A first-person, open-world RPG set in the region of Chalice: a province still living in the wreckage of a kingdom that stopped showing up, 130 years on.
The old kingdom didn't fall to invasion. It fell to neglect. A succession war meant armies stopped getting paid and tax collectors stopped making their rounds. Authority didn't collapse so much as quietly stop arriving. Whoever was already on the ground had to decide what came next.
Two answers took hold. Garrison troops left unpaid and unrelieved became Anvilborn, trading protection and steel for a living. Provincial administrators kept doing the only job they knew, and became the Ledger, a bureaucracy that still runs, still collects, and still keeps the peace, answering to no crown at all anymore.
The Ledger's system still works, which is exactly the problem: some of the people running it have quietly started working it for themselves, and nobody above them is left to notice. That's not common knowledge. It's the kind of thing a player can be the one to uncover.
Magic, where it exists at all, is old, rare, and tied to plants that don't grow anywhere convenient. The Verdant Circle trades in something that might be real magic and might just be very good, very secretive alchemy, and the game is built to keep you honestly unsure which.
Procedurally generated terrain, towns, and NPCs, with simulated lives and a per-part damage system underneath the fights.
In-depth alchemy, blacksmithing, and brewing tied to real jobs: farm the barley, brew the beer, sell it yourself.
What you do for a living, and how, opens some doors and closes others. Thieving gets you information; it also gets you watched.