Design principles
This page outlines Fabelgeist's design principles. Read it before contributing! All other pages are subordinate to this one.
Project promise
Fabelgeist should make its players feel like adventurers in a fantastical, believable, and shared world.
"Shared" is the operative word. Though the game will be fun played alone, it is fundamentally a social game, and its greatest moments should come from players' interactions with other players—the bonds and rivalries formed between strangers in a strange land—and their lasting impacts on the world. What we do for world design, we do to give these interactions context; what we do for game mechanics, we do to give these interactions consequences.
The browser is the medium
Fabelgeist is a game about interacting with strangers over the Internet. As far as we know, there is no better tool for interacting with strangers over the Internet than the web browser. To take full advantage of this , the game should be not only browser-based but also browser-shaped:
- Players should be able to navigate the world like they navigate the Internet,
following hyperlinks between
people, places, organizations, quests, rumors, objects, and ideas.
- In a sense, this should be a self-documenting game; it is its own wiki.
- Anything in-world which players can meaningfully discuss should be something they can reference as a hyperlink.
- People should be able to play the whole game in the asynchronous, web-based "strategic" layer. Though immediate dangers invite real-time tactical simulation, they may be autoresolved; tactical play offers an optional close-up of select events, which may be preferred, but it is never required for progress.
In short, this isn't a "normal" web game that runs in a client inside the browser, like old Minecraft, but a fully hypertext web game which can become a normal game when desired, like in combat.
Since people already use the browser every day—for work, for emails, for social media—the game should slot right into their existing workflows. We're like any other tab in your browser, just a pretty fun one. We're also like any other game in your library, just one you can switch out of when your boss walks by. No longer must you boot up Steam and lock your computer into a fullscreen executable for a couple hours just to enjoy a quality video game; that is a relic of a bygone age, friends, an age in which your browser couldn't handle high-quality, real-time 3D graphics. But novel web technologies (Wasm, WebGPU) have brought that age to a close, and no one has even realized it! No one has even realized it... yet.1
One world, many stories
Strategic and tactical layers
Physically based gameplay
Familiar fantasy
Contributor-friendly production
Principles and accepted details
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We aren't entirely without predecessors. Fallen London is a text-based browser RPG which, to quote PC Gamer, "will ease itself into your spare tabs, onto your phone and behind your eyelids"; Prosperous Universe is an asynchronous browser MMO driven by a persistent player economy; and Blaseball was a browser-based baseball simulation whose players gave it an extensive, shared mythology. Each fulfills some part of the Fabelgeist mission, but not all of it. More pertinently, we don't know of any browser games which combine a hypertextual strategic world with a real-time adventure game with high-performance 3D graphics; that feature, likely our main technological draw, only became practical in late 2025, once WebGPU began shipping with all major browsers. ↩