Ponor: Folk Horror RPG

Rovinj, a few years after Venice fell. The bura has closed the roads, not one shutter on the street is open, and the town is dying in its sleep. Whatever is doing it came up out of the hollow in the limestone that the town has always known better than to enter.

Four people go down anyway. A harambaša who spent thirty years holding a line too narrow to run from. A smuggler who knows every hole in the wall. A glagolitic nun with her book. An old man who knows what you pour across a threshold.

PONOR is a first-person, grid-based dungeon crawler in the old tradition — one tile at a time, four faces along the foot of the screen, and the world stopping into turns the moment something down there knows where you are. Thirteen floors, from the paving stones of the old town to the bottom of the pit beneath it.

NO CREATURE HERE IS A BIGGER NUMBER

Sixteen things live in the dark, and fourteen of them are a rule rather than a stat block. The rule is what you have to work out.

The mora does not attack the waking. She waits for the party to lie down, and while she is near, sleeping costs you instead of restoring you. Iron goes through her like smoke; salt she will not cross — but the line has to cut the whole width of the passage, or she simply walks around it.

A vukodlak is not hard to put down. It is hard to keep down, and fire will not do it. A hawthorn stake will.

A vila laughs at steel and wants cold iron. A vodenjak lives only where the water stands, and everything it does is put you under it. A karakondžula climbs onto somebody's back, and you cannot hit it without hitting your own.

The ala sleeps across the one hall you have to cross, and light is what wakes it. So you put the torch out and go past in the dark, or you do not go past at all.

WHAT YOU CARRY BEATS WHAT YOU HAVE LEVELLED

A handful of salt. A hawthorn stake. A piece of cold iron. A torch that burns on a clock and sometimes has to go out in a hurry. Those are the answers, and they run out. Rest is not free. Your save waits at the top of the floor rather than where you fell, so dying costs you the descent and never costs you the evening.

Four characters, forty-one abilities and no class restrictions: anyone may carry anything, it just will not suit everyone. Every creature has a voice of its own.

The game is in Croatian and English, and the folklore keeps its Croatian names in both.

Everything ships inside the app, so Ponor plays with no network connection at all. No account, no registration, no leaderboard and no analytics. It is free and funded by ads, which a one-time in-app purchase removes, and your progress and settings stay on your device.

Ponor is a horror game with scenes of violence and is not intended for children.