How it works

An RPG that plays itself — fairly.

Aethelgard takes the ritual of the old IRC IdleRPG and makes it portable and provable. You forge a hero and step away. Behind the scenes a single, deterministic engine turns elapsed time into levels, loot and glory — and a server you can self-host keeps everyone honest without ever trusting what a client claims.

1 · Your hero is just four numbers (and a diary)

A character is completely defined by its seed, class, name and creation time, plus a signed log of any choices you make. That's it. Feed those same values to the engine anywhere — your laptop, a phone browser, a microcontroller — and you get exactly the same adventure, down to the last gold piece. Nothing about your progress is stored as a number someone could edit; it's recomputed from the seed whenever it's needed.

2 · Progress is time, not toil

There's nothing to click. The engine advances your hero in fixed ticks: exploring zones, felling monsters, dying occasionally, hauling back treasure, and ascending in prestige. Come back in an hour and you've gained an hour's worth of story. Come back next week and the saga has rolled on without you.

3 · "Idle" means witnessed, not merely old

Here's the subtle part most idle games get wrong. If progress were simply now − creation_time, you could forge a hero, switch the device off for six months, switch it back on, and claim half a year of adventuring you never actually spent. The oldest account would always win — being old would beat being present.

So Aethelgard credits only the time the realm actually witnessed you. Every signed check-in — an online sync, an action, an offline report — is a witness event, and your character advances only up to the last moment you were seen.

Each check-in extends your credited time by up to a cap (about a day for a brand-new hero). The cap grows as you bank genuine presence, so a steady long-term player can comfortably skip a few days — up to a couple of weeks — between visits. Vanish for months and show up once, though, and you're credited one cap's worth, not the whole absence. A device left switched off banks nothing. Showing up is the proof.

4 · Nobody has to trust the client

When you play online, your client's reports are treated as advisory only. The server re-runs the exact same engine from your seed, against its own clock, and that result — the canonical state — is the only thing that ever hits the leaderboard. A tampered client can get itself flagged, but it can't inflate a single level. Requests are signed (HMAC) with a strictly increasing counter, so they can't be forged or replayed.

5 · Online, offline, or air-gapped — your call

• Fully offline. Run the engine locally and never talk to anyone. No leaderboard, no network, no fuss.
• Online. Sync every ~30s for the shared leaderboard and the PvP arena. Play right in your browser →
• Air-gapped. No open ports and no background connections? Play offline, then log progress by pasting a short signed token — or scanning a QR with your phone. The server still recomputes everything, so it stays just as un-fakeable. Offline portal →

6 · Presence bots: idle in a chat room, like the original

The lowest-friction way to be witnessed is to do nothing at all in the right place. Authorize a presence bot for an IRC or Matrix channel and simply sit there idle — exactly like the classic #idlerpg bot. The bot vouches that you're present; the server credits the time. No open ports on your side, no client running. Link your chat handle to your hero once with a one-time code and you're set.

Multi-home freely: IRC and Matrix and manual reports can all point at the same hero. They're combined as an OR, never summed, so you can never bank more than real wall-clock time — but corroboration from independent witnesses raises how far you're trusted to skip.