Vergebound — All Content

The Spiral - 2 - The Threshold

J.D. Stanton — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Keeper had begun at his wrists.

The Vaults lay far beneath the Thronetower on the plateau’s edge, below the long stair and the spiral tombs, below the cisterns, in the deeps where the wind that howled in the King’s Chamber far above could not be heard. Here the air held the taste of old ink and cold stone. Fragments of loreglass lined the walls here in the thousands. They sat dull as pitchstone in countless rows, until the old man passed by them, when each in turn gave up a brief glimmer, as of moonlight half remembered.

The Keeper did not tie the ribbons in rows. He wound them, each name and knot a fraction further round, wrist to elbow, in one long climbing turn. A name at each turn. A knot for each name. The linen was laid over the one beneath so that no skin showed between, drawn tight until the flesh beneath whitened. Bodum watched his arm vanish under the layers of it. Would his steps falter on the spiral? When he returned, his name too would join the Litany, bound to a rite older even than the King’s Teeth. If he returned. The knowledge pressed more tightly than any linen could.

“Every Reeve of Highseat has borne these, Steward,” the Keeper said. He did not look up from his work. “I wound your father’s. My master wound his. The winding is older than the Stewards. The kings bore them before you, back to the fall of Ennura, when the Drift came up out of the Glasslands, and the first of your line stood upon this rock and could not be moved.”

The Keeper was halfway up his forearm now, the names climbing past his wrist. “Though the names you bear are the Stewards’ only. When the last king was betrayed, and slain, our enemies opened and scattered the tombs in the valley. We learned that even in death we were not safe, so we brought our rulers up the long stair.” He drew a knot closed. “As the Blood turns, Steward. A turning for each of them, each laid higher than his father, and Kalipyr first of them, the only king in the spiral tombs above us.”

As the Keeper tied and adjusted the corresponding knots, he had been murmuring, and had been all the while, so low that Bodum had taken it for chordal chanting. Only now, with the names nearly at his elbow, did he understand that it was the same phrase with each knot.

As we are written, so we endure.

Beginning the next wrap the Keeper spoke again. “The binding of names. The waysalt and draft of sauma. Your walk in the Drift. The Orosi will tell you the anchoring is theirs, but it was done here first. In this room. Before there was an Oros to write it down.”

Bodum must have looked away. Toward the stair perhaps, or toward the wind he could not hear, though he felt it on his face. He remembered only that the Keeper’s hands had stopped.

“You doubt it, Steward?”

Bodum said nothing. He did not doubt it, but the doubt was not his own. It was Hemma’s that he carried with him down the long stair like a stone in his boot.

The old man resumed, and when he spoke again, his voice was not raised and was the worse for it. “Doubt the watchfires, then. Doubt the men who man them, and the towers on which they stand. All of it ground to dust in time. Only the written shall remain.” The last knot he tied at the elbow, where the turning ended at the oldest of them, and paused.

He said something more then, low, as he smoothed the sleeve of names flat, and Bodum caught only the shape of it, to mind his feet in the wastes for the splinters of glass.

“Speak up, Keeper.”

The old man looked up from his work for the first time, cried out, and leapt from his knees, driving a blade into Bodum’s heart as he did. The knife, an oily black chip of desert glass, sank up to the hilt.

Bodum woke from the dream, his hand pressed hard over his heart and the taste of sauma in his mouth like chalk.

“Are you whole, my reeve?”

His hand was still on his chest where the wound would have been. He withdrew his hand then, tilting it to look into his palm for blood that wasn’t there. “Yes,” he said, shaking off the dream and the deadly blow that woke him.

The great stone whorl stood over the camp, blacker than the sky it was cut from. The fire had burned down to a red seam in the dark. It cracked and spat as he panted. Twenty paces off, the Dungirii sat upright and awake. He had never once seen her sleep, though he knew she must. In the wan light, her eyes were pale rather than dark, not veiled by age, but swimming with flecks of light, like loreglass in shadow. They did not move when he moved.

“You spoke. In your sleep.”

His throat was dry. He reached for the goatskin but did not drink. “What did I say?”

She was a long time answering. The seam of the fire ticked and settled.

“Her name,” she said.

His hand went, without his sending it, to the cord at his throat, and to the small weight of black glass that hung there, the inscription - by deeds, not gods - worn shallow with handling, her parting gift to him.

She had looked up at him before she spoke, the way she always did when the light caught his blue eyes, though she never said what she saw there. “So are men made, my love,” she had said. She had little faith in rites, and had said so; but she had faith in him.

As he circled its rough edges with his thumb, he thought of her fingers, deft and delicate, tying the cord. “There,” she had said. “A bit of Drift-glass. If you lose your salt, that will find you the way home.” The memory of her unsteady smile and her hand on her belly as she pushed the glass into his palm made him ache for her. That ache was sharper than any thirst or hunger and stayed with him in the quiet of the desert night.

Bodum did not speak to the Dungirii again that night. He did not ask her what else he had said, and she did not offer it.

He woke to night still clinging to the edge of the Glassland lazzaretto, the ground beneath him holding what little coolness it could. He knew he must begin the Walk before the sun rose high enough to bake man and sand alike hard as fired clay. In the east the first light gathered, the sun’s glow red and immense over the distant waste. Its upper rim had not yet broken the horizon, but its glow had already stained clouds there with copper and blood. For a little while the land beneath it remained black and still, in that narrow mercy between darkness and heat. Soon enough the Glasslands would burn, and he would be walking east into them.

She was already standing when he rose, her face lifted to a dawn she could not see. She had packed nothing, because there was nothing of hers to pack. The goatskin lay at his feet, and he knew by its weight when he lifted it that she had filled it from her own.

He looked back at the Threshold, the whorl. In the first light it was less black than it had been, but no less wrong - a crown of blades the height of a keep, leaning slightly toward the east, and at its center beneath, the mouth, with burl flowers thick about it.

Sensing his gaze, the Dungirii spoke. “I go no farther. Walk toward the sun until it clears the horizon. Then turn, and keep the Threshold on your left,” she said. “Widen each turn. Do not straighten your path. Veer, and the Way will not open. Those who wander are lost. Nearer the Drift, much is lost, while things best lost may yet be found. Take nothing. The Drift takes enough for the both of you.”

He shifted his body, the small weight at his throat ticking against the clasp of his cowl. Her head turned toward the sound.

“What do you carry, my reeve?”

He glanced down and then to her, tucking the glass on the cord within the folds of his hood.

“Nothing,” he said.

The wind moved through the burl flowers between them. She did not ask again though she was silent long enough that he thought she might. When she spoke at last it was to the open desert path.

“You may ask one question of what you find there.”

What would he find, he wondered. What will find me?

“And coming back?”

“Keep the Threshold on your right. Narrow as you go, and mind the Spiral. It is the only way.”

He licked his lips. He was not ready.

“It opens once in a Steward’s life, my reeve. It will not open for you again, and there will be no way back to what you find there. Your father learned that. He went to the edge of the flowers every year until he died, but the way was closed.”

He had not known that. He pursed his lips and said nothing.

He waited for more, a word for the road, a hand on his arm, whatever it was that Dungirii gave their own when they sent them into the sand. It did not come. She stood in silence, her eyes on nothing and her face toward the whorl, behind him. After a while he understood that this was the whole of it, and she could not lie, even to wish him well.

A light breeze stirred the burl flowers, and she lifted her face to the sky.

“The wind is from the east,” she said at last. “Keep it on your face going out. On your neck coming back. If it seems to change, it has not. You have.”

He slung the goatskin over his shoulder, then turned east toward the bloom of red and gold, with the whorl behind him, and began to move. Not long after, the sun crossed the horizon, and he turned, beginning the spiral. He looked back once, from the far side of the first turn. She had not moved. She stood where he had left her with her face toward the sound of him, and she did not raise her hand.

He looked back a second time, further off, and still she had not moved. He kept the whorl on his left, and did not look back again. He didn’t dare.

The Spiral - 1 - The Dune

J.D. Stanton — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bodum lay face-up on the dune in a patch of red-capped flowers, halfway up the last great swell, where the lee side sheltered such things from the wind. His heart was going too fast for the little it had to work with, and he could hear his own shallow panting, like a dog. He raised a hand against the noonday sun and blinked hard at the black spots swimming across his vision.

Get up, he thought, but could not.

An inch from his eye, specks of red lay in the sand. He had been seeing them for hours, a fleck here and there in the lee of the dunes with the scrub where the wind had let it lie. So small were they that he had taken them for spots in his vision, then, when he last fell, for blood, his own, until he turned his hands over and found them only cracked and dry. The thick scatter of it looked like something had come this way bleeding and had not stopped to die.

Higher up, the flecks had become flowers: fleshy, cap-headed things, wound-red, their stalks the color of old bone. Burl-flowers, his Dungirii guide had called them, one of the few things she had said since they left his lands. Lying now among them, he understood the specks were their seed. From a distance they looked like the blooms in the valley beneath the King’s Teeth. He had brought Hemma a bundle of them the day before he left. Four days ago. It felt like forty.

The cramp took him then, low in the gut and through the thighs, his body wringing itself for water that was not there. He rolled to his side and brought up a mouthful of gray-white sauma, and watched it soak into the red at the foot of a flower - and could not, for a long moment, remember what either of those things was called.

Sauma, the Dungirii Waysalt in his goatskin, sat warm as spit. It tasted of chalk and ash with a bitterness that lived at the back of the throat long after the swallow. It was the only thing the rite allowed him. It turned and focused the mind, giving Waysight to the ungifted, or so it was said. He took it in sips at the crest of each swell, as instructed. It slaked nothing. It was not meant to.

With each subsequent swallow the flecks in the sand fluoresced, their numbers growing, as if the bitter liquid were drawing them to the surface. His guide had told him to expect this, but he found the effect no less unsettling. He had not eaten in three days, and somewhere in the second night the hunger had stopped being a feeling and became an idea. In its place were the mouthfuls of sauma, heavy as stones in his gut. Three could carry a man through a day. He understood, with the taste of it in his nose, that the smell of it might kill him before the sun did.

Behind him, twenty paces back, his Dungirii guide had stopped. He knew it without looking. That was the distance she kept, and had kept for four days, always behind him, so that he climbed each rise not knowing what lay beyond.

A poor guide, he thought. He had rested more since dawn; every crest now, where yesterday it had been every third. When they stopped, she came no closer, only squatting on her heels facing windward, weighing sand in her hands, and listening to the wind. Symbols and scars ran the length of both her arms, wards carved and inked in Orosi and Dungir against the Drift. He wondered how many times she had crossed these sands in his father’s service, and which of those marks had been for him.

On the first day, he asked why he must go first. She was the Waybinder, after all. His guide. The way was his to find, she had said. He had asked what would happen if he fell. Then you will get up, or you will not. That had been the whole of her answer, and he knew, without turning his head, that she would not come.

He got a hand under himself. The linen strips of the emmun, prayer ribbons, had fused to his forearms. Sweat and dust and the Tower Keeper’s hard knots had welded the name-inked strips into a single sleeve of faded cloth from wrist to elbow. As he pushed against the sand, he felt the linen of each ancestor’s ribbon pull at his skin like stitches. He had stopped counting them. Somewhere on the climb, he realized he had stopped feeling sure of the order - the Litany of Stewards - back to the last king, Kalipyr, which he had known since he was a boy. He was kneeling now and his left palm was bleeding. It had found the edge of something beneath the sand. It was sharp as any blade, likely the first of the glass. He wiped it on the ribbons because there was nothing else, and left a dark smear across a name he could not read.

It took three tries to put his feet beneath him. When he stood, finally, the world still moved very slightly, like the slow, heavy shift of a kneeling camel. Determined, he took a deep breath, and pressed forward, careful to keep his eyes on the sand; so steep was the climb up the great dune. The hide boots he wore were especially unwieldy this high in the slipface of the lee. He forced himself to climb the last ten strides to the crest before he let himself raise his head to look.

The silt that had run for days in great swells gave way here to sandstone; a channel as wide as a river lay carved through it from his feet to the horizon. Too straight to be a riverbed, he wondered at it. Black stone shouldered up through the sand in its course, in hogbacks and rubbled moraines, scattered or stacked aslant, sharp-edged and glassy. It appeared as if great hands had pried loose the slabs from the slag bed beneath and piled them carelessly in heaps. Threads of red burl-flower criss-crossed the floor. And beyond, at the far limit of the heat-shimmer where the pale sky met the channel before him, something rose within it that was not a hill.

“How much farther?” he asked. He did not expect an answer. He had asked the sand as much as her, the way a man speaks to a horse or a dog.

“That is the Threshold, my reeve.”

He turned, startled, the sudden movement nearly sending him back to the ground. Her speech was rough with disuse and age. She did not look at him; her head turned instead, past him, at the thing.

“There we make camp tonight.”

Bodum looked in the direction of her sightless gaze, and the thing at the edge of the world was no longer something that was not a hill. He squinted and could just make it out - shafts of black stone splayed from the mouth of a cave at its center, like a halo crown forged for a dead god. He shuddered. At that distance, it would be midnight before they could make camp.

“Walk,” she said.

He took another mouthful of sauma. His stomach nearly rejected it, but he forced it down a second time. As it went down, the red flecks in the sand turned from rust to blood.

He thought of his wife, and of the flowers.

He had brought them to her the day before he left, a bundle of flowers from the valley, and she had taken them the way she took most gifts, reluctantly. “So it’s true, then. Salt and sand and prayer ribbons, and you come back a Reeve.” She set all but one on the table beneath the window, turning it in her fingers as she spoke. “Your father came back, which not all of them do… and never said a word about it.”

“No Steward does.”

“They weren’t married to me.” She was smiling, but she was watching him the way she did. “A thousand years of men walking into the desert, and not one of them came home with anything to say… or the ones who came home talking, had gone mad. Either there’s nothing out there, Bodum, or there’s something none of them could bear to tell their wives.”

“It’s what’s done. Back to the last king.”

“And there’s a reason he was the last.” She said it the way everyone in Highseat said it, as a thing settled a thousand years ago. “We shield the west from the Drift in the east, and our lands from the kings of the west. A man with a goatskin does it, apparently, once in a lifetime. No king does that. No king would.” She turned a stalk in her fingers. “The Ashriders’ prophet walked into the same Glasslands and came out a god. You walk in and come out a Reeve. I’d like to know what the difference is.”

“What you come back to,” he said and smiled.

“By deeds,” she said. “Not gods,” he said reflexively. “I know.”

She touched the flowers. “These will be dead before you’re back.”

“Then I’ll bring more.”

That was the whole of her: she believed nothing the Keeper said and everything her husband was, and she had let him go.

He exhaled a long breath and began the long descent into the valley.

The First Two Stories Are Almost Ready - Serialization Starts Soon

J.D. Stanton — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The first two stories are almost ready to be serialized, and the rest of the content - Codex entries and the stories behind them - continues to come along.

Mid-September was the original target but I’d rather start a little late with enough written to keep going than start on time and stall a few weeks in. The goal is still a weekly rhythm that we can maintain.

We’ll start releasing in the next week or two. When it starts, the stories will arrive in installments here on the site, with new entries following on a regular schedule. If you’d like to know the moment it begins, the RSS feeds are the easiest way to follow along.

Only the written shall remain.

Building the Buffer - Weekly Erdaheim Starts Mid-September

J.D. Stanton — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Since stepping back from the podcast, Dan and I have been doing exactly what I said we would: putting that time back into Erda. Right now that means building a buffer - Codex entries, stories, the kind of steady written material this site was always supposed to run on, rather than something we scramble to produce week to week.

We’re not switching that on the moment it’s ready, either. We’re building enough of a lead that weekly publishing can actually hold once it starts. That start date is mid-September.

Less Talk, More Game

J.D. Stanton — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The digital prototype taught me something I needed to actually test to believe: Vergebound works best when the time and energy behind it goes straight into the game and the world, not into everything orbiting it. Long-form podcasting has been a good creative outlet, and we’ve learned a ton (thanks to all the guests so far) but it’s also been quietly expensive - in time, in energy, and in cost - relative to what it’s given back. So we’re pausing it for the moment.

That time is going two places instead: back into Vergebound itself, and into getting Erdaheim written and published on a real, weekly rhythm again. More on what that looks like soon.

Vergebound Goes Digital - A First Look, and First Feedback

J.D. Stanton — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After months of paper, pencil, and print runs, Vergebound has its first playable digital build online in a test sandbox. It’s not a replacement for the tabletop game but an experiment to see if the evolving mechanics work without the lift to arrange everyone’s schedules for in-person play tests.

We kept the first look small and internal on purpose. Krzystof gave us thirteen points of feedback within a day of getting access. Much much faster than the paper and pen feedback loops so far. There’s more testing ahead before this is ready for a wider audience, but this is an interesting start to finding out what Vergebound could be beyond the table.

Away From the Desk - I Got Married

J.D. Stanton — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

If you’ve noticed things went quiet around here for a while, there’s a good reason: I got married. Between the wedding itself and the honeymoon that followed, I stepped fully away from Vergebound for a few months. Erdaheim has waited this long to be finished properly; it could wait a season longer while I took care of something just as important.

I’m hands on keyboard again. Thank you for your patience during the gap - there’s a lot to catch you up on, and more coming soon.

Who We've Actually Talked To - The Into the Verge Guest List So Far

J.D. Stanton — Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After the last update about our podcast backlog, I got a fair question back: is there actually anything in that backlog, or are we just behind? So here’s a full list of who we’ve actually sat down with for Into the Verge so far, recorded and real, whether or not it’s made it out the door.

Sean Ryan, Story/Setting Developer at Asmodee - recorded and edited, ready for release.
Mark Goldman (aka Markus Goldman), rock-and-roll podcaster with his own show pulling around 100k listeners a month at its peak - recorded back in early February.
Andrew Frinkle, world builder and published author working in serial fiction - recorded the same week as Mark.
Jason Brandon, a DM and creative collaborator with Mark Rein-Hagen on his “Lostlorn” project - recorded in late February.
Frank Perkins, a DM, recorded alongside Sean Ryan.
Jeff Smith, who by day commands a Pacific Fleet nuclear submarine group and by hobby has been a college DM for years - recorded in early March.
Mark Rein-Hagen, creator of Vampire: The Masquerade and creative director on Lostlorn - recorded in mid-March, not yet released.
Kelly Williams, writer, DM, and a genuine connector in the TTRPG industry - recorded in late March, still raw and waiting on an edit.

That’s eight waiting on exactly the editing help I asked for last time. We’ve been stacking up material faster than we can finish it. More of these are coming out as soon as we’ve got the help to cut them.

We Need an Editor - the Podcast Queue Is Piling Up

J.D. Stanton — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

So… we’re better at booking guests than we are at getting episodes out the door. Between Mark Rein-Hagen and a few other conversations recorded over the last couple of months, we’ve got a real backlog sitting in raw footage - good material that nobody’s heard yet because it hasn’t been edited.

Recording a conversation is the fun part; cutting it down into something worth someone’s time is a completely different skill and a real time sink, and right now it’s the bottleneck. We’re looking for an editor to help us clear the queue and keep pace with it going forward. If that’s you, or you know someone who might be a fit, get in touch - there’s already plenty of material waiting.

The First Faces of Erdaheim, and a Big Name Coming to the Podcast

J.D. Stanton — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For years, Erdaheim has existed as simply lore and rules notes - which is fine for playtesting, but it’s not how a world becomes real to people. That’s finally changing. Over the last couple of months, commissioned art has started arriving for the game’s races and classes, and I got to see some of them rendered by hands other than mine for the first time. It’s a strange, wonderful thing to see others weave visible skin over your world’s bones.

The Vergewalker (class), by Heitor Aquino.

Orosi (human subrace), by Tam Tran Thi.

Nythrim (race), by Tiago Barcelos.

The Glass Widow (Verge-mutated giant spider), by Johnrev Rodrigueza.

And one still in progress: Dravenka (race), being worked on by Creative Caviar. This one isn’t finished yet - what we have so far is a rough sketch and a speedpaint recording, not a final piece, so consider it a work-in-progress preview rather than a reveal.

Separately, on the podcast side: we just booked Mark Rein-Hagen - creator of Vampire: The Masquerade - for a conversation about building worlds that outlast their creators. Landing him was a genuine coup, and I’m looking forward to sharing the conversation once we’ve actually recorded it - more on that soon.

Growing Erdaheim - Level 5 Skill Trees, and a Call for Artists

J.D. Stanton — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Since PAX, I’ve been heads-down on the one thing every playtester asked about most: what happens after the early levels? The Playtest Packet now covers the Gearmaster and Vergewalker skill trees all the way through level 5, so adventurers have a real path to grow into instead of hitting a wall a few sessions in. It’s a meatier document than the one I was handing out a few weeks ago, and it’s already changing how people build characters at the table.

The other big shift this month: I’m opening Vergebound up to outside artists. Erdaheim has lived in our heada - and in a lot of rules text - for a long time, and it’s time for other eyes and hands to help shape what it actually looks like. We’ve put together a call for illustrators to submit test pieces, with a shot at defining the visual identity of the game’s first chapter. If you know an artist who might want in on that, send them our way.

You can find the post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/intotheverge/

Vergebound Heads to PAX - Meet J.D. This Friday

J.D. Stanton — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This Friday, J.D. will be attending PAX to personally share early print copies of the Vergebound Playtest Packet, connect with tabletop fans, and introduce new players to the emerging world of Erdaheim. If you’re attending, keep an eye out - he’ll be handing out packets, directing people to our digital links, answering questions, and generally doing the dangerous work of talking about a project he loves far too much.

PAX marks our first in-person effort to introduce Vergebound to the wider TTRPG community, and we couldn’t be more excited. If you spot J.D., say hello, grab a packet, and help shape the next iteration of the game. This is only the beginning.

Playtest Packet Complete - And Ready for Adventurers

J.D. Stanton — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

After months of drafting, refining, rewriting, and testing, the Vergebound Playtest Packet is officially complete. This first-look package captures the core mechanics, tone, and world pillars of the Erdaheim setting, offering a fully playable slice of what we’ve been building for the last several years. It includes class previews, encounter structures, lore foundations, and a guided introduction to the collapsing histories and mythic dread that define the world.

Now the real work begins. Over the coming weeks we’ll be placing this packet into the hands of early testers, GMs, designers, and curious wanderers to gather feedback that will help shape the next phase of development. Vergebound was built to be played, broken, questioned, and remade - and we can’t wait to see what you do with it.