endings — AMBER, MERCY and WRITER — with no score and no correct answer. AMBER requires killing the Red. MERCY and WRITER can be reached either after the fight or through the earned non-combat route. The finale reads your actual save file and quotes back up to three real journal entries the NPCs wrote about your playthrough.

Because the finale reads the save directly, it reflects the campaign you actually played: how you treated Osric, Wren and Vosk; whether you forged Godsbane or walked in without it; whether you arrived with a blade at all. Nothing is ranked. There is no points total, because the game does not believe one of your choices was correct.

New in v1.2.0: the title screen keeps an epilogues gallery. Every ending you reach is recorded there and can be read again without replaying to it, and the counter tells you how many of the three you have found. The finale itself is now staged rather than dumped, and the art drifts behind it on a re-view.

The thematic centre is the distinction the game insists on: being recorded is not the same as being bonded. In a world that is a palimpsest, what survives erasure is not what was felt — it is what was written down. Reach them unspoiled; the words read back to you are the ones you earned.

No ads where it counts

No advertisement ever appears during combat, during dialogue, on the ending, on the death screen, or after a boss kill, and there are no interstitials anywhere. Those rules are enforced in code and covered by tests. The studio's own merchandise is offered in exactly three places where you are already at rest.

This is worth stating plainly because the previous build got it wrong. A rotating banner sat outside the screen switch, which put it on screen during combat, during the ending, and when you died — the game would quote Wren's journal back at you, tell you nobody would ever add a line to your page, and four inches above that a banner would rotate to something about nostalgia. That banner is deleted.

Two details make the policy trustworthy rather than decorative. First, none of the frequency state touches your save — it lives in its own browser key, so there are zero save migrations and nothing about a forty-day run can break over an advertisement. Second, the rules are assertions in the test suite, so a future change that puts an offer back into a boss fight fails the build.

The player must never be interrupted, and must never be lied to. services/wares.ts, the stated principle

Art and engineering

Ashaveth v1.2.0 ships 192 pre-generated art assets — 84 monster plates, 68 items, 26 NPC portraits, 5 locations and 9 ending plates — and passes 667 unit tests across 32 test files with 0 TypeScript errors. The entry bundle is 370 kB, compressing to 122 kB gzipped. AI features run behind a Cloudflare Worker that keeps the API key server-side.

The art is generated offline and committed, so nothing is drawn at play time and the game costs nothing per session to render. It is also why the game keeps working when the connection does not: every illustration you will see is already on your device after the first load. The 24-cell item matrix and the 12 monster family plates exist for the same reason — procedural content must never produce a missing image.

The stack is React 19 and TypeScript 5.8 on Vite 6, with Tailwind for layout. The API key never reaches your browser: every model call routes through a Cloudflare Worker that holds the key as a Worker secret under layered spend caps including a hard daily ceiling, a model fallback chain degrades to canned text rather than failing, and a build-time scan fails the build if a credential is ever inlined into the bundle.

Frequently asked questions