Chaos Awakens

Borin Duskmere left Embervein a travelling merchant. He came back with something in his hands that answers when he opens them.

He doesn't speak a word to it. He doesn't wave a staff. He looks at a thing, and it happens. Nobody in the village has a name for that they like.

Then his mother is poisoned. The only cure grows at the bottom of the old mine, and the one man who knows what waits down there is pouring ale behind the bar of the Tusk & Pick.

Chaos Awakens is a party RPG about a dwarf, his friends, and the cost of the things they choose. This free demo is the first stretch of the road: a tavern full of people with stories, a forest valley full of things with teeth, and a mountain pass where someone has been waiting for Borin. He already knows Borin's mother's name.

Where it starts. The full game opens earlier: the last leg of Borin's trading trip, the night on the pass where it happened, the homecoming, and the village learning what he brought back. The demo skips that planned prologue. It opens at the tavern door, and what came before arrives as a short narrated recap over the first minute.
What it is. A demo of a game still being made. Everything in it is subject to change: the story and the lines, the characters and their looks, the rules and numbers, the art, the voices, the interface, the prices in Garrick's taproom. Saves from this build may not carry into later ones.

What's in the demo

• A party of dwarfs. Borin, a sorcerer who casts without a word. Fargrim, an exiled barbarian with a greataxe, who complains about everything and follows you anyway. Brennor, a ranger who tracks, translates, and says the quiet part out loud.
• Fight your way. Real-time with pause, or turn-based with a full action economy. Choose at New Game and switch in Options between fights.
• Talk your way. Skill checks roll in the open, and the party lends its best hand. Magic opens doors in conversation, but there is always another way through.
• Companions who keep score. Fargrim notices what you do and remembers it. Romance is part of the story, slow and warm and entirely optional.
• Voiced. Dialogue and narration are voiced throughout.
• A world to poke at. Traps to find and disarm, locks to pick, letters to read, side quests in the woods, a map that fills in as you walk, and a Chronicle of the people and places you meet.
• Story and Normal difficulty. Each one tells you plainly what it changes before you pick.

Content notes

Fantasy violence and blood. Alcohol and drunkenness. A parent in danger. Romance between men, with kissing and partial nudity (a hot spring, a shared bed); nothing explicit. Mild language.

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Platforms and requirements

Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. macOS 10.15 or later, Intel and Apple Silicon in one universal app. The game uses Godot's Forward+ renderer, so the graphics card needs Vulkan, Direct3D 12 or Metal.

	Minimum	Recommended
Processor	Quad-core from 2015 or later (Core i5-6400, Ryzen 3 1200)	Anything newer
Memory	8 GB	16 GB
Graphics	2 GB: GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, Radeon RX 560, Intel Iris Xe	GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB, Radeon RX 580, Apple M1
Preset at 1080p	Low	High
Disk	About 1 GB free (850 MB on Windows, 900 MB on a Mac)

Opening it on a Mac

The Mac build is signed but not notarized by Apple, so macOS refuses it the first time.

1. Right-click ChaosAwakens.app and choose Open, then Open again.
2. On recent macOS: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.
3. After that it opens normally.

Controls

Mouse to select, move, attack and talk. Every key can be rebound in Options.

Key	Action
Space	Pause, or end your turn in turn-based mode
1 – 9	Abilities
R	Run or walk
Tab (hold)	Highlight things you can use
C / I / B	Character sheet, bag, spellbook
J / M	Journal, map
G / L	Handbook, Chronicle
T	Party tactics
F5 / F9	Quicksave, quickload

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Known issues

• This is an early demo. Some fights in the forest were tuned for a party one level stronger and can run hard. Story difficulty takes the edge off.
• The Mac build is brand new. If anything looks wrong, please tell me your Mac model.

Feedback

Leave a comment on this page. Tell me what you were doing, what you expected and what happened, plus your OS and graphics card. A screenshot helps a lot, and so does the log:

• Windows: %APPDATA%\ChaosAwakens\logs\godot.log
• Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/ChaosAwakens/logs/godot.log

Saves live beside it, in the saves folder.

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Credits

Made by AED Games. The full credits roll from the main menu.

• Music: "Willow's Waltz" from the Forest Folk Loop Pack by Prompt.fm
• Music: "Bloodied Sword", "Surunan's Fall" and "The Horde" by Ivan Duch, CC BY 4.0
• Fonts: Alegreya Sans (The Alegreya Sans Project Authors) and LT Museum (LyonsType), under the SIL Open Font License 1.1
• Environment, props and interface art: Synty Studios

This work includes material from the System Reference Document 5.2.1 ("SRD 5.2.1") by Wizards of the Coast LLC, available at https://www.dndbeyond.com/srd. The SRD 5.2.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.