The World of Epic Words

Epic Words is a word-ladder adventure that runs the length of fifty kingdoms — a slow road east through a fantasy world where words themselves are wearing thin. You climb from one word to the next a letter at a time, and along the way you meet the people who live on that road: an overwhelmed junior courier, a wandering healer who owes you one, a bandit chief with unexpectedly strict principles, a lake fairy who deals in half-answered promises.

This Codex is their record — a growing set of profiles for the recurring cast of Epic Words, drawn straight from the game’s own story files. Each entry is a character in full: where they live, who they answer to, what they’re good and hopelessly bad at, and exactly where on the road you’ll first cross paths with them.

The Founder’s Deck

Every kingdom has one signature face — a single character rendered as a collectible card in the Founder’s Deck, complete with a playing-card rank and suit. Pell, the Courier, is the Five of Hearts and the very first face you meet, standing at a crossroads in Kingdom I with a scroll he cannot deliver and a signpost he cannot read.

Who’s in the Codex so far

New profiles are added a few at a time. Here’s who has a full entry today.

Oil painting of a weather-lined woman with short tousled brown hair on the deck of a dark-painted river barge at sunset, wearing a worn teal-green long coat over brown leathers, a single dark pearl on a cord at her throat, a leather-bound book tucked at her hip, a many-arched stone bridge and riverside village behind her.Captain VeyA privateer with a logbook full of debts owed to people who no longer exist.Oil painting of Duke Aldren, a distinguished middle-aged nobleman with a trimmed grey beard, in dark robes with a deep-maroon-and-gold mantle and a heavy gold chain-of-office, a gold signet ring on his hand, standing in a stone hall beside a fire, a rolled map on a table before him and a carved high-backed chair behind.Duke AldrenHe won't stamp what he can't read — and he remembers, regardless, who asked him to guess.Oil painting of Mara, an older road-worn herbwoman with a long grey braid, wearing a hooded brown travelling cloak over a faded green dress, a worn leather satchel of glass tincture bottles and herb sprigs slung across her, holding out a small paper-wrapped packet in one open hand, on a sunlit dirt road through green rolling hills.Mara, the Wandering HealerA cure for what ails you — paid for in kindness, never coin.Oil painting of Pell, a young courier in a frayed cloak and dusty blue tunic, an overstuffed leather satchel of scrolls at his hip, standing on a dirt road beside a weathered wooden signpost in green rolling hills.Pell, the CourierA courier at the crossroads — technically speaking.Oil painting of Uttermost Rest — a cluster of old stone cottages with mossy, overgrown thatched roofs and smoking chimneys nestled among green rolling hills, drystone walls threading between them, a weathered plank door in the foreground whose knothole reads like a letter worn out of a word, a dirt path winding up past the houses under a bright, cloud-scudded sky.Uttermost RestThe oldest word in the vale, and half of it worn away.