A free browser-based dark fantasy RPG
Shadowrealm: Age of Darkness is a persistent browser RPG set in a world of shadow and conflict. No download required, play directly in your browser at any pace, from any device. Travel between four dark cities, build your character across eight ranks of power, and carve your name into the realm’s history.
It runs on real time even when you are not logged in: energy, health, and mana refill gradually around the clock, so a few minutes here and there is enough to keep growing. Underneath the crime-and-conquest theme sits a genuine player economy (a marketplace, a bank, a rotating black market), real player-versus-player systems (open PVP, a ranked arena, formal duels), and a social layer of guilds, chat, and friends, all free to engage with from your very first session.
Everything in Shadowrealm costs energy, and energy refills on a clock rather than on a button. That single rule shapes how the game is played: you spend what you have on the deeds worth doing, decide whether to bank the proceeds or risk them, and come back later to a fuller pool. A session can be two minutes or two hours, and neither is the wrong way to play it.
The core loop is deeds. There are 24 of them, each with a real success chance rather than a guaranteed payout, ranging from begging strangers for coin to moving against the Shadow King himself. Failure is a genuine outcome: you can be caught, wounded, or thrown in a cell, and the jail is a real place other players can break you out of. Around that sit the systems you unlock as you climb: crafting, heists, a stronghold to build, a stable to fill, and an Ascendancy tree for players who reach the top and choose to start again stronger.
There is no season wipe and no server reset. A character you make today is the same character in six months, with every coin and every scar still on it, which means progress accumulates over weeks of ordinary play instead of over one long sitting.
The economy is shared rather than personal. Gold comes out of the same world other players are trading in, so marketplace prices, the value of a rare drop and the cost of a casino are all set by what people are actually willing to pay. Player-versus-player combat is real too: fights persist damage, a defender genuinely loses health whether or not they were online to see it, and the arena keeps a ranked season.
It is also deliberately a game of criminal ambition rather than heroism. You start as a nobody in a soot-choked city with 100 gold and 10 points of energy, and you climb eight ranks by taking work nobody respectable would touch.
Shadowrealm is free to play and free to keep playing. There is no paid tier, no subscription and no content locked behind a purchase: every system described on this page is reachable by playing.
Shadowgems, the premium currency, buy convenience and cosmetics rather than power that cannot be earned. They can also be earned in game, which is the point: a player who never spends anything is a normal player here, not a second-class one.
Shadowrealm: Age of Darkness is built and run by Maurice Moret, trading as Mortek, from the Netherlands. It is an independent project rather than a studio product: one person writes the code, balances the economy, and answers the support inbox. That is why the release notes read like a changelog and the roadmap is public, complete with the things that are not built yet. Players vote on what goes there, and a fair amount of what ships started as a suggestion.
If you want to reach us, the contact page lists every route in. The game guide is the long-form introduction, and the reference wiki has the actual numbers behind every system named above.