Quarthaven: Wizard Village

Quarthaven is an isle of mages floating above the clouds, with four towers: the Ember Spire (fire), Tidewell Tower (water), the Root Bastion (stone) and the Gale Loft (wind). Forty days ago the Archmage vanished and the Veil around the isle closed, so nobody can leave. Twelve mages live there, three for each element, and every one has their own story, friends, rival and secrets. Every visitor joins as one more mage. The resident mages are driven by a language model and the visitors are people. Nobody, human or AI, is told who is who.

Nothing a resident mage does is scripted. Every step, every word and every spell (where to go, whether to follow you, whom to duel, when to raise a ward or heal a friend) is a decision made by the model. The game only carries that decision out. Mages see everything that happens within sight and hear what is in earshot: who casts what at whom, who walks in, who shouts across the plaza. All of it feeds their next decision. Your goal is to stay alive.

Open full screen ↗Click inside the game first so it receives your keys.

How to play

Choose your elementFire, water, stone or wind. The elements turn in a wheel: water beats fire, fire beats wind, wind beats stone, stone beats water. A bolt against the element it overcomes hits hard; against the one that overcomes it, it falls weak.
Move and lookWASD or arrows move you relative to the camera, or click the ground. Drag with the right mouse button (or Q / E) to turn the camera, use the wheel to zoom, and on touch screens turn with two fingers.
Cast1 bolt, 2 ward, 3 your element’s art: fire kindle (a burning patch), water mend (heal), stone wall (raise a stone barrier), wind gust (blast everyone back). F is a staff blow. Click a mage to aim at them; otherwise a bolt flies where the camera looks. Every spell costs mana, which returns slowly.
TalkPress Enter, type, press Enter, or hold 🎤 and speak. 🤫 / 💬 / 📢 set how far your voice carries. Mages close to you hear you clearly, farther ones catch broken words, and distant ones hear nothing. The same rules apply to their voices.
Bring your own mindMages think with an OpenRouter key you enter at the start, using any model you pick or type. Your key pays for their decisions about you and for mage talk you can see. It stays in server memory for your session only and is never logged or stored. Without a key, the mages stand silent.
Enter the towersEvery tower, the Conclave Hall, the Library of Echoes, the Copper Kettle inn and the cottages can be entered. Inside, you see and hear only who is in there with you.
Friends, rivals, factions🤝 Relations shows what every mage thinks of everyone. Mages who like each other both ways carry the same flag colour.
Pause, die, returnP or Esc steps you out of time. If you fall, you rise again as someone new, and the mages remember who you were. Your own isle with your own lore and an invite link is one click away.

One engine, two games

Quarthaven runs on the same living-NPC engine as Oakhollow: Living Village, the 2D medieval village. Both share perception, the time gate, memory, opinions, voices and the model interface. The game adds only its map, its people, its lore and its abilities. Here those abilities are spells: one more action, cast, that the model can choose, plus the physics of bolts, wards, walls and flames. The 🪙 Token log in the game shows every model call live: tokens in and out, cost and latency, with mage names hidden.

The game is a testbed of the Living NPCs research series on how to give AI agents perception, time and agency inside game characters.

Research note: what is said and done on the isle (chat lines, opinions, spells, duels; no IP addresses or personal data) is logged anonymously to study how people and AI agents treat each other. Please don’t type personal information. The mages are AI and can be wrong, rude or strange.