Katarra is a persistent, browser-based online role-playing world told primarily through text. You explore locations, interact with people and other players, make consequential choices, and develop a character whose history matters mechanically.

The world continues when you log out. Settlements, relationships, factions, quests, and regional conditions can change through the accumulated actions of its inhabitants.

Katarra is organized into connected locations. A location might be a road, market, ruin, home, forest clearing, ship deck, or a chamber beneath a city. Available exits show where your character can travel.

1. ObserveRead the location, its people, visible objects, conditions, and available exits.
2. ChooseTravel, speak, investigate, use an ability, interact with an object, or wait.
3. ResolveThe game evaluates your capabilities, circumstances, knowledge, equipment, and choices.
4. RememberImportant outcomes become part of the world and your character record.

Every new character begins without a class. Levels 1–5 are known as the Unbound period: time to encounter Katarra before committing to a path through it.

During these levels, you learn basic skills, explore your surroundings, meet practitioners, witness different forms of power, and discover possible futures. At Level 5, you may choose only from paths your character has encountered and sufficiently understood.

A character’s people is not a bundle of combat bonuses. It influences appearance, cultural knowledge, languages, history, relationships, and how parts of the world may initially perceive them.

The public Codex will document playable peoples as their designs are finalized. Each entry will distinguish shared ancestry from culture and homeland—because two people who look alike need not speak alike, worship alike, or agree on anything beyond the weather being personally offensive.

The System recognizes development, records exceptional behavior, and communicates changes a character can perceive. It does not assign a personality, dictate a moral alignment, or choose a class on the player’s behalf.

Level

A broad measure of accumulated capability and experience.

Rank

A recognized stage of development carrying meaning within the world.

Path

A vocation or discipline discovered and pursued by the character.

System Mark

A rare recognition created by meaningful patterns of behavior. Most conditions remain hidden.

Katarra contains martial, scholarly, social, mystical, practical, and stranger paths. Some are common enough to be public knowledge. Others require a mentor, location, act, relationship, or discovery that the Codex will not spoil.

Public entries may describe what a commonly known path does, but they will not publish exact discovery requirements, hidden evolutions, secret feats, or every available ability.