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Wyrmward
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About the game
The letter came out of nowhere. You still remember the day the Arch-Mages of the Academy accused your old mentor of meddling with the dark arts; soon afterwards he disappeared, and since then his name has only been spoken in whispers. You owe him your apprenticeship, though, and the letter says he needs you. So you followed its directions for weeks on the road, and the game opens as you finally step into a wet, overgrown meadow, with an ancient forest at your back and his crooked, smoking hut in front of you.
What he wants, and why the Academy turned on him, you find out by playing. You come prepared: your spellbook already holds a few basic spells, and the whole game is built around using them well. Most puzzles have a magical answer, and the fun is in working out which spell, cast on what.
Wyrmward is a new English game with an old history. Johan Berntsson, one of the two authors of the PunyInform library, first wrote it in 1996, later rewrote it in Swedish, and in 2026 turned it into this expanded English edition. It plays very much like the Infocom adventures of the 1980s.
Playing it here
Click Play now and the story starts in the player. Everything is typed: write a
command after the > prompt and press Enter. The game is in English. The
status line shows your score, out of 40, and the number of turns.
The author also publishes a version with pictures and sound effects for
interpreters that support them. This page runs the text-only edition, so the
picture and sound commands simply tell you there are none.
Commands
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
n, s, e, w, u, d |
walk; in and out also work |
look (l), examine (x) something |
look around, or look closer |
read spellbook |
list the spells you know and what each one does |
cast copy on spell |
write a spell from a scroll into your spellbook |
cast spell on something |
use a spell, such as cast heal on me |
take, drop, wear, remove, give ... to |
the usual ways to handle things |
inventory (i) |
list what you are carrying |
again (g), undo |
repeat the last command, or take back the last turn |
score, full |
your score, and the list of what earned it |
help (hint) |
instructions, credits and a menu of graded hints |
save / restore |
keep your progress in this browser and load it back |
A few things worth knowing
Start with the book. read spellbook shows every spell you have and a
line about what it does. Words like freeze or heal on their own will only
remind you to use cast.
Collect spells as you go. Scrolls can carry spells of their own. Reading one tells you what it holds; copying it into your spellbook with the copying spell is what lets you use it whenever you want.
Magic is cheap, so experiment. Casting a spell on the wrong thing usually fizzles harmlessly, and the description of what happens is often a clue.
Examine everything and keep a map. The author's own advice: the descriptions carry subtle hints, and the world is larger than it first looks.
Save before the big moments. There is more than one ending, and a few
choices close the story for good. If something goes wrong, undo takes back
the last turn.
Hints are built in. hint opens the help menu, and its Hints section
answers the common questions one nudge at a time: press space for the next
hint, or X to stop before it gives too much away.
Credits and licence
Wyrmward was written by Johan Berntsson, who began the story in 1996 as "Of Things Good and Evil" and later published it in Swedish as "Drakmagi". The source code is released under the MIT licence and the story text under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, and the code is in the game's repository on GitHub. PunyInform, the library by Fredrik Ramsberg and Johan Berntsson that the game is built with, is also MIT. The story file served here is the text-only Release 5 from the author's itch.io page, unmodified, without the pictures and sounds of the other versions. The licence texts are linked from this page.