Free Company

The year is 997, and Christendom is holding its breath for the end of the world. You're getting paid either way.

Free Company is a co-op tactical RPG about a band of sellswords carving a living out of a fracturing medieval world. From the Viking-raided coasts of the North Sea to the courts of Al-Andalus and the sands of the Maghreb.

Recruit a roster of hard-bitten war-bands, take contracts from kings, bishops and caliphs. Or seize a place of your own. Settle every fight with deep, deliberate, turn-based tactics where a single bad decision can cost you a veteran forever.

Play alone, or bring your friends into a shared campaign you can drop in and out of. The world waits for you.

Key Features

• Command war-bands, not lone soldiers. Every unit is a named captain leading a file of men: a bracing spear wall, a shield line, a lone assassin slipping through the dark. Attrition whittles them and losing the captain is a wound that doesn't heal.

• Deep turn-based combat. Action points, reaction interrupts, cover, reach and shield walls. Maces and crossbows punch through mail; arrows don't. Fire panics horses. Permadeath means every fight matters.

• A living mercenary roster. Hire from a broad cast of captains: a disgraced Norman lord, an exiled Byzantine strategos, a Berber raider-chief, a heretic alchemist. Each with their own quirks, flaws and dry, needling banter. They're jaded professionals: nobody refuses a paycheck, so any legend fits your line.

• Guerrilla strategy across a fractured map. Seize the passes, fords, ports and silver mines that decide a region. Serve a patron the easy way, or burn your standing to carve out holdings of your own and answer to no one.

• Drop-in / drop-out co-op. One persistent company; the world pauses between sessions, so play together whenever you can and no one falls behind.

• A world on the edge of the millennium. Is the dread real, or only fear? Zealots and cold rationalists each make their case and the game never tells you who's right.

• 1000 AD, Europe & North Africa. Norse huscarls, Byzantine cataphracts, Magyar horse-archers, Berber camel corps, Fatimid fire-throwers and more. Every band a distinct answer on the battlefield.

Take the coin. Keep your company alive. Decide what you'll become before the year turns.