Grimsorrow Academy

You signed the indenture. The page was still warm.

Grimsorrow Academy is an idle RPG of dark academia and spellcasting dread - two games in one save, narrated by a clerk who has read your file and found you wanting. Scry the mirror for the dark itself. Attend fifteen forbidden Disciplines, raise a drowned lord's castle and every ten years, sign again for more power. The school never lets you graduate. It only lets you go deeper.
Scry the Obsidian Mirror to unlock your Disciplines and advance through the school year. Spells can be cast to move faster, but the ledger balances, and everything is paid for.

Spells are not bought. They are learned and trained by hand. Trace a spell's mark on the glass to cast it: instant Maledictions, sustained Litanies, and Bindings that scry in your place. Only the strongest learn to cheat their own examinations and idle them.

Then take them to the Proving Grounds: a road through the vale with a hundred and one of the dead standing on it, from the Kept-Back in the Academy's yard to the black mere and the shore of the sea under the world. Pick one. Unmake it, mark by mark. Every cast is done in the dark's own way, in smoke, ash and dried blood.

What you learn in chalk, you cast in glass. One clean stroke across the Mirror, mid-scry, and it reads the shape of your hand: the glass warms, the working takes hold, and the dark answers to the spell's name. Pay the whispers, wait out the gathering, draw it again.

At rank 20 a mark's Mastery opens: a tree in a shape of its own, inscribed with umbra and reagents and spent with Insight. Each of the twelve marks grows one, with three Keystones that change what the mark is. The Unlidded Eye's Second Sight makes every 7th cast burst half again as strong. Its Held Open lets one trace open the Eye and the next shut it, striking for all it burned in between. Held past six seconds, it turns on you.

The Academy took a drowned lord's keep in payment, and the Headmaster secretly gave you the key. Raise Hollowmere out of the black mere one work at a time: ten buildings that change shape as they grow, tenants to house and feed, and nightwine to keep them from grumbling. When the Keep can rise no higher, let the mere take it back and build again on the old foundations.

Fifteen fields of forbidden study, from gravebotany and cryptmining to bonebinding and the Vampiric Council, and the strangest of them keep rooms of their own: Sister Plot's Poisoned Garden, the Dead Stars over the observatory, the Loom of Crows, the Reliquary where Wardens are bound, the Choirmaster's Well, and the Chapter House where a Council with no master sits.

Every action builds its own Attunement, and every Discipline feeds another: herbs to potions, bones to Devotion, finds to the Bursar.

Close the game and the school goes on without you. The Sources seep, a Discipline works through the night, and the Bound Gardener tends your plots. When you come back, the clerk has it all in a ledger, down to the last Chapeau Noir. Counted honestly, up to a day at a time, and longer under the Night Watch.

When the umbra runs deep enough, sign a new Indenture. It shatters the mirror and voids your contract - and pays you for both: Seals that bless every life after this one, and Oaths spent down a permanent tree. You keep the power. You keep signing.
The Winding Stair is a well cut down through the earth: 233 Fragments of Memory across fifteen acts, lit where you have walked it and dark below. Earn Tenure and raise your ceiling across 120 levels. A second realm opens beneath the Stair, the Undercroft, and below that, what the lore will not decipher. All stairs here go down.

• 8 umbra Sources · 12 draw-to-cast spells · 68 unique mirror upgrades

• The Proving Grounds: 101 of the dead on a road of ten tiers

• Hollowmere: ten buildings, five floods, twenty tidings and the Sunless Sea below

• 15 Disciplines with per-action mastery, gear, potions and permanent Sigils

• Night Errands: idle fights through 23 zones and 12 dungeons

• A 16-node prestige tree, a 300+ deed ledger, and a four-quadrant completion journey

• Honest offline progress, with a Welcome Back report

In Early Access, the school is already complete and stable, playable from first scry to endgame. The deepest doors - the Cave and Hellplore are closed across Early Access.

Do not feed the staircase.