WITHERCROWN

The Last Autocracy · The Bleeding Heir · The Black Starets

The interesting version is not "what if the starets really had dark powers?" It is: what if he did, and that still wasn't why the empire fell?

WITHERCROWN is a setting skin for MÖRK BORG. It takes the last winter of a vast, dying autocracy — already decomposing through war, hunger, administrative failure, rumor, and elite infighting — and lets the Calendar of Nechrubel occupy the same collapsing world. A hated foreign-born empress. A hemophiliac heir. A peasant mystic with bad grooming and worse boundaries. Secret police hunting each other as foreign agents. Bread lines. A bureaucracy that moves responsibility from desk to desk until nobody remembers who owned it.

The starets is not the hidden keystone holding up the plot. He's a node — accelerant, symptom, beneficiary, pressure valve. Use the MÖRK BORG rules as written. Everything else here — the map, the court, the calendar's flavor, the kind of ruin you walk through before 7:7 — is new.

This bundle includes:

• WITHERCROWN (18 pages) — the full setting: the Pale Empire and its capital, the court that will not last, the Machine Turn engine that drives political consequences without anyone plotting them, 7 character origins, a converted Misery table, bestiary, rumors, and opening hooks.
• A Night At the Chancery (10 pages) — a complete introductory scenario for Ice 0 (no Miseries yet). For one night, a government building has no master, and the file half the city wants is split across four offices. Ten rooms. Seven hours. One fight, if you're unlucky. No demons walk in. Clerks, a one-armed porter with a numbered logbook, a telegraphist who reads every wire aloud whether she wants to or not. The building is not haunted. It is staffed.

Both are free. Not pay-what-you-want — free. Read them, run them, argue with them.