Take the Dive

Firstly, as a warning, due to our vaporwave/glitchcore visual inspirations, there will likely be a fair amount of promotional illustrations shared here that may cause eye strain. If you tend to have sensitive eyes, or you find yourself bothered by glitchy images, fear not! All images will be appropriately tagged as #eye strain or #glitch for your blacklisting purposes. 

About Us page - A quick rundown of what Wellspring is and who the Mirage Company are. 

itch.io - all game updates can be found here!

Discord - Join us. We host playtests fairly frequently, so if you ever want to come try out the game, we will try to schedule a time to accommodate you! (Bear in mind that both myself and gwaja are in the states, though, so we may have issues with testing for European players, but we will try our damnedests!)

Twitter - More official game updates, as well as some miscellaneous engaging with our ttrpg contemporaries.

Behind the scenes, right now we’re reworking skills and making some final revisions to the journey and quests to make sure everything is nice and consistent before we drop the behemoth that is tactical combat. Combat playtests will be happening behind the scenes very soon, too!

Once our next update drops, gwaja will go back to finishing up the first four classes and cleaning up the combat rules in preparation for beta, and Abby will be diving headfirst into rearranging the book and setting up our new layout. Exciting stuff ahead!

After several weeks of sitting in the drafts folder, Cephalopod Squad is finally complete! Cephalopod Squad is a silly hack of Grant Howitt’s Honey Heist about playing as heroic squid children. Which definitely has zero relation to the very popular third person shooter franchise by a certain C&D-happy video game company.

Well, sort of. Mostly I wanted an excuse to use this illustration because it didn’t end up making the final cut. :(

Wellspring’s tactical combat is finally available for preview! This is a patron-exclusive preview, but it lays out the basic details of our combat rules in a small 10-page PDF. All the critical crunch is here: action economy, movement, and, most importantly, How to Hit Things. We finally did it! (For those who have not been following us for long, we’ve actually been slowly chugging away at the combat system basically all summer and fall. Like, we initially said it would be out by September. Whoopsie.)

For those who are not patrons, fret not—0.2 is well underway! Beta will be bringing the full tactical combat system along with major overhauls to the book’s structure to make it easier to find critical information, a brand-spankin’-new layout (again), and all sorts of fun stuff.

Alright: we're gonna be up front with this. No cherry picking and painting this place as some kind of perfect fantasyland. First things first: welcome to the broadcast.

And second things second: the world itself is trying to kill us.

See, it's succeeded once before; we've built our foundation on the bones of a dead civilization. Some of the Archivists think they were the ones who brought it out. They built temples of steel. Mountains of concrete and glass. Technology that drank deep from the Wellspring and burned bright with progress. And it was only then that the Gloom rose up.

That's the only logical progression of events, anyway. We know from experience: a footprint that big couldn't have been left if they were like us. Under threat from the start. The thing is, we don't know why the Gloom came to be. Maybe it was a consequence of their way of life. Or maybe it was something like us, brought to the world by pure chance. Whatever the cause, even they didn't stand a chance against it.

The Gloom scraped them from the face of the world. Sucked dry the mana from their great civilization and left it as nothing but wastelands.

Then we fell here.

We didn't really choose this place—the Grand Shift placing us here was something of a cruel act of fate. Once we arrived, we couldn't leave. A disparate array of people from worlds we no longer remember. Trapped on—say it with me now—a world that's trying to kill us.

That was a long time ago, though. And you may have noticed that we're still here.

Whoever we were once is lost to history, but it turns out the people who came here in the Grand Shift were a stubborn bunch. They banded together to survive. They learned how to fight back.

Now, we are the Great Family. One people united against an apocalypse that never ends. There's not many of us, but we've managed thus far. Pushing back the Gloom little by little. Building a civilization in the face of ever-present doom. Learning from the people here before us. We've made ourselves a place here, and we'll be damned if we let this world get the better of us.

(We know, that's a lot of history right up front. Don't worry, we're about to get to our point. The reason you're hearing this broadcast.)

The Gloom still looms. Its threat is ever present. No matter how many victories we claim, there's a lot of world, and only a handful of us to fight back.

That's why we're calling on you, Traveler. Why this transmission has reached your eyes and ears. We need you to give in to that siren song of wanderlust. To venture out into our world. Whether you want to delve into the mysteries it holds or fight in the name of the Great Family is up to you. We just need protagonists for this story.

Don't worry—we've made sure to prepare a guide for you. We wouldn't just throw you into the deep end like that. Everything a new traveler might need to know—just give it a read.