Verdance’s Ashes

What it is

Verdance’s Ashes is a single-player campaign shell for Beyond All Reason, an open-source real-time strategy game. You run a small mercenary company on Verdance, a dying world that three factions and the wild are already fighting over. Between fights you sit at the hub, a war map in the browser; the fights are real BAR matches, short sorties launched from a landing pad. BAR’s units, maps and AI are BAR’s; the campaign decides where you fight, with whom, and what it costs.

The hub board and the in-game minimap never show the map as it is. They show what the company believes: a zone filled in a faction’s colour means we think they hold it, with the shade as our confidence; a dashed border is stale word; a question mark means nobody has looked. In the fight your own line of sight replaces belief live, and when the ground contradicts the brief the contradiction is marked and carried home. Nothing on the player’s side ever reads the truth frame or another faction’s mind. That is a law of the code.

One sortie is one observation. The company’s belief goes out as the briefing; line of sight, the pad headcount and the extraction manifest come back as facts; Python folds them into the belief, records the surprise per zone, turns people left behind into obligations and structures into holdings, and grows the next mission from the result. Each faction is its own mind, acting on what it has seen, which is what the player gave away. The engine holding every mind is Umwelt.

It grew out of an earlier procedural-campaign effort for the same game, listed on this site before as BAR Campaign. The headless harness from that work is now the campaign gate: a whole sortie run without the game.

A sortie

• Infil: the game loads paused on a card: who you brought, the belief board with the pad and the job marked, what your intelligence officer thinks you are walking into.
• The job: an objective (wreck, hold, fortify, seize) and marks, required and optional. The clock never ends a sortie; when it runs out the phase is overtime and the map wakes up.
• Extract: get what you want to keep onto the pad and lift. The manifest is a headcount, not a judgement: who is inside the ring, who is not and where, what stands where. What is off the pad stays.
• Home: verdicts come from the manifest. At camp time passes: heroes rest, scout and come back changed; rumours arrive; zones change hands you never saw. The next briefing is grown from the result.

What exists today

Version 0.14.0, public alpha, Windows 10 and 11. One path: a setup script finds BAR and installs the mutator, a play script opens the war map on a local port, a reset script starts over. A ship script builds a zip with an embedded Python, numpy and scipy, and the engine vendored in, so another machine needs nothing installed. 451 test functions (counted 21 October 2026) and a campaign gate that runs end to end without BAR; the suite needs no test framework. Last pushed 30 October 2026.

The repository is public as of 30 October 2026. No Steam page or GitHub release yet; the zip is the publishing path. The licence is split on purpose: the mod, data, scripts and docs are GPL-2.0-or-later because the game engine requires it; the tools and the hub are all rights reserved.

Not done

No outside playtest recorded yet.

Steam cloud, achievements and an in-game campaign surface are stubs.

BAR must already be installed and launched once; the campaign ships no maps and no engine.

Next

First outside playtest from the zip, with the feedback bundle the hub exports. Then a GitHub release with the zip attached.