Dreadmark has been a solitary pilgrimage so far. This round it grew a spine of steel behind the scenes — real servers, real leaderboards, and the beginnings of an online world worth competing in.
Two boards now stand. The Eternals ranks the highest-level characters, softcore and hardcore strictly apart, with ties at the cap broken by experience and by who got there first. The Reckoning is the race: create a fresh "Ladder Pilgrim", run them from birth to the Dark Lord's corpse, and your official time is measured by the server's clock — not yours, and not your machine's. Pilgrims bank into their own private stash, so every race is truly self-found.
The boards live in three places: the title screen (a new LADDER entry beside PLAY), a twin-column view showing both races at once — with a Wall of the Fallen running along its foot, where dead hardcore names rest under their skulls — and in-game on the L key, so you can check your standing between fights. Fallen hardcore characters keep their place on the board forever, skull-marked. The wall is content.
And the world now speaks. The Herald announces season world-firsts the moment they happen — "so-and-so is the first to reach Level 12" — and when someone in the hardcore top-100 dies, the bell tolls for every hardcore player online. Softcore never hears it. That dread is a hardcore privilege.
Underneath it all sits the part you'll hopefully never think about: every ladder run writes a tamper-evident journal, and the server proves submissions rather than trusting them — experience is recomputed from the record, every item is checked against what could legally exist, impossible race times are rejected outright. Season one of this system is called Season: Demo, and it will archive — never wipe — when the next begins.
One more quiet gift: the vault. Ladder characters back themselves up to the server at every checkpoint. Lose a disk, move to a new machine — your pilgrims come home on their own, and a dead hardcore character stays dead no matter what you do to the files. Death, finally, with teeth.
The names are being written. Go claim a line.