Aerth Reclaimed

The roleplaying game

Britannia has risen again. The dark never left.

In Hoc Signo Vinces (IHSV) is a tabletop roleplaying game from Virtus Invicta. Its setting, Aerth Reclaimed, is Britannia in the year 4621, nearly two thousand years after the Apocalypse broke the old world. Britannia has clawed its way back: airships moor at the masts of London, Cambridge assays and certifies machine-stone behind its White Walls, and a Treaty-King rules from Westminster through ministers, Great Houses and a Church whose rites still hold the dark at a measured distance.

Recovery is not safety. Beyond the lamplit districts lie flooded roads, lapsed parishes and ruins no surveyor will name. Demons wait at every breach, patient for panic and the wrong bargain. Spirits hold fords and coppices by pacts older than the Crown, and punish the village that forgets them. When the ground thaws the manors hire dog handlers against the walking dead, grave dogs dig wherever burial has failed, and blight creeps along the verges into crop, water and dream. In the cities, necromancers, bone brokers and demon-callers trade in arts the law punishes with the rope.

Civilisation holds because people hold it: wardens and watchmen, priests and pilots, witch-hunters and customs men. And it holds because companies of the bold are paid to go where they cannot.

You play one of those companies. Take a commission from a Cambridge assay house, a London bishop or a harbour court. Cross the Narrow Sea under warrant, go down the Nightstairs into the undercity, or ride north into the Marches, where the Crown’s writ thins to rumour. Carry steel, powder, a sanctified lamp and a warrant, and decide which of them to trust when the lamp gutters.