A free, open-source browser MMORPG
The gates are open. The race is on.
An empire emptied in a single night. A border no one could cross. Three hundred years later the gates are opening, and every city wants what is inside.
Free · Open source · Plays in Google Chrome · No download
The premise
A thousand years
The Empire of Vanai ruled the whole continent of Ardenfell for a thousand years. Roads, gardens, glassworks, granaries, a palace at the centre of it all.
Three hundred years ago
Then, between dusk and dawn, every citizen of the heartland was gone. No war, no plague, no bodies. Dinner still on the tables, gates barred from the inside, and around the empty interior a border no one could cross.
Now
The people left outside grew three free cities. Now the border is failing. On one morning the three gates open, and the old treaty dies the moment the first door does. What replaces it is a race.
Three different city stories. Three envoys meet at the halfway inn. The gates open at dawn.
What Vanai is
An MMORPG in the spirit of FFXI’s social combat and FFXIV’s one-character-every-job freedom. The short version, in eight articles.
No price, no shop, no subscription. Vanai is MIT-licensed: the code, the original art and music, and the game data.
Open the game in Google Chrome and play. Nothing to download, nothing to install, no launcher.
Six jobs, levels to 50. Change job at a city sanctuary and learn every one of them on the same character.
Auto-attack builds TP. At 100 TP your weaponskills wake up. Land one on the heels of a partymate’s and they chain, and a skillchain opens a window for your mage’s magic burst.
Solo play is tuned to about level 10. After that, the world is built for a party of up to six: a tank, healers, damage, and friends you meet on the road.
Crafting, vendors, an auction house in all three cities, mail with parcels, friends lists and companies.
Three AI-run courts tax the markets, post bounties, write letters, and remember who served them.
Teleport crystals in every city and field zone set your home point and carry you between the ones you have touched.
Combat
Engage, and your character swings on its own while the party calls its next move. Every swing builds TP. At 100 TP a weaponskill lights up on your hotbar.
Land your weaponskill on the heels of a partymate’s and they chain. The skillchain opens a short window, and a mage who casts the right element into it lands a magic burst. The best fights are the ones the whole party times together.
Three doors
Start in any of them. Each city has its own story for the first fifteen levels, its own court, and two job guilds.
North-west, on the fjord
The Sea Gate
East, on the bay
The Tree Ring
South, an island in the sea at the end of a causeway
The Island Academy
The courts
Each city has a court, and the courts are run by AI. They are never seen, only heard: through proclamations, letters and offers. They set the market tax, post bounties, compete for claims on the interior, and keep a ledger of every player who served them, and every one who left.
The Court of Caerdun
To the bearer of charter, greeting.
The court notes your service in the Caerdun Fields and has entered it in the ledger, where it will stay.
A bounty stands on the wolves at the watch farms. Terms are as posted. The court honours terms to the letter, and expects the same.
By order of the court
The road
Each city opens onto its own fields. Roads run between them: the North Road through a hundred white miles of snow to the one lit window of the halfway inn, the Shore Road past palms and a wrecked grain ship. A ferry crosses the gulf.
Past the gates, danger grows inward. Every doorstep is the most beautiful thing you have seen yet, and somewhere a three-hundred-year-old groundskeeper is trimming the hedge and would like to know if you have an appointment.
Monster levels by region, levels 1 to 50.
The peoples
One character
Pictures from Ardenfell
By the numbers, from the game’s own data
Open source
The music, sound, icons, terrain, cities, dungeons and monsters are made by code.
Vanai is MIT-licensed. Read it, fork it, run your own world. A Rails 8 server runs the world, a Babylon.js client draws it, and PostgreSQL keeps it.
Free, in your browser. Bring your friends; the gates are already open.
Google Chrome · nothing to download · getting started