Dragons Die

DRAGONS DIE. THEIR NAMES DON’T.

You don’t command an army. You raise a handful of dragons, learn their
names, and fly them out into a world that has gone quiet… hold by hold,
hunt by hunt, one small brave wing at a time.

Some of them come home.

The ones that don’t get carved into the long table, and the hold keeps
their chair set anyway.

Marblewick: Dragons Die is a permadeath roguelike about a besieged
sanctuary of warmth, the flights that fly out from it, and the memory that
holds when nothing else does. The reach is dying. Marblewick still has its
fires lit. What you do with that is measured in names.

Raise a wing that can die

Every dragon hatches from an egg with a name, a voice, a temperament, and
a chair at the table. They bond with the wingmates they fly beside and grow
stronger for it,hen grieve when a bonded ally falls. There is no roster
of interchangeable units here. There is a wing you know, and a wing you’re
about to lose, and usually they’re the same wing.

Fly out into the silence

Plan the hunt: pick your wing, your supplies, your line of attack, and the
Breath to carry you there and back. Then fight in real time, six dragon
breeds with element-coded breath, formations that matter, bonds that turn
the tide, and a slow-motion beat on the kill that earns it. Push too far
from the hearth and the wind starts taking sides. Come home before it goes
cold. Or don’t, and live with that too.

The long table remembers

A persistent memorial that stays full across every run. When a dragon
falls, its name carves itself into the wood. Every empty chair has a story
you can read — how they went, what they were, what peggs said when they
didn’t come back. You will fill this table. That is the game. It does not
forget, and after a while, neither do you.

The fallen arm the living

No gear shops. No random loot. When a dragon dies in the reach, or when
you give one to the hearth at the long table, its bones become equipment
for the wing that’s still flying. Every upgrade you carry was somebody. The
strongest wing you ever field is built entirely from the ones you lost.

peggs keeps the hearth

She waited the silence out alone, half-grown, hiding the eggs until yours
finally cracked. She names every dragon you hatch. She sits at the head of
the table when you land. She welcomes you home in lowercase, and she has
things to say…about the wind, about the chair that stays empty, about the
ones you brought back and the ones you didn’t.

"i’ll keep the hearth, {callsign}. you keep the wing."
"the chair stays. the name stays."
"home before the hearth goes cold. you’ll make it."

And then the telling

When a run ends, peggs reads it back to you — the whole flight, name by
name, the wins and the empty chairs, spoken plain by the one who was there
for all of it. A run isn’t a score screen. It’s a story someone tells about
your wing after it’s over.

What you get

• Six dragon breeds, each with procedural morphs and colors — no two wings
  look alike
• Named-dragon bonds, grief, and songs — a flight is a relationship, not a
  loadout
• The Long Table: a memorial that persists across every run and every
  death
• The bone economy: your fallen become the equipment of the living
• The Telling: an end-of-run eulogy that reads your whole flight back to you
• Real-time tactical combat — element breath, formations, bond bonuses,
  crit slow-mo
• Breath logistics that make distance a real decision, not a number
• Captain origins, settlement events, and a reach that shifts underfoot
• Three concurrent save slots and a clutch book of every dragon you’ve
  ever hatched
• A thirty-minute first flight; a long table that fills for hundreds of hours

hatch them. name them. carry them home.